The PAC Forum at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Entertaining shoot out between UCLA and Memphis. While sideline-interviewing before kickoff, Mora Jr tempered expectations due to "the middle of the defense" missing for the game. Injuries? Suspensions? Mora Jr wouldn't say, but the Bruin defense was a total train wreck, getting torched at the edges where plenty of un-absent experience was supposed to be doing their job. And not incurring stupid 4th quarter personal fouls. Or choking away nearly 400 lightly contested yds through the air. (Which Rosen offset with over 400 yds of his own arm.)

Josh Rosen posting another +400 yd passing symbolizes how masked the mediocrity of Mora Jr's UCLA tenure is by the luxury of high-fortune quarterbacking dating back to Brett Hundley. Win or not, the rest of the team played like marinated horse turd. Then again Rosen tossed two pricey INTs, the first being a pick 6 that gave Memphis the confidence to hold court with a more talented Bruins opponent.

It's like Mora Jr is in competition with RichRod & Graham to get fired first.

As of late Buyouts are a bone of contention with me. RichRod's is through 2019, Graham's through 2020, & Mora Jr's through 2021 - all of whom are owed about 2.5 million for each contract season left. I have big problem with state employees making, say five million over a two year period of doing nothing, though if you talk to the fan bases of either of these three programs they'll be quick to argue their coaches are already doing nothing. IMO, ADs are way too quick to pull the trigger on long extensions (see Penn State most recently) because it justifies hiring their guy (see, my guy, RichRod just won the Pac 12 South - boom! extension!) but it's always done under the excuse of recruiting (he can't recruit effectively without four or five more years left on his contract!) Which is patently false, because the way around this is to have your coach contracted only 2 or 3 years out with a automatic one-year extension for a better than average program year. 7 wins at Arizona, 8 at UCLA for example. It's similar to the contract Riley had with Oregon St.

And ADs who fire coaches with many millions of dollars left on their contract should in turn be fired for costing the tax payer.

In the case of both Arizona schools the extensions were justified at the time; both had won their conference division, but in retrospect granted too many years. Even amidst the Wildcats and Sun Devils spark of success anyone could see the defenses would eventually face a day of judgement. RichRod and staff neglected the defensive roster when it came to recruiting and Graham fielded the worst scheme I've seen by blitzing every down and never substituting to the point of being worn out by the 4th quarter.

But what's UCLA's excuse for having a statistically worse defense than both Arizona and ASU this year? The Bruins are ranked 122 in total defense, behind ASU at 121, and giving up an average of 515 yds/game (vs ASU's 505 yds/game.) Mora Jr already tried to trot out an excuse before kickoff yesterday, making sure the sideline reporter know how depleted his numbers were, but that's BS because so many of those sophomore and junior year backups are highly recruited 4 stars rated players who've had enough time in the program to develop and unify into a better effort than giving up 560 yds to Memphis yesterday.

What I don't fathom is why AD's hire coaches at all.  It's not like they have any expertise in choosing coaches or training for it in the modern era where they don't stay on the job long enough to go through a few coach hires.  The guys who know from hiring coaches are coaches since they hire hosts of assistants every year.  Schools with decent football traditions probably ought to form hiring boards of former HC's and other coach's friendly to the program and have them put forward and evaluate names for the new head man.  Forget the dumb organization chart, the HC is a higher level employee than the AD in every real way nowadays.