UConn footballs instant turnaround under Jim Mora: How did Huskies get to bowl?

Jim Mora says this isn’t about proving people wrong or a chip on the shoulder. He doesn’t want to say he told you so.

But he also does want to say he told you so. After taking UConn to its first bowl game in seven years, in his first year as the coach, he’s earned that right.

“I didn’t think I should have been fired at UCLA,” Mora said. “I thought they made a mistake. I still think they made a mistake.”

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Rarely has a 6-6 record with a bowl appearance been more impressive or surprising, and Mora is the director. The Huskies are preparing for Monday’s Myrtle Beach Bowl against Marshall, the first bowl game for a group of players who have experienced a college career like few others.

UConn had been at the bottom of the FBS, losing to UMass and Holy Cross and finishing with a 1-11 record last year (that one win came against Yale). The Huskies won four total games from 2018 to 2021. The 2018 UConn defense was statistically the worst in college football history, setting FBS records in points (50.4) and yards (617.4) allowed per game. They didn’t play in 2020, the first FBS team to cancel its season due to the pandemic, and head coach Randy Edsall resigned two games into the 2021 season.

When Mora took the job last November, friends asked him, What the hell are you doing?

He had been in the process of moving his life from California to his home in Sun Valley, Idaho. He was newly engaged. He went hiking, mountain biking or fly-fishing every day. He had plenty of money after more than three decades in coaching.

So what was Mora doing taking the UConn job?

The son of Jim E. Mora, an NFL head coach for 15 years, didn’t like going out on his back. He didn’t like that his coaching career had seemingly ended in his late 50s with a loss to USC in 2017.

“I had a void,” the younger Mora said. “I had unfinished business. This is what I’ve done my entire life, football, and I didn’t like how it ended at UCLA.”

In a season of unexpected turnarounds, from Kansas to Duke to TCU, UConn’s run to a bowl game is perhaps the most stunning.

Edsall resigned two games into the 2021 season but hoped to finish the year. That didn’t go over well inside the program, and he reversed course and left the next day. It ended a disastrous second stint in the role but gave athletic director David Benedict plenty of time to talk with a slew of candidates. After a few virtual calls with Mora, Benedict flew to Sun Valley on a one-way plane ticket for an unusually immersive interview experience. Benedict spent four days with Mora, which included the coach having virtual calls with various stakeholders and search committee members, including Connecticut governor Ned Lamont.

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Leaning on the counter in Mora’s kitchen toward the end of the week, Benedict finally said, “So do you want this thing or what?’”

Fans were surprised but largely ecstatic. Mora was the most accomplished coach to ever take the reins of the program, as a former NFL head coach for two teams who also had a pretty good run at UCLA. UConn’s football history dates back to 1896, but the program has rarely made much noise outside the Northeast. It spent 50 years in the Yankee Conference, winning 15 conference championships. It moved up from what was then Division I-AA to I-A in 2000 in Edsall’s first stint as head coach. He found success, winning two conference titles. The Huskies made the 2011 Fiesta Bowl as Big East champs with an 8-4 record. They lost to Oklahoma and Edsall didn’t even fly back with the team, instead taking the Maryland job.

That set off a decade of despair, save for a 6-7 blip season in 2015. UConn was left behind in the last round of conference realignment. Former Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo said in 2011 that BC didn’t want UConn in the ACC. The Huskies stayed in the reformed American Athletic Conference but eventually left for the non-football Big East in 2020, delighting basketball fans but leaving football in independence purgatory and fan apathy hard to overcome.

Mora flew directly from Idaho to Clemson for UConn’s next game after taking the job, giving him a few weeks to observe the team in-season before he took over. When he took the reins for real, Mora felt refreshed. At UCLA, where he posted a respectable 46-30 record from 2012 to 2017, Mora had trouble dividing time between his team and his kids. He lived 45 minutes from campus in Manhattan Beach. Now at UConn, there are no kids around, and he practically lives on campus, in a house he maintains is haunted. A “College GameDay” investigation determined … maybe.

Through recruiting and transfers, he brought in 40 new scholarship players, including quarterback Ta’Quan Roberson from Penn State. After spending a few years in media and visiting other schools, he learned how to structure practices and meetings differently and better handle himself. Players said he brought confidence to the team. Fans said he brought excitement.

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“It really calmed me down,” Mora said. “I haven’t lost my passion or my fire. I’m the same old guy. I get pissed and demand excellence. But it comes from a better place, if that makes sense.”

That calmness was tested as the season approached. Defensive coordinator Lou Spanos left the program two weeks before the opener for what was described as personal reasons. No one in the program has explained publicly exactly what happened. Linebacker Jackson Mitchell said Spanos was just gone one day.

Mora, perhaps alluding to philosophical differences, took over the defense and said the group got back to doing what it does best with personnel. Spanos, who spent two years with Mora at UCLA, did not respond to a request for comment.

“We haven’t seen him since the day he left,” Mora said. “We haven’t talked to him since the day he left. He’s just in the rearview mirror.”

Then Roberson tore his ACL on the second drive of the season at Utah State. Keelan Marion, last year’s No. 2 receiver also suffered a significant injury. The Huskies started 1-4 and faced more injuries. They lost to Syracuse, Michigan and NC State by a combined score of 148-24. To outside observers, it was just another UConn football season.

But players felt differently. They still believed they could make something of the season. A 1-4 start was expected with that schedule.

