For years, UConn has been the doormat of the FBS, last posting over five wins back in 2015. Now, under new management, the team has seen a sharp improvement from the bottom of the NCAA
STORRS, Conn. — About 30 minutes east of the capital city of Hartford sits Storrs, Connecticut. A small rural town that emulates everything New England. Around 15,000 people, a couple of roads, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and a football team that has been the jest of college football for over a decade.
Long known for their heralded women’s basketball pedigree, the University of Connecticut has been the lifeline for this small town since its inception in 1881. Fast forward nearly 150 years later and the UConn Huskies football team has rarely seen success, brining the school nothing but ridicule and disappointment.
For a state of 3.7 million and the third-smallest commonwealth in the union, UConn has managed to be the second-best team in the state, getting outplayed by their Ivy League peers in Yale to the west. Spanning from 2013 to 2021, the Huskies have managed to hit the 5 win mark just once, in 2015– but have generally clung to their lowly records, rarely breaking 3 wins at times.
The Huskies have long been the laughingstock of Division One football and the NCAA in general. Often times subject to being scheduled as teams’ ‘cupcake’ games, where the matchup is supposed to be an easy win early on in the season, UConn has failed to shake the stinky stigma of being dead last nearly every year.
Until this past season.
Rarely ever in the college football landscape is six wins a moment for jeers. Six wins for most programs signifies a lackluster year, spelled with mediocrity. But for first-year head coach Jim Mora and a Huskies team which has been marred with infamy and stain, it’s a sign of a shifting tide.
His acceptance speech was void of any fireworks or an extravagant audience. Instead, Mora was all business as he knew what he was getting into. Sitting at a ledger with the UConn Husky as the backdrop, Mora would delve straight into his motifs and MO as a coach.
“It starts the day they walk in that door,” Mora said at his inaugural press conference, talking about what the culture shift would be like with a new era of Huskies. “[We must] help them become the young men their parents expect them to be.”
Words tend to be semantical, for any football team. Take Alabama or any beer-league flag football team, no speech nor loaded words make an impact until they’re set in motion. Mora came into the program roaring.
For the Huskies, the only constant has been change. Since 1997 the team has switched conference allegiances four times. Teeter-tottering between the now defunct Atlantic 10 and the Big East, the Huskies finally landed in the American Athletic Conference in 2013– the start of their woes. Since then, the team has been anything but respectable, ending the 2021 season with only one win against a reeling Yale team deep.
That 2021 season marked just how grave UConn’s situation was. Unmasking an ugly roster along with the desperate need for a coaching change was a loss to an FCS-level Holy Cross along with a 49-0 loss to Purdue and a 45-0 drubbing by Fresno State amidst a slew of games that flat-out looked like UConn was in the wrong division.
Mora was the change the Huskies forlornly needed. An established coach with a decorated history, Mora had been run through the ringer via every level of football known to man. Making his way through the NFL circuit, he served as a supplemental coach for the Chargers, Saints, 49ers, Falcons, and Seahawks. Returning to the college world after his rookie season in coaching as a graduate assistant at the University of Washington, Mora ended up as the head coach of the esteemed UCLA Bruins, a position which he got fired from in 2017 after six years.
More had gotten off to a fast three years in Los Angeles, going 29-11 yet couldn’t keep up, ending his final three years of tenure in the City of Angels 17-19, eventually let go after a humiliating loss to USC in three consecutive years.
Now, 2021, Mora has taken the job at the University of Connecticut following a reported painstaking four days talking to loved ones and a Connecticut panel that included UConn athletic director David Benedict and even governor Ned Lamont.
It’s time for a paradigm shift.
Looking at the program from a birds-eye point of view, one thing was clear. It was a shipwreck. A totaled car-wreck filled with a culture of losing that had become insouciance amongst the Husky fanbase.
“Just another UConn Husky season”
No one in their right mind would take this job, even for a coach who had taken a five year hiatus since departing UCLA, it was career suicide.
Mora didn’t think so, “”The challenge of going uphill and taking over a program like this. It inspires me and breathes life into me.”
Since Mora took the challenge, UConn’s program has seen a complete reversal of action. Turning the sails on a ship gone three sheets to the wind hasn’t been easy, but for the first time in eons, UConn turned a 1-11 team into one that’s bowl eligible.
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During the 2022 offseason, the Huskies added 40 players on scholarship, including several high-profile recruits like former Penn State quarterback Ta’Quan Roberson who Mora alluded to as a possible starter come 2023. The roster has also been injected with freshness and youth, a crucial turning point for a team in desperate need of something new. The culture has started to shift, building upon what the team did in 2022, the end product is still far away.
Competing for the third year as an FBS Independent, the Huskies are just one big win away from earning back everyone’s respect. And it’s already present on campus.
“It’s more about the emotional side of things and the energy around the program that comes from the coaches and the players, it’s fun to see,” UConn athletic director David Benedict said. “What you have to come away with, whether at practice or in the building, is that these guys are having fun. That part has been really rewarding. That wasn’t present the last couple years.”
