But let’s be serious for a minute. While Mora certainly has his football bonafides and has diligently been trying to improve the program for three years, what’s saving us is the gift of the transfer portal (and Mora’s skill at spotting the right players for our system). It’s what’s driving our resurgence this year and gives us a renewed confidence in the future. And hopefully, the confluence of greater success on the field brings us a larger infusion of “NIL money” which, as we all know, is critical to our ability to compete at the level we aspire to, and enables our entry into a P-4 conference.
That's the bottom line, existential necessity for UConn. Period, end of sentence.
So it’s pretty precious to hear all the vitriol being levied against Coach Prime. Imagine if Coach Prime had been hired here—bringing his two sons, Travis Hunter, and his promotional genius. The amount of exposure and TV relevance would have put this program on an entirely different level. The public would have developed a completely different impression of UConn’s football program. Money would have flowed, the stadium would be filled and raucous—and with our BBall success and Yormark’s dream of a Northeast presence for the conference, we would already be in the BIG 12
You can criticize Sanders all you want, Three of my grandkids went or currently go to Colorado Boulder, One was there before Coach Prime arrived but with him in his senior year. He had experienced the incredible transformation from losing seasons, a half empty stadium and a ho-hum attitude toward game days (sound familiar?) to pandemonium and incredible “must be there” excitement every weekend.
I like Mora, but I’d trade what we have for the Colorado experience in a heartbeat—and so would you. Time is getting shorter, the P-4 train is leaving and we must be on it. We have no other choice.
But reality is what it is. Yes, we all support what we seem to be creating here—and brighter days on the field should provide us with greater opportunity to survive. But acting like we’ve been lucky not to have had to suffer the circus and the antics of Coach Prime who is “unable to run a program” is laughable. It’s akin to the kid who, when not invited to the big party, says “I never wanted to go there anyway.”
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