Everything UConn Football HC Jim Mora said ahead of Buffalo game week
UConn Football head coach Jim Mora met with the media again today as the Huskies prep for the upcoming game against the Buffalo Bulls this upcoming Saturday afternoon.
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Full Press Conference Transcript
Coach, if you could start us off with some thoughts on week five coming up here. Okay. Well, it’s a huge challenge for us to go to Buffalo.
They are a really good football team. They play a swarming, attacking, aggressive defense. Their head coach has a special teams background, so they’re going to be sound there.
They do some really good things on offense. They mix it up well. They’ll use the quarterback run.
They’ve got good threats on the outside. They’ve got, I think, a couple of really good running backs. So we’ve had our challenges on the road, and we expect this one to be a really tough, physical, hard-fought game.
Health was your number one concern coming off Saturday’s game. Where are you on that?
JIM MORA: We’re pretty good. The issue has been guys getting hurt in the game and missing plays or not being able to come back in that game, and then they recover for the next week, and that’s where we are.
So when I said that, it felt like we just lost a bunch of guys on defense for too many plays, and that really hurt us. But they’ve all recovered very, very well, and that’s something that’s been a positive for us this year. Certainly losing Mel, as we did, has hurt us, but you can’t make excuses.
You’ve just got to keep playing. We’ve talked about the challenges on the road before, but what are those, and why is it so difficult? I think it permeates all of sports. Winning on the road is difficult.
You’re out of your environment. You have to get away from your routine. We try to create a routine that is consistent whether we’re home or on the road, but there are just some disruptions that you have to be able to overcome, and you have to be able to maintain your focus, and that’s not always easy.
Typically, there’s a little bit more momentum for the home team. Once again, that’s something you have to try to ignore, put out of your mind, focus on what you can control, which is what happens between the white lines, and that’s what you stress, and that’s what you emphasize, and that’s what we work on, but it’s not as easy as it sounds to do. So it’s just about having the mental toughness and the focus to stay right in the moment and stay where you are and play the play you’re playing, and that’ll help you when you go on the road.
But winning on the road is tough. It’s not easy. I agree with where Joe is right now as a quarterback.
Obviously, your offense has performed pretty well. Not quite as consistent as you want, but at a pretty good level, but he’s also missed some balls downfield. Is it more just about getting in a rhythm at times? At times, yeah.
We’re not pleased right now with where we are with the downfield, the big throws down, down the field. You’re exactly right. We missed three on Saturday.
I think it’s timing and work with your receivers, understanding coverage. We’ve worked really hard to be on the same page with our quarterback and our receivers and the exactness of how a route’s going to be run versus particular looks. Those guys get extra work at it each week, and so I think as that piles up, you’ll see us become more consistent in that area.
Overall, are you pleased with where Joe is?
JIM MORA: Yeah, I think he’s the fifth-leading, sixth-leading passer in the country in terms of yards. Anytime it’s an incompletion, we’re going to tear it apart and try to figure out why, and I know it bothers Joe. Getting our completion percentage up as high as we can is certainly a goal, but Joe’s done a really nice job for us so far this year, and there’s certainly room for improvement.
What’s great about Joe is he’s the first one to recognize it and address it. Last year against Buffalo, where’s their defense gotten better?
They’re one of the better defenses in the country right now. Well, they were really good last year.
They had a key player hurt, but they play incredibly hard, very, very physical. They’re excellent tacklers. They play with great confidence and energy.
As a guy that loves great defense, which I do, it’s a defense that’s fun to watch. It’s a defense that’s really tough to prepare for. Last year is irrelevant.
They’re just a different team. Even the guys that were there, they’ve got guys that are returning that were All-Mac or second-team All-Mac. They’re starting inside linebacker.
Number two was fourth-team All-American, which is pretty darn good. That was last year, and he’s better this year. So they pose a significant challenge for us, and we’re going to have to be really on point against them.
Is this going to be a big offensive-wide test? No, I mean it’s an offensive test. It’s everybody. You can’t just put the focus on the offensive line.
These guys, they lead the country in sacks, and people assume when they hear that that’s just your offensive line, but it’s not. It’s your tight ends blocking. It’s your backs blocking.
It’s your receivers winning. It’s your quarterback knowing where to step up and when to step up, not taking sacks. So it’s running the football to keep yourself out of situations where they can really get after it.
But they are an excellent defense in all phases. Very, very, very solid, very disciplined, very complete, very physical, very hard playing. Like I said, it’s a real challenge for all 11 plus us as a staff to go against them.