UConn took on Marshall in the 2022 Myrtle Beach Bowl. While it wasn’t a New Years Six or the Peach Bowl, for the Huskies– it was an omen that things were changing for the better within a team defined by their failures. What seemed improbable from a distance, the team overcame a rocky start in order to secure their first bowl appearance since 2015– against Marshall. A full circle of events.
At the beginning of the year, a 1-4 start seemed like UConn’s case was impalpable, like some form fire football gods cursed the town of Storrs for all eternity. But soon enough, the Huskies proved that football is a fickle sport– one where comebacks are all the probable. Even with Roberson tearing his ACL in Week 1 against Utah State, even after a keystone piece of the coaching staff in defensive coordinator Lou Spanos ominously disappeared one day, and even after the team fell deep into a 1-4 hole by Week 5 that lost most of the community’s fragile hope for a revival.
Yet, UConn never wavered, and leading the charge was none other than the man who could be attributed as the catalyst for a program with a fresh breath of air in Jim Mora.
The Huskies came roaring back nearly immediately. As linebacker Jackson Mitchell put it, “in years past, if we started 1-4, we’d finish out 2-10, but this year, you could tell a difference. Coach Mora gave us hope that we weren’t going to finish that way, that we could still make a bowl game.”
During that five game cesspool, the team had their wits tested. Facing No. 5 ranked Michigan and No. 12 ranked North Carolina State, the Huskies were destined to be just another doormat for the upper echelon of the NCAA. A “easy-win” circled on every team’s calendar as a warm-up game.
Semantical titles aside, the ‘Dawgs came roaring back. In the six game stretch following their pitfall, rejuvenated head coach Jim Mora and a star-sprung offense led the Huskies to a 5-1 record beating out prestigious programs such as Boston College and Liberty.
After UConn’s 59-0 loss to Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mora remained positive, mentioning all the things about the Huskies he was proud of. This sentiment later grew to be one of the most stunning storylines of the 2022 NCAA season.
“The thing that I was proud of was the attitude and effort of our young men. They kept fighting. This is not the situation that you’d like to say you were able to play a lot of young guys, you’d like it to be in a situation where you were up 59-0, but we did get a chance to play a ton of young guys,” Mora said after Michigan’s drubbing of the Huskies.
“And we will move forward with some of those young guys. We brought in a good recruiting class and we’re going to give them a chance to play. I’m not going to say they are going to start, or they are supplanting anybody or anything like that, but there are some good young athletes on this team that we are going to start force feeding and we did so today a little more in the second half.”
In the midst of their 5-1 stretch, UConn suffered yet another pitfall in a 21-25 loss to Ball State. Yet, the aura around the team was different. All it took was one look outside the facility to see the fruits of UConn’s galvanizing turnaround. Merely a season after the team finished 1-11, the team was in the top 50% of points allowed, had more than one win under their belt, and had beat Fresno State– a team which they lost 45-0 just a season ago.
“Their expectations had risen,” Mora said. “It flipped after Ball State.”
The change was evident, and then all of a sudden, things started clicking. The Huskies went on a tear. They beat Boston College in a 13-3 slugfest, pulled away late against UMass– coronated themselves as the “Kings of New England”, and won a thriller in East Hartford against Liberty. All three of their W’s were at home, instilling deep faith in their fanbase that the Huskies they have waited so long to see had finally arrived.
Despite dropping their last game against a stout Army team, the metamorphosis of a once-inglorious team was clear cut. The game against Liberty enshrined Mora as the Gandhi of the UConn Huskies. A field storm was in order for a crowd of 15,000, paired with a Gatorade bath for Mora sparking debate between Liberty head coach Hugh Freeze who said it was a credit to his program that UConn’s win warranted a field storm.
To that, Mora responded, “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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For the players, a rocky road had finally culminated into tangible success. Not semantics, not empty words… instead, hard fought wins.
“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 former UConn head coach Randy 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.”
College football isn’t linear, instead it’s a wild roller coaster of emotions that have everybody second guessing every facet of the game. Since the lopsided defeat in Ann Arbor, Mora knew he had a team that would stand tall through the trials and tribulations. Not every team can take the mental and physical toll of that day ad use it to fuel a fire that wouldn’t go out for quite some time.
“[We are not] relenting. There’s way too much pride and competitive here,” Mora said in a postgame presser. “We have eight games left, and I see no reason we can’t be a very, very good football team by the end of the year, one people are proud of and one our players are proud to be a part of.”
If anything, Jim Mora personifies the UConn football program with one massive trait, the gigantic chip on his shoulder.
“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.”
Mora will always think that way, until the day he passes on his coaching torch to someone else. But in a way, that grudge he has, that steadfast motive to prove them wrong and to prove himself right is UConn’s MO. A team that has been counted out by the entire nation as a pushover is slowly turning into one the rest of the college football world might have to look out for.
From a absent head coach, to injuries begrudgingly being a constant thorn in their side, to a negative stigma from the university of nothing but women’s basketball– the Huskies have endured and endured. And will continue to keep setting higher expectations in 2023.
The job’s not finished.
“Next year, we should finish as a Top 25 team,” quarterback Zion Turner said. “That’s a goal for myself.”
With more transfers being piled on, and a healthy roster to go along with it, there’s no reason in the world UConn can’t continue to reach for the stars.
