On Saturday, October 3, 2015, college football coaches collectively had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.
You’ll continue to read more about this as you stay with our site and process everything that happened over the past weekend. This is but the first of several installments in a series of articles reviewing how many coaches lost touch with reason in week five.
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UCLA lost an opportunity to entrench itself at the top of the Pac-12 South on Saturday. The Bruins didn’t look good against Arizona State, and the first story of this game is that the visiting Sun Devils deserved to win. They clearly outplayed their hosts in Pasadena. What happened inside the final five minutes of regulation time wasn’t likely to change the ultimate outcome.
Yet, with that having been acknowledged, any remaining chance UCLA might have had to win this game evaporated when coach Jim Mora, Jr. committed a blunder worse than 99 percent of the other coaches in the FBS. Mike Riley of Nebraska (yes, we’ll write about him soon enough) is the only exception.
To reset: UCLA, trailing 29-23 with 4:16 left, faced fourth and six from its own 5-yard line. It’s true that if Arizona State got the ball back on a punt, it would have had very good field position. Let’s assume a 35-yard net. The Sun Devils would have gained the ball at the UCLA 40. With a field goal, ASU would have taken a two-score lead (32-23) and wrapped up the game. Mora, not wanting ASU to get that kind of field position, took an intentional safety to make the score 31-23. The margin was a one-score margin instead of two, and Mora was going to gain field position as a result of taking the safety.
Framed in those terms, the move seems reasonable. Yet, it was anything but… and what’s worse is that just about everyone who saw the episode unfold knew it was an awful move at the time it was made.
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This specific idea — that an eight-point deficit is different from all other one-score deficits — has been repeatedly examined over the past few days here at our site. We talked about it in the Miami-Cincinnati game on Thursday and in the Notre Dame-Clemson game on Saturday. While an eight-point deficit is technically a one-score deficit, it comes attached with a burdensome and anything-but-certain 2-point conversion. Structuring an endgame strategy around an eight-point deficit isn’t something a coach should ever WANT to do. It might be the best in a limited set of undesirable options, but it should never be sought out as an ideal situation. If coaches trail by eight points with — let’s say — six minutes left in a fourth quarter, they should run a hurry-up offense so that, in the event of a failed 2-point try, they might have ample time in which to get the ball back, ideally by playing defense and not even having to resort to an onside kick.
Jim Mora, Jr., however, seemed to pursue an eight-point deficit. He certainly thought it was better than remaining down by only six points and taking chances with his defense. Yet, this did not represent the entirety of Mora’s failure on Saturday… which is pretty scary.
First, let’s deal with the immediate question of the scoreboard margin in ASU-UCLA, and why Mora’s concern about ASU getting a nine-point lead instead of an eight-point lead was so severe and, ultimately, mis-calibrated.
We said in our hypothetical above that if UCLA punted from its own 5, ASU would get the ball around the UCLA 40 or thereabouts. Here’s the reason Mora was overly concerned about a Sun Devil field goal and subsequent two-score game: If UCLA’s defense stopped ASU on the first series of downs after the Sun Devils got the ball back, Arizona State probably would not have kicked a long field goal. The Sun Devils might have done so, but there would be no guarantee. If facing fourth and two at the 32, yes; if facing fourth and seven at the 37, Todd Graham probably would have punted.
Moreover, let’s say UCLA’s defense failed to stop Arizona State on that first series of downs. Had that been the case (under a scenario which never materialized, of course), UCLA would have been out of timeouts, and ASU would have been able to drain the clock inside the 1:30 mark of regulation. Time was just as big a factor as the scoreboard margin. Mora had to realize that his defense — no matter what — was going to need to stop ASU on the first series of downs once the Sun Devils got the ball back. That he gave ASU two free points before giving the ball back makes no sense.
This leads us to the mistake Mora made in addition to giving ASU two points… and creating the eight-point deficit which put UCLA in a greater bind.
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When UCLA took the safety, the thought emerged that the Bruins were setting up an onside kick by choosing the free-kick option after a safety — you can do that, of course. Sure enough, UCLA did choose the free-kick option instead of a punt. In that moment, the decision by Mora suddenly made sense. It was the only way his move made sense, but giving his team a chance to recover an onside kick was actually a clever way of gaming the situation.
There was just one problem: UCLA kicked the free kick deep. There was no onside kick. Mora gave ASU two points, forcing his own team to have to convert a 2-point try just to tie… and that’s if UCLA ever got the ball back down by eight… which didn’t happen. (ASU scored to go up by 15.) Mora then compounded his error by not ordering an onside kick.
Mora is just the latest football coach to fall victim to this common shortcoming among all coaches: Despite trailing late in a game and therefore not having the leverage with which to make preferable or desirable decisions, Mora acted as though he had all the opportunities in the world to play a “normal” game. In other words, Mora gave up the ball and asked his defense to get a stop, the kinds of things you do in a regular game situation. In an endgame situation, however, you often don’t have the luxury of being able to prematurely surrender possession (on fourth down) or allow the opposing offense to either score or drain your timeout supply (or both). Mora, though, felt this was perfectly reasonable.
He got smoked.
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One last point on this: If you take a safety when down by five, the opposing team’s lead becomes seven. That’s valuable for the opposing team, but at least you don’t have to score a 2-point conversion to tie. What Mora did with this safety was that he gave ASU an extra degree of leverage, given that 2-point conversions are missed more than they’re successfully converted.
Jim Mora, Jr. needs to brush up on his intentional safety situations. He clearly whiffed — in implementation, subsequent free-kick follow-through, the works — on Saturday against Arizona State.
