On Monday, UCLA’s main football Twitter account tweeted out a graphic calling the Bruins “Transfer U.” No one has successfully utilized more transfers since 2020, it read. The Bruins spotlighted transfer defenders Darius Muasau, Gabriel and Grayson Murphy, and corner Azizi Hearn on the graphic, underneath a leaderboard that showed UCLA has gained 20 starters from the portal since 2020.

Nevermind that Ole Miss followed up on Wednesday by creating almost an identical graphic to the one UCLA made, calling itself “Transfer U,” and claiming it has had 21 starters join the team via the portal, not the 16 listed by UCLA. The UCLA graphic was problematic for another reason.

“That was a mistake,” coach Chip Kelly said of the tweet on Wednesday, adding that he didn’t sign off on the message. “That’s not what we’re about.

Kelly wanted to make clear their plan is to build through high school recruiting and then add pieces to the roster as needed through the portal.

“We’re always going to build it — just like we talked about in the preseason — with the high school kids and then you’re going to supplement it with the portal,” he said. “I think what their point is, we’ve been very efficient with our portal. I think the kids we bring in here play and that’s a credit to how we do that. We’ve always approached it like it’s free agency in the National Football League, so how can they contribute to the program?

“There’s a ton of guys that go in the portal and I think that’s probably the M.O. for most teams in college football, I think 48% of the quarterbacks in the FBS right now are transfers. In our conference, there’s only two quarterbacks that were recruited as high school kids coming out and that’s Dorian (Thompson-Robinson) and Tanner McKee at Stanford, the rest of them, the other 10 teams have transfers on their team, so that’s kind of the reality of it. But that’s, no, that shouldn’t have gone up.”

Even though the head coach saw a message delivered from an account representing his football program that he felt doesn’t reflect what his football program is about, the tweet is still up.

https://twitter.com/UCLAFootball/status/1569415623972909056?s=20&t=lUckGUhl4NpklXtklA649Q

“It’s already out there, so I don’t know what deleting it does,” Kelly said.

Many on Twitter were quick to point out that the five teams listed on the graphic are a combined 61-51 since the start of the 2020 season. No doubt UCLA has gained some key contributors from the portal — Zach Charbonnet comes to mind immediately — but few want to see UCLA rely on transfers as its primary roster-building tool.

The 2023 high school class currently ranks 85th nationally with only six commitments. Cal and Arizona State are the only other Pac-12 schools that have yet to hit double-digits for their class size. After Lincoln Riley earned the moniker of “Portal King” for his utilization of the transfer portal this past offseason, USC has a top-15 high school class with 16 known commits.

Unless things change quickly with the 2023 class, UCLA is probably going to have to continue to hit the portal hard. Just run the tweets broadcasting that fact by Kelly next time.