You talked about John Neider is going to be coming out here today. It just seems like every week it just keeps getting better and better, and how intense it was all over social media, just what you’ve seen. You’ve talked about him a couple of times this fall, right?
JIM MORA: Yeah, I like talking about him.
I like talking about John Neider. We get to see that all the time in practice. People don’t get to see it as much as we do.
You get to see it on game day, and fortunately he’s winning opportunities by the way that he prepares and practices, and then he goes out on Saturday and he makes the plays that he made against Delaware, and he makes the play that he made against Syracuse, even though he was throwing it rather than catching it, and he makes the plays that he made against Ball State. He just earns more repetitions and further confirms what we’ve seen out of him since he’s been here, which is he’s very athletic. He’s got great hands, great concentration.
He’s incredibly smart. He’s very competitive. He’s a hard worker.
I’ve said many times his freshman year we moved him wide out, and he just gave the defense fits when he was on the scout team, the service team, giving us opponent looks, and you just always kind of felt, hey, there’s something there with this guy. Then he’s had to overcome some stigma. He’s a walk-on.
He was a quarterback. You’ve got to fight through some things when you’re that guy. You get a reputation, and that reputation can sometimes I think it can hurt you in the eyes of the people that are judging you, and as a coach you have to be able to overcome that, that stigma, that reputation, and say, you know what, this guy is the real deal, and that’s John.
What a great credit to him. This is a guy that I think is out there. This is a guy that’s a type 1 diabetic, has to deal with that.
My daughter is a type 1 diabetic, so I know the challenges of living that life, having to give yourself the injections or you have the pump, but it’s something you have to constantly monitor, and he just doesn’t let anything hold him back. I know he’s an advocate for type 1 diabetes, and the Dexcom, which I wear the Dexcom, too, and you see guys that are doing that. It’s just pretty inspiring, pretty inspiring.
There’s a famous quote, our record says we are. Do you feel like a 2-2 football team? I have to, Joe, because that’s what we are, and I ascribe to that quote. I really do.
You say, hey, we should be better, we could be better. It’s not. It’s 2-2, and that’s the reality of the situation.
I always ask these players, let’s not rationalize things. Let’s just hit it straight on. The facts are we’re 2-2, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.
Are we disappointed? Maybe a little, but are we discouraged? No, not at all. I think there’s a real sense of resolve to keep climbing closer to our potential as a football team. To me, that potential really is just an infinity.
It goes on forever. Every day we’ve got to come out and we’ve got to just get a little bit better, a little bit better individually and collectively. I like the mindset of our team in terms of their approach every day to trying to reach the potential that’s pretty endless.
Do you know much about the supposing quarterback this week? Can you talk about the dual threat challenge he presents?
JIM MORA: We have a ton of respect for Taquan. He was here. He gave it his all.
His career started out with a bang. Against Utah State, he takes us down and we score. Then he gets hurt.
He blows out his knee when he’s scrambling towards our sideline. It was really unfortunate. He fought his way back.
This is a guy that is in his seventh year. It hasn’t been easy for him, but he has just had great perseverance. That, to me, is just the indicators of a really tough human being, which we knew he was.
He is a dual threat. He’s throwing the ball very, very well. We know he’s got the legs to run.
He looks like he’s very comfortable in this offense. It looks like the things that they’re asking him to do are the things that he does well. He tweaked, I believe it was his ankle the other day.
He got face-masked on a scramble. He came up a little bit gimpy, but he stayed in for a play. They scored a touchdown.
Then we didn’t get to see him anymore, but I would be hard-pressed to believe this wouldn’t be a game that he’d be back for.
Do you have to change the way you call plays on defense because he has some knowledge? Do you change signals or anything like that?
JIM MORA: He hasn’t been here for a year and a half, so he spent really a spring looking at this defense. I don’t think that his focus at that time was the signals.
The way we signal is so late. It’s really kind of hard to get our signals. You could tape them or do whatever you want, and yet Matt holds that until the last second to get it in.
That’s very much what they do on defense as well. Their coordinator does a tremendous job of holding the signal until he sees the formation and then getting a call into his guys. I don’t think that’s something that we have to be concerned about.
I think what we have to be concerned about is just going out and executing to the best of our ability, play after play after play for 60 minutes or as long as it takes. Where has Joe grown the most since he got here? He’s probably as a leader. Then I would say just his toughness.
