It didn't take a comittee of influential alumni to make the greatest hire in UCLA football history. All it took was an incredibly charmed athletic director who, with the help of Mother Nature, lucked into two hires which changed UCLA athletic history.
Most know the story of how UCLA lucked into hiring John Wooden. He preferred Minnesota and they promised to call at 6:00 P.M. A snowstorm prevented the Minnesota A.D. from getting to a phone and when UCLA called at the appointed time of 7:00 P.M., Wooden accepted. When Minnesota finally got through, Wooden refused to change his mind because he had given UCLA his word.
Well, athletic director Wilbur Johns lucked out again when it was time to hire a new footbal coach not long after that.
Just before Wooden's first season at the helm, the Bruin football team was having its problems.
Bert LaBrucherie was hired with only high shool coaching experience (67–10–2 at L.A. High) but won the Pacific Coast Conference championship and played in the Rose Bowl in his second season at UCLA. However, in the next two years, the program quickly disintegrated. LaBrucherie was under fire and even a mid-season win at Nebraska couldn't save him from a player revolt and the entire staff resigned right after the season ended.
The A.D. was on another coaching search and many big names were mentioned as candidates. Johns was off to the national coaches convention again to find his man, this time in San Francisco. A little known coach from Vanderbilt with a good but not great record and whose teams had rarely been seen on the West Coast was on his way to the convention, but was stranded in Chicago due to a blizzard. With no trains running, he was about to return home when he caught a flight at the last minute to San Francisco. "The last thing I thought of was coaching at UCLA" said Henry "Red" Sanders, but met Johns at the convention and the meeting led to his hiring. Not only did Sanders become the greatest football coach in UCLA history, leading the school to its only national championship in 1954, one of the assistants he brought along was Tommy Prothro, who later also coached UCLA with great success.
Now while Johns was lucky to have the opportunity to hire Wooden and Sanders, he was also lucky they turned out to be so good. Neither had a particularly distinguished coaching record. Wooden only had two seasons at a lower division school and Sanders had a 15-20-2 conference record which was worse than the coaches he followed since they joined the SEC.
A postscript. Deshaun Foster wasn't the only UCLA football coach to last only three games in a season. Upon Sanders' unexpected death shortly before the 1958 season, long time assistant George Dickerson was appointed interim coach. But just before the fourth game, he was admitted to the UCLA Medical Center suffering from "nervous exhaustion" and replaced by Bill Barnes. Barnes coached the team for six more seasons, the last three with a record of 10-20 and he resigned.