Evaluating College Football's First-Year Head Coaches: Jim Mora

When Jim Mora was hired as UCLA’s head football coach in the winter of 2011, well, to be blunt, it created just about the same buzz in Los Angeles as the release of a new Pauley Shore movie might: Essentially, it created no buzz at all. For a program which had been living in the shadow of USC since the late 1990’s, the arrival of Mora- a man who had only coached one season in college his entire career, as a graduate assistant in 1984- was seen as a random shot in the dark, with little hope of success. The fact that UCLA’s administration settled on Mora only after swinging and missing on Chris Petersen and a number of other, seemingly “bigger” candidates didn’t help the school’s public image either. But after all that off-season uncertainty, a funny thing happened. On their way to another mediocre coaching hire, the Bruins actually struck gold with Mora. In just a few short months Mora transformed the program from “afterthought in its own city” to a 9-4 club and Pac-12 Sout...