STORRS, Conn. — Jim Mora and his wife Kathy got up the hill, to the UConn football fields long before the first practice was to start Friday. They took a jog around the twin gridirons, mowed and manicured to the new coach’s specifications.
“I wanted to get up here early, before anyone else, because I did want to have some time,” Mora said. “I just got married and we came up and jogged around and talked, and it’s her first time being in this environment. And it is special for me. It is emotional for me and have a chance to do this again.”
Allow Mora his moment. He’s at the dawn of a brand new start, 3,000 miles from where he has lived and worked most of his life. Though he could pass for 40, he is 60 and has learned how precious and how elusive a second chance can be.
Mora played or coached football nearly without a respite from his teenage years through 2017. Then he was fired by UCLA, and four seasons came and went without him. He worked some in TV, and the four years and $12 million remaining on his last contract was paid, but the feeling a football coach gets from the three hours of running and drilling and coaching in the sweltering July heat cannot be bought or replaced.
He took a deep breath and dove back into his element.
“I have not coached on a football field since Nov. 18, 2017, when we played USC at the [Los Angeles] Coliseum and the next morning at 9:30 I got fired,” Mora said. “So I know exactly how long it’s been since I’ve been able to come out and get ready for a game. And it’s freaking awesome. I feel like this is what I was built to do.”
By our count, that’s 1,744 days away from the game that has been his life, and his father’s life. Mora once coached his way to within a game of football’s highest peak, leading the Falcons to the NFC Championship game in 2004. At UCLA he was fired despite a 46-30 record, a mark that would warrant a statue at Rentschler Field if he were to come close to it at UConn.
He came for $1.5 million per year, less than half what he was making at UCLA, because he needed a day like this as much as this beaten-down program needs a coach that can dream big, dream of what is perceived as impossible (the ACC?), get behind his vision and get others to buy into it.
“From the moment Coach Mora got here,” running back Nathan Carter said, “you could see the energy, the passion in his eyes, how much he loves not only the game of football, but how much he loves us players individually. We want to play for a guy, we want to go to war with someone who loves us that much and has so much passion. That’s really pushing us, driving us forward.”
Linebacker Jackson Mitchell said, “He has said it to us a bunch of times since he’s been here, you can tell how much he’s missed it, the passion he comes with every single day, in meetings, watching us work out, out here coaching us.”
The danger in hiring a coach like Jim Mora for a job like this is that it could become a “retirement job.” That was the danger in hiring Randy Edsall for a second time, too. All one can say after Mora’s offseason of recruiting, of revamping and energizing the program’s approach to messaging and storytelling, is that he gives every indication that he is all in, and he has spread a feeling on campus that if he is not the coach who can get something done at UConn, then it just can’t be done.
All of the answers will come in due time. There’s a culture to be established, dozens of players to be sorted out and organized into cohesive, efficient units — which is how a head coach can make a remarkable difference right away.
So with the season starting at Utah State Aug. 27, the state of Connecticut is asked once more to emotionally and financially invest in FBS football, despite the 31-87 record since the Fiesta Bowl, including last season’s 1-11, to believe before seeing that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.
Mora says he has the “least entitled” group of players he has ever had and finds it refreshing. Hey, as we say every year, it has to start somewhere, and Mora’s Huskies can start with being fun to watch, easy to root for.
“I know outside these gates, people don’t think much of us,” Mora said. “And that’s OK with me. I think a lot of us. ... [The first practice] was a good day, we’re off and running and that’s the most important thing.”