I say that mentally and physical toughness. I always think he was a really tough guy, but he’s just got another layer to that toughness that he had when he came here. He’s more resilient.
He’s more focused. He doesn’t let things bother him. He’s just become a tremendous leader for this team.
He does it the right way. He demonstrates it in practice every single day. When he has a bad play, he doesn’t brush it off.
He wants to get it right. I think he’s a really good example for our players. When he needs to say something and he does say something with conviction, our players listen to him.
I think that’s probably where he’s grown the most, that and just his confidence. His confidence to play in this system. He’s been in it for a while.
He understands it much more completely, and so he’s able to make better decisions. I think any coach will tell you that the number one trait that you’re looking for in a quarterback is a great decision maker, a guy that’s going to do the right things. Sometimes that means getting rid of the football, getting you out of a bad play into a good play, knowing when to even take a sack.
In the RPO world now, so much is give or keep and throw. He just makes the right decisions. How do you like the way the running game responded after losing medals? It’s such a big part of it.
You just count on Cam a little bit more. Do you see the other pieces finding a role? Yeah, Cam and Victor. Victor, he didn’t get as many touches as we’d like for him to get the other day.
It just was kind of the product of the game. You saw we worked Oliver in there. We’re going to get MJ in there.
You miss Mel. Mel is a heck of a player, and he just gives you that spark. But as I’ve said, we’ve got good backs, and we have a nice scheme that we understand well.
Our backs understand it. Our tight ends understand it. Certainly our offensive line understands it.
So I think that we have the potential to be a really, really good rushing football team. We are already pretty good, but I mean even better. That’s exciting to me.
If we had Mel, that would be great. But we don’t, so we can’t worry about it. We’ve just got to go on.
How would you evaluate the offensive line at this point? Obviously, they’re a big part of the running game. Detective Joe, for the most part, hasn’t turned the ball over yet. How would you evaluate them so far? They’re doing well.
This is a big test this week, though. This is a team that, like I said, they have 16 sacks. We’ve given up three, so they’re the top sack team in the country, and we’ve done okay.
We don’t want to give up any. They stopped the run. We’ve been able to, if we stay with it, run the ball well.
I think we’ve been pretty balanced on offense, but I still think there’s so much that we’ve left on the table. You guys mentioned the deep throws. So we just have to keep focusing on us every week, not be complacent, not take things for granted, not ever feel like it’s good enough.
Fortunately, we’ve got a group of young men here that they subscribe to that philosophy. You watch them practice every day, and there’s real intent on getting better. They take it very seriously.
They’re not happy yet, and they won’t be happy until hopefully they’re done playing football. That’s how you have to be. You have to always be going for more.
Coach, on Saturday, you talked about it a little bit, but the deep throws ended with three carries, five yards. What would you expect from them on Saturday?
JIM MORA: It’s just so hard to tell going into a game how it’s going to play out with the number of touches guys are going to get. There’s so many variables that go into it, the situation in the game, who’s hot, what you’re trying to get done.
So many plays in college football now are the run-pass-option type plays. So a guy getting a carry as opposed to not getting a carry sometimes is dependent on the defensive look. So it’s just really hard to predict.
We know that Victor is a very important part of this offense. He’s a very good runner, he’s a very good receiver, and he’s a damn good pass protector. So when you combine all three of those things, he’s the guy you want on the field.
But in terms of being able to anticipate his number of touches, that’s just really hard to do. Coach, you talked about playing the game stop in the last two minutes and getting stops. You all did force an interception in the fourth quarter.
What are some of the things that kind of led to that takeaway that you might be able to take into this week to maybe clean things up in those last minutes?
JIM MORA: Defense to me is about doing your job consistently with a high level of effort. And if you do those things, if you’re consistently doing your job and you’re doing it with great effort, then you’re going to have a chance to make some plays like Lee did the other day. Defense, when you get out of rhythm, when you get out of sync, when guys ad-lib and do their own thing, that’s when you can get yourself into real trouble.
So it’s just a constant source of emphasis for us is do your job consistently, as hard as you can, for as long as you must, and we’ll make plays. And really, that’s it. That’s defense.
Now, certainly putting them in the right spot as much as we can, but you watch some of the best defenses in football, and they don’t do a lot. But what they do, they do very, very well, and they play very, very hard, and therefore they make plays. I ascribe to that, and so does Matt.
We expect more out of our defense, and I believe that they will respond. Okay, thanks. Defense.
Defense.
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