Jim L. Mora’s nerves have been frayed for days.
The will-they, won’t-they of UCLA’s coaching search, the immediate preparation for a move from Seattle to Los Angeles, and then, to top it off, his most nail-biting test in 30-plus years.
But Mora aced the NCAA recruiting test – ahem, open book – on Tuesday morning and almost immediately, he planned to fill the one gaping hole in his resume.
“I haven’t been that nervous about a test since I took the SAT,” he joked to a horde of eager reporters at his introductory press conference on Tuesday at UCLA’s Morgan Center, after he was announced as the Bruins’ 17th head football coach.
Now, Mora can finally smile.
But even the Cheshire Cat’s lasted longer, as Mora knows he will be graded harshly as he assembles his first recruiting class with the benefit of zero recruiting experience, his last and only college job came 27 years ago as a graduate assistant at his alma mater Washington.
To help, he’s bringing in the big guns.
Mora is expected to bring on SMU offensive line coach – and Rivals.com 2010 non-BCS recruiter of the year – Adrian Klemm as his offensive line coach and run game coordinator and Arizona State wide receivers coach Steve Broussard to be his new running backs coach, sources said on Tuesday night.
With heavy ties to Southern California and street cred gained over a combined 15 years in the NFL, that duo should be able to get UCLA in many front doors.
Mora wants to help pick the right ones.
Mora knows he lacks living-room experience right now, but he’s no stranger to evaluating talent.
“One of the things Bill Walsh always made us do is Bill said, ‘I know what the guy is now; your job is to tell me what he’s going to be in a year, two years, three years, four years,'” Mora said. “That’s what Bill Walsh said. He said, ‘Look, I can turn on the film and tell you what he is right now. Your job is to tell me what he’s going to be.’
“I’ve been trained to do that.”
Mora accepts that recruiting is an art that is mastered rather than a science that is simply learned, and he counters that with sheer invigoration for the challenge.
He said that recruiting was “one of the things I’m most fired up about” and he said that he would spend three hours on Tuesday night on the phone with UCLA’s 18 verbally committed players.
But that is the future, and there is also the now, and Mora got a taste of that on Tuesday as well, albeit briefly.
Mora met with the Bruins after their Tuesday morning practice for roughly 15 minutes, the first encounter between the team and the man who takes over for Rick Neuheisel.
Mora’s first goal is to instill a level of discipline among the team, and that begins, he said, internally.
“You have to create a culture of accountability,” Mora said. “Not only accountability to your institution, to your school, but to your teammate and to yourself. There’s really not a lot stronger than peer-to-peer accountability. I have a saying that I like, and that’s, ‘Count on me.’ You have to earn the right, first of all, through your actions, to say to somebody, ‘Hey, you count on me,’ and have any merit.”
For a team with a penchant for penalties and a propensity for public gaffes, the message will need to sink in quickly, even before any schemes are installed or plays are run.
Those will be sorted out, too, as Mora did not have any clear-cut answer about his offensive or defensive approaches, saying that they wouldn’t be “any one thing.”
“When people think of new coaches, they kind of think it’s a different atmosphere, different attitude maybe,” UCLA junior quarterback Kevin Prince said. “They don’t think about the tougher part, where we have to learn everything again. Being an older guy, I’ve changed systems before. It’s going to be different to learn something completely new.”
That will eventually come, though.
First, Mora is looking toward the future, even though he’s just finished Day One.
With his current roster, with his incoming Bruins, with his staff, with himself, now comes the time for evaluation
“One advantage I might have in that area is the fact that I’ve been around so many great players in my career,” said Mora of his 25-year NFL career. “And I mean all-time great players, both coaching them, and just being around them. They all have something to them that stands out and I think I can identify it. Can I identify in a 17 or 18-year old kid like I can identify it in a 25-year old kid? I don’t know, but I think I will be able to.”