UCLA Football: Who You Callin’ Soft?
Rick Neuheisel’s response to Jim Mora – specifically Mora’s opinion that UCLA Football in 2012 was soft – says volumes about Neuheisel, and not in the way that he intends.
On Tuesday, Jim Mora discussed in an interview with Colin Cowherd that his impression of UCLA Football when he was hired in 2011 was that the team was soft, an assessment with which Athletic Director Dan Guerrero agreed.
On Wednesday, Mora’s predecessor, Rick Neuheisel, lashed out with comments of his own, bristling at having his team called soft, questioning the perceived toughness of Mora’s teams, and complaining of a lack of administration support during his tenure.
Tough Players ≠ Tough Team
First, Neuheisel admirably defends his players (just as I would expect Mora to do), and bristles at the suggestion that they were soft. He says, ‘I’ll go to war with any of [my former players].’ That’s all well and good, but a team’s toughness is more than just the aggregate grit of its players.
It’s also a measure of how well (or poorly) the players and coaches collectively respond to adversity. Can they take a punch and maintain composure, or do they crumple? How confident are they as a team in the work they’ve put in and the talent they have? How aggressive is the play-calling? How physical are the practices?
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These things say less about the players, and more about the coaching and the culture of a program. So does this: Neuheisel opened his UCLA coaching career with a 59-0 loss at BYU and ended it with a 50-0 loss to USC, and he spent a lot of time in between screaming at overmatched quarterbacks on the sidelines.
Sources intimately involved with the program during Neuheisel’s tenure have confirmed to me what we all could see from the outside: his players loved him, but they did not respect him. You simply cannot say the same for Mora. They may or may not love him, but they definitely respect him.
Doing Whatever Works
Neuheisel goes on to pooh-pooh Mora’s motivation techniques, dismissing Mora’s decision to paint the locker room walls black, to wear black on the sidelines, and to emphasize martial virtues and koans of wisdom from The Art of War. Those things may sound silly to the outside observer, but locker room psychology is generally pretty receptive to such broad, on-the-nose gestures.
Regardless, it’s worked, as any fan or neutral observer can tell you; Mora’s teams are better in large part because they are mentally tougher and more physically agressive in their outlook and preparation. If these things were so easy, Neuheisel could have adopted them as well, and perhaps we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Penalties as a Diagnostic Tool
Neuheisel does have a point when he points out that, despite Mora’s emphasis on mental toughness, his UCLA teams are notoriously undisciplined and heavily penalized on the field. Mora’s teams have averaged 8.4 penalties per game, good for roughly 122nd in the nation; Neuheisel’s teams, by contrast, averaged 6.5 penalties per game, good for roughly 82nd in the nation. This has been a particular point of frustration for UCLA fans the last four years.
Mora’s teams have averaged 8.4 penalties per game, good for roughly 122nd in the nation; Neuheisel’s teams, by contrast, averaged 6.5 penalties per game, good for roughly 82nd in the nation.
I don’t want to get to into this, as I’m researching this very topic for a longer piece I plan to publish later in the off-season on UCLA’s penalty issue, but there are a few different categories of penalties. Some come from not having your head in the game (i.e., false starts), some come from lack of talent or ability (i.e., some holding calls), and some from lack of self control (i.e., taunting or unnecessary roughness).
Others, though, come from playing tougher and more aggressive football, erring on the side of hitting too hard or too late rather than too gently or not at all. This isn’t to excuse any category of penalty, and it doesn’t take away from the impact they have on a game’s outcome. But it is to suggest that there’s not a neat, one-to-one correlation between penalties and a lack of mental toughness, as Neuheisel is implying.
Advocate or Victim?
Neuheisel’s issues with Mora aside, it sounds like this was really a boiling over of Neuheisel’s long-standing disappointment and frustration with Dan Guerrero and the Athletic Department. He claims that Guerrero never supported the team, never visited practice, never fronted the money necessary to hire quality assistants or improve facilities.
I’m sympathetic to Neuheisel here. We all know Dan Guerrero is not the most hands-on athletic director. He raises money and is a good ambassador for the program to donors and the broader community, but he doesn’t do much on the actual sports side of things.
To the extent that the successive failures of Dorrell and Neuheisel caused Guerrero to realize the error of his ways and become more involved and/or more free with funding, that’s bad luck for Neuheisel. His legacy is saddled with having served unsuccessfully under an unhelpful AD who reformed only after Neuheisel was fired.
But I’d argue that Mora deserves some of the credit for the Morgan Center’s greater prioritization of football. He has used his influence – sometimes via threats to take other jobs – to force Guerrero’s hand and demand the support he wants. Part of being a head coach is advocating for your program, and Mora has been more successful there than Neuheisel, by any measure.
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I’ll end with the caveat that I like Rick Neuheisel, with his passion buckets and his punting is winning. There’s no doubt that he loves the team and the university, and I’m sorry for him that his tenure as head coach didn’t work out.
But his comments today reveal more about his shortcomings as a coach and his inability to come to terms with those than they do anything about Jim Mora’s program. This is an ugly distraction, but hopefully it will be forgotten soon, for the sake both of the current team and of Neuheisel himself.