“In years past, if we started 1-4, we’d finish out 2-10, but this year, you could tell a difference,” said Mitchell, the team’s defensive anchor. “Coach Mora gave us hope that we weren’t going to finish that way, that we could still make a bowl game.”

Mitchell is the heart of the defense. He had 120 tackles in 2021 and could have transferred to another school, but he believed in Mora’s vision after their first conversation. UConn was the only FBS school to offer the Connecticut native out of high school. Finishing the job with this team meant something. Mitchell’s 134 tackles this season are tied for the fourth-most in the country.

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The Huskies began the climb back with a 19-14 win against Fresno State, then won 33-12 at FIU. They ran for a season-high 295 yards, and true freshman quarterback Zion Turner, a Miami native who was thrust into the starting role when Roberson got hurt, completed 11-of-14 passes. He hasn’t been asked to do too much but has gained confidence and efficiency throughout the season. Turner went 37-2 as a starter at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Florida, where he won three state titles on a team loaded with Power 5 players. He was a three-star prospect with high-major interest before a knee injury impacted his senior season and the transfer portal led teams to more experienced options. He signed with UConn and was the highest-ranked player in the recruiting class.

“His experience in the NFL coaching players like Michael Vick, I felt like I could be another one of those great players for him,” Turner said of Mora.

A loss to Ball State the following week became viewed as another step forward. The Huskies blew a 21-10 halftime lead and felt they let a win slip away. That itself was a new feeling. They beat Boston College for the first time in school history the following week, delighting fans after the ACC slight a decade ago. Then they beat UMass, declared themselves Kings of New England and put themselves on the doorsteps of a bowl.

Three seasons since having the worst defense in FBS history, and one year after finishing 123rd in points allowed per game, UConn is respectable on defense, now in the top half of the country in points allowed.

“Their expectations had risen,” Mora said. “It flipped after Ball State.”

Crown us. 👑

The Kings of New England have arrived and are here to stay#HuskyRevolution pic.twitter.com/xnuIXrIiKl

— UConn Football (@UConnFootball) November 5, 2022

A 36-33 upset win against No. 19 Liberty, as a 14.5-point underdog, was win No. 6, and fans stormed the field in celebration. Mora was doused with one jug of Powerade and tried to avoid the second one so he could shake hands with Liberty head coach Hugh Freeze. It was the first time Mora had ever experienced that as a coach. After the game, Freeze said a field storm was a credit to his program for reaching the point where such a fan reaction happened against them. Mora said it had nothing to do with Liberty.

“I read the quote and my message to Hugh Freeze would be, ‘Settle down, big dog. It wasn’t about you,’” Mora said. “It was about winning six games, doing things we’d never done here. It didn’t matter who we beat that day.”

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It was about the fans and the players. From the canceled season to Edsall’s departure, few players had gone through quite that much.

“This was the first team to cancel football for COVID, right off the bat, and the head coach left for eight months and went to Florida,” Mora said of Edsall. “These kids told me they didn’t see him for eight months. They were up here stuck in dorms and working out in pods, eating by themselves and they didn’t have any games. They won one game last year and the coach is gone. I wanted them to feel love from the fans.”

(In response, Edsall said any notion that he left the team in 2020 was a lie. The Huskies held spring practice in 2020 and practiced in early fall 2020 without games. “Every day that I was supposed to be there, I was there,” he said. “And when I wasn’t, it was because the university was shut down, and we couldn’t be there and the kids weren’t there.”)

UConn had the third-largest percentage increase in attendance this season, according to numbers calculated by D1.Ticker (excluding two teams with a stadium change). The average attendance of 22,095 was a 50.4 percent increase, behind only Kansas and Duke, two similarly struggling programs that bounced back.

Like the team’s success, the increase in attendance is a step forward but not where the program ultimately wants it to be. Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field holds more than 42,000. Benedict has heard stories of the stadium being packed in the late 2000s. The Boston College crowd was more than 25,000, but the Liberty crowd was barely more than 15,000.

“We have a nice small core that stuck with us win or lose, but we started to get people back, and some came back right at the beginning of the season,” Benedict said. “Jim started building confidence in our fan base.”

Where does UConn football go from here? As an independent program, there is no conference championship to compete for. A bowl game is one of just a few tangible endpoints. The administration has passed on interest from Conference USA. Mora admitted he’d like to play in a conference, but he deferred to Benedict on those issues.

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The schedule with more local games has its benefits. The Huskies proclaiming themselves Kings of New England makes fans as proud as anything else. Many fans defend the move to independence. There can be other goals.

“Next year, we should finish as a Top 25 team,” Turner said. “That’s a goal for myself.”

Mora will always believe UCLA shouldn’t have fired him. He took a flier on the worst team in FBS and raised it to respectability in one year. He’d proved himself right so quickly that UConn fans are suddenly worried about losing him to a bigger job. But that’s a good problem to have.

For now, Mora is working on adding more transfers and recruits for next season. On Wednesday, UConn secured the services of Washington defensive back transfer Zakhari Spears. The Huskies have momentum, and the long journey back to a bowl game is an opportunity to put a stamp on the first step of a new era.

“This game is more than just a bowl for us. It’s a defining game,” Mora said. “We’re either going to 7-6 or 6-7, and it’s a big deal for these guys to finish with a winning record. It’s not just another game. It’s going to define the progress they’ve made.”

(Top photo: Williams Paul / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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