"Following the 2017 season, two programs were reportedly going after Kelly: Florida and UCLA. Florida fans seemed convinced Kelly would come to Gainesville because why on Earth would a football coach choose UCLA over Florida? You can win national titles at Florida!
I wrote at the time that Kelly was more likely to end up at UCLA. He's always been an offensive innovator. Even when his Oregon teams were at their peak, he seemed more interested in drawing up plays than recruiting kids to play in his offense. His approach to recruiting didn't make sense for what Florida wanted, as Dan Mullen later found out, and UCLA felt like a better fit for Kelly.
Things have changed a lot since then. When Kelly took the UCLA job, there wasn't a transfer portal. There wasn't NIL. There weren't conference games against Rutgers. All of those things exist now, and yes, there are a lot of football coaches who don't enjoy this new college football landscape. The complaints about being more of a cat wrangler than a football coach are well-founded."