By Ryan Barry
NEFJ Staff

UConn head coach Jim Mora took to the podium for his usual Tuesday press conference to discuss the Huskies’ 31-24 loss to Syracuse as well as the upcoming road match-up against the UMass Minutemen on Saturday afternoon to close out the regular season.

A win will give UConn eight wins ahead of a second bowl appearance in three years.Here’s everything Mora had to say…

Mora with his opening thoughts on UMass

“We have a lot of respect for this team. You watch them play good football. They’re physical up front. They’ve got two quarterbacks that they’re playing right now and they’re both making plays. They use them interchangeably. They got a couple really good backs, a good set of receivers and move the ball well. Defensively they do a lot of different things. You see a lot of variations out of them, they play hard, and they’re physical up front. I think they’re good on the back end and they’re really solid on special teams, so I think they caught our attention. We have to have a great week of preparation in order to go up there and give ourselves a chance to compete for a win.

Mora on how he keeps the team focused on a holiday week

“It’s easy, they don’t have school, so that eliminates the distraction. There’s nowhere for us to go Thursday except here to practice. It’s a normal schedule, and what we’ll do after practice is have a little family holiday feast, a thanksgiving feast, so for us it’s just business as usual. All of that doesn’t affect us, we just stay on our normal routine.”

Mora on whether or not it’s nice to have a road game that’s closer to home

“I don’t care really, you know, honestly. I’d rather be playing at Rentschler, you know? It’s just up the road so it is easier but I don’t know, I guess I don’t really care. I just want to get to the stadium and play wherever and whenever.”

Mora on last week’s measuring stick loss to Syracuse and what it meant for the team

“Well, we played with incredible effort. We gave ourselves a chance to win at the end which is always the objective, especially when you’re playing an outstanding team like Syracuse who is sitting here at 8-3. I would say as a program we’re making progress. We’ve played three ACC teams to a total of 15 points and had a chance at the end of all of them to win, but the objective of them is to win, not to come close, and we’re not about coming close. Particularly the last week, we played hard, we competed against an outstanding football team in their stadium in a hostile environment. We handled it well. We’ve just got to find a way as a program to continue to close the gap on those types of teams. That’s continuing to develop the players we have here while adding talent to this team which is going to be very important for us this year because we’re losing a lot of really good players. (We’ll) continue to put our players in the position to make plays, coach them up, be demanding, be demanding of ourselves as coaches in creativity and detail. Just never becoming satisfied with being close. You just cannot let that seep into your culture. “Well we were close, well we played them close, well we coulda, woulda, shoulda.” You know, that’s all BS. The objective is to win the football game and that’s what drives me crazy when you’re ultracompetitive. Losing, it tears your soul apart, it really does. You recognize that you’re closing the gap, but that just never (shakes his head and fades out in frustration). If I ever accept that as being okay then I will say “peace, love, I’m gone.””

Mora on if he could reflect what the schedule was like when with a Power Four school

“I cannot, because I’m thinking about UMass. You guys can think about all of that. If I don’t think about UMass then I am doing a disservice to everyone in this program. So no, I cannot. After this season, give me a couple of days to think about it and recover, reflect, and then I can answer that question to the fullest extent possible. No disrespect, but I cannot do that now, I am not capable of that. I don’t know a coach that is capable of that. I do not mean to be disrespectful to your question. I acknowledge your question but I’m just being honest, no, I cannot do that at this time. I apologize.”

Mora on the quarterback situation

“We will have one out there at kickoff! They both worked well today. It’s kind of like every position. I know everyone focuses on the quarterback and that’s the guy that’s the trigger man, the guy that takes the snap on every play. You go into every game with the thought of who can give us the best chance to win in this game at every position and that it’s always open competition. It’s that way again, and as I’ve said all along I feel really fortunate I have two guys that have gone out and shown they can win games for us. When we get to Saturday we’ll be locked in to who it’s going to be and we’ll go out and support the heck out of that guy.”

Mora on what would define a good bowl game, and if it’s the opponent, where they might go, the date, or whether it’s close to New Years

“That’s a really hard question because the bowls are so different now than it was when I was growing up. We all knew the pecking order of bowls, and now they have all these different names. I don’t even know, besides the five big ones, where they rank, so that’s a hard question to answer. I would love to play a prominent opponent that we can measure ourselves against, I think that’d be great. Right now, we just have to focus on beating a really good UMass team so that maybe we are more attractive to people. We haven’t talked about a bowl game since we won six games, and really at that point I told them we were bowl eligible, but we really weren’t that sure if we were bowl bound. We haven’t given out the t-shirts and all that stuff like other people do because we don’t know anything. We’re an independent, we’re not guaranteed anything, so we just have to go out and like I said, just kind of focus on playing really well this week so maybe we have more options.”

Mora on what next week will look like after the regular season and finding out what their bowl plans would look like

“I have no idea, I’ll decide on Sunday what next week looks like. I’ve said this a million times and I know you think I’m a psycho, but my world ends Saturday when we walk off the field, that’s as far as I think ahead, that’s really about it. I have no clue, I don’t even know, like I had to look at the calendar to realize that Sunday was December 1st.”