Mora The Same: Mora Blaming His Players

Everyone is rightfully concentrated on the embarrassing sideline blowup between Jim Mora and Jeff Ulbrich yesterday, and it's no surprise that Mora led with that in his presser. However, also buried in his opening statement was this ugly little nugget that we just happened to notice:

You know, when you play a team like Oregon, you got to be almost perfect to beat ‘em. They’re just so explosive and so good and umm, I think we did some things today that were really positive, but we shot ourselves in the foot a couple of times.  I think that the turnovers hurt us, certainly. You know when you got a team like, you give them a short field, it’s going to make it extremely difficult on your offense, or I’m sorry, on your defense. Umm you know obviously umm we’ve got to, we’ve got to figure out how to put the ball through the uprights, and we need those threes.

Again, this came out of his opening statement, and this is the tone he wants to set for the news conference. There were four major points: Addressing the Ulbrich situation, talking about how Oregon is good, begging the fans to come back to the Rose Bowl after two consecutive stinkers his team laid there, and tossing his kicker under the bus.

First things first. Yeah, a 41 yarder is in Ka'imi Fairbairn's limited range and should be a make. You know how much that matters? Not a damn bit. It is insane in this particular game to go to that and think that it is worthy of being a lead topic in such a comprehensive failure.

Shooting ourselves in the foot? Sorry, but Fairbairn didn't do that. Mora did. Mora did that with his typical gutless NFL conservative style call to trot his kicker out there when we've got 2 yards to pick up to put us into Oregon's red zone. Mora did that by not recognizing that our opponent is not a nickel and dime, dink and dunk, field position style team. This was Oregon. Is Jim Mora familiar with them yet? They're the team that averages 43 points per game, that doesn't give a damn about our piddly 3 points when they're going for 6 every F-ing time, and then goes for the 2 points afterwards just because they can.

Best case scenario, the Bruins close to within 9 points and give the ball back to the Mariota express and they march down the field again and make it a two possession game. Lo and behold, that's what they went and did! Missed FG or not, on Oregon's next possession, it took them 3 minutes to march 77 yards into the endzone. Ironically enough, Oregon's kicker missed that PAT. Know why Oregon didn't care? Know why Helfrich doesn't feel the need to lament not being able to put the ball through the uprights? Cause they already had six points in their pocket.

Then again, throwing kickers under the bus to distract from his own coaching inadequacies is nothing new for Jim Mora. It's pathetic. Mora says he knows that Oregon is explosive and that they're good, but he sure doesn't coach like it. This wouldn't be so upsetting if I knew our fanbase was smart enough to not fall for this kind of red herring. But I have little faith that UCLA fans won't fall into the Herpaderp Fairbairn Hate Train conducted by Mora, rather than looking at the coaches that call for field goals on Oregon's 4 and 23 yard line in a game where even made field goals are next to worthless. So if you're going to come in here and start running your mouth about our kicker all while not mentioning and ignoring the much bigger issue at hand here, then congrats, you're just another one of Mora's useful idiots in this fanbase and you deserve games like yesterday's.