Mora Irrelevance: UCLA Football Continues its Plunge With Last Night’s Desert Disaster

UCLA is a bad football team. Now that we have that out of the way. Remember that I told you that first.

After the Colorado game last year, I wrote about how Jim Mora was taking UCLA Football to historic lows. At the time, I wrote about how poorly the Mora-led Bruins were faring against Power 5 opponents.

Today seems like a good to revisit that and update things. Last year, I wrote how Mora was 2-9 against Power 5 opponents since November 14, 2015. Since last year’s Colorado game, UCLA is now 3-4 against Power 5 opponents. That means that Mora is now 5-13 against his last 18 Power 5 opponents. That’s a dismal .384 winning percentage over that timeframe.

Mora’s conference winning percentage is now .530 and is continuing to crumble worse than a Diddy Riese peanut butter cookie that’s been left out overnight. That’s 41 percentage points worse Karl Dorrell, who had a .571 conference winning percentage when he was fired.

The worst part of this is that it doesn’t get any easier moving forward.

Next Saturday, the Bruins host Oregon. Then, they travel to Washington and Utah before finishing the season against Arizona State, Southern Cal and UC Berkeley.

After watching last night’s game, I’m not sure if this year’s team will win another game this season. It is completely possible...actually, make that likely...that this team will finish 3-9.

Sure, some of you may be optimistic. There might actually still be a few Bruin fans left who believe that this team will turn it around and finish strong. A few of you may even still believe that Jim Mora is the best man to be coaching the Bruins.

I’m not sure how there could possibly be anyone left who still believes that if you’ve been paying close attention the past few seasons.

That said, let’s look at an administration that knows what it’s doing.

Today’s example comes from Lincoln, Nebraska where, again, Nebraska’s chancellor Ronnie Green has again made Gene Block look like an absolute idiot.

Green did that a few weeks ago when he fired Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst. Green didn’t waste any time looking to right the ship that is Cornhusker football. First, he called the team’s loss to Northern Illinois unacceptable. Then, less than a week later, he fired Eichorst so that a new AD could be hired to address the issues with the football program.

Well, today, Green is in the news again because Nebraska just hired Washington State Athletic Director Bill Moos as the new Cornhusker AD.

Wow! Imagine that!

Nebraska has a chancellor who understands the value of a winning football team. It must be nice!

If Gene Block should step down tomorrow, I know who I’d want to be the next chancellor at UCLA and it’s Ronnie Green. Unfortunately, Green’s background in agriculture probably means that would never happen, given the fact that UCLA doesn’t have an agricultural or animal science program that I’m aware of.

But, Green has proven to understand that losing athletic teams hurt a university’s image which is something that Gene Block still doesn’t understand.

He’s also proven that he knows how to hire an athletic director. Moos, after all, served as the AD at Oregon before taking over at Washington State. He started the resurgence of Oregon football under Mike Bellotti. He took over at Washington State in 2007 and was the guy who hired Mike Leach as the Cougars’ head coach. So, Moos has built not one but two football programs into winners in almost the same time as Dan Guerrero has hired three football coaches, fired two of them and should be getting ready to fire a third as Bruin football continues its plunge into irrevelance.

Think about that if you still think Jim Mora should be coaching at UCLA.


Go Bruins.