Hey, UConn fans, would you like to see Jim Mora’s last press conference?
… Would you like to see it again?
The UConn football coach’s press briefings, like his give-and-take of about two minutes in Storrs on Tuesday, have been rather short and Belichickian lately. In fact, Bill Belichick’s media sessions are Senate filibusters by comparison. The football program’s social media account posted the video: Five minutes of blank screen, then two minutes of Mora, and several commenters, fans looking for some answers, did not sound pleased, either.
Let me quickly add two things. I haven’t covered the last couple of UConn football games, nor the last few Tuesday availabilities in Storrs. Other assignments required me to be elsewhere. I don’t cover UConn football exclusively, though I write plenty about it in my current role.
Let me also add that I loathe to write about first-world, backstage sportswriter issues. It would be much more on-brand to write about last week’s buzz-killing loss to Rice, and the chance for UConn (5-3) to get back on track and go for bowl eligibility vs. Alabama-Birmingham on Saturday at noon at Rentschler Field.
But I do feel a need to explain a few things here and to flag a very good football coach for unnecessary gruffness. Might have written this a day earlier but, yes, there was a basketball game Tuesday night, which may or may not be what this is about.
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Mora has been irritated, evidently, over a lack of questions following some games, particularly the three overtime losses on the road that have turned what could have been a great Huskies season into one that will need a strong finish to be considered good.
Now, I’ve seen coaches annoyed over getting too many questions, or tough questions, silly, redundant or ill-timed questions, but never have I heard complaints about not getting enough questions.
Nor do totally buy that this is what has been eating him. From one of the post-gamers I attended last year, after a gut-wrenching loss to Wake Forest, where I got the only question in, and the ones to which I’m referring this year, Mora in those spots is apt to walk in almost immediately after the game, make a terse statement, then allow a pregnant pause of about 1.5 nanoseconds before deciding it’s over and walking out.
I’m pretty certain that if a reporter cut him off and fired off a question about strategy or play-calling in the postgame moments at Rice last week, the coach would not have welcomed it. Mora didn’t like a question about the wet field conditions, and shut things down just as reporters were joining a prearranged ZOOM call, only to hear him ranting it was “disrespectful.”
By way of explanation, a writer assigned to do a game recap has to file the first version as soon as the game is over. If a game is one-sided, you can even file before it ends. When a game is decided on the last play, you’re caught flatfooted and it takes a few minutes to write half a dozen paragraphs, then get to wherever the interview is taking place, or nowadays log onto ZOOM.
I was in that role for 29 years, will be in it again for the game against Air Force Nov. 15, and was considered rather good at it. Our young beat writer, Joe Arruda, is about as fast and as good at it as I was. When we are both working a game, I can get down to the field with five or 10 minutes to go to make sure one of us is at the press conference, but we can’t double up on every game.
So when Mora goes in immediately after the game, without a typical cooling off period of maybe 10 minutes, it’s not always possible for all the reporters to get there. The student reporters in the room are a little intimidated, hesitant to ask questions. I was a student reporter once. Maybe it was during the Harding Administration, but I’ve been there, and I teach student reporters today. They need reps, need to learn and grow out of that.
It’s not the coach’s responsibility to accommodate us; it’s on the print, digital, radio and TV reporters to adjust to whatever obstacles he puts in the way. But no one was being “disrespectful” to Jim Mora. I tend to write off coaches’ meltdowns following losses; it comes with the territory, especially in football, but by the next day it should blow over.
Word was out on campus Monday that Mora was still smoldering about the perceived slight, and to expect a churlish scene when he took the podium Tuesday. He answered eight questions with short, one-sentence non-answers and was done.
“That’s what you get when you don’t ask questions after the game,” he was heard to say as he walked away.
So Mora really taught us a lesson. And we had it coming, myself included. We’re the ones, after all, who have relentlessly thrown bouquets at this coach’s feet for four years, the ones who have been making the wins over Group of Six conference teams and the couple over bad ACC teams a big deal, even as the rest of the FBS world didn’t.
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Mora’s 23-23 record at UConn is a damn sight better than things were in the years before he got here, but .500 is .500. If he’s in a bad way because attention shifts to basketball around here come late October, he should have expected that before he left Idaho in 2021. Wins over Buffalo and Ball State aren’t moving that needle. So when the Tuesday availability falls on Big East Media Day in New York, as it did last week, he’s going to see a small crowd unless he could move heaven and earth and do it on a Wednesday once a year.
Mora gets the credit he has earned for pulling UConn football from the depths of mockery and irrelevance into something people care enough about to be legit angry after a debacle like last week in Houston, where the Huskies were double-digit favorites.
There would be more attention if they were 8-0 against their light schedule, but for the most part fans here appreciate Mora’s work and the state’s media has shown nothing but respect for it, and for him. Certainly there has been no shortage of praise tapped onto this keyboard.
We all take the bad with the good. If the coach felt he needed to make some sort of statement Tuesday, give reporters a two-minute warning, so be it. Maybe he can make another two-minute statement on Saturday and hold on to a lead.
