Earlier this month, Jim Mora signed a contract extension that will keep him at the helm of the UCLA football program through the 2021 season. The terms of the two-year extension, obtained by the Daily News on Thursday, deal mostly with added bonuses and an adjusted scale for buyouts to accommodate the coach’s longer tenure.
Mora can earn up to $1.065 million per year in bonuses, which is an additional $135,000 compared to the extension the head coach signed in 2014. He can now earn $25,000 if UCLA finishes in the top 10 of the AP poll and an additional $25,000 if the Bruins finish in the top 5.
If UCLA excels in the classroom, the contract extension states Mora can earn up to $145,000 in bonuses, based on graduation rates and the NCAA’s academic progress rate. It’s a much larger bonus for academic success than the total $50,000 offered in the previous contract.
Note: There seems to be a mathematical error in the contract (see attached PDF below). If you add up the cumulative parts of the academic bonuses, they only equal $135,000 instead of the stated $145,000.
If Mora leaves for another Division I-A school or an NFL team before Jan 16, 2017, his buyout is $2 million, followed by $1.7 million if he leaves before Jan. 16, 2018, $1.35 million for the next year and $1 million if he leaves before the final year of the contract. The condition of leaving for an NFL team or another college job remained from the coach’s original contract before the 2012 season.
Mora will earn a $3.45 million talent fee, combined with a $300,000 base pay, per year for the 2020 and 2021 seasons. The total of $3.75 million is the same salary he is scheduled to earn in the 2019 season after he reworked his contract in 2014. Mora’s extension two years ago was believed to make him the second-highest paid head coach in the Pac-12 after Washington’s Chris Petersen at that time. (Clarification: USC and Stanford do not have to disclose salaries for their head coaches, so it’s difficult to know how much exactly Clay Helton and David Shaw make.)