STORRS – Every week, regardless of the weekend’s result, the UConn football team is able to stay consistent in preparation by following a routine that coach Jim Mora has used and altered for almost 30 years. It stems from Mora’s time coaching with the San Francisco 49ers in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
The routine went with him to the Atlanta Falcons and the Seattle Seahawks as a head coach, and then to UCLA. It has been tweaked over the years, but for the most part, it’s stayed consistent.
“I’ve been around routine-oriented people. You talk to a guy like Bill Walsh – and unfortunately we can’t anymore, may he rest in peace – and it was everything… We always used to talk about the ’49er Way.’ People call it the ‘West Coast Offense’, it was more the ’49er Way,”’ Mora said Tuesday, with his UConn team just one victory away from its first winning season in 14 years (2010).
“This is the way we do things. Every pregame meal, every night before a game, you walk down the serving line and its the exact same foods prepared the exact same way at the exact same time. The tables are set up the exact same way, people sit on the bus the exact same way… Some people might think it’s psychotic, to us it’s being mentally prepared and being physically prepared and emotionally prepared. That comes from routine. Eliminating uncertainty.”
Mora’s personal pregame routine includes running the stadium stairs, a tradition that began when he was coaching the San Diego Chargers in 1984, he says. That routine has changed a little as he, now 62 years old, has gotten older.
“Used to be four laps, start with the same song right when I came out of the tunnel, going in the same direction, then it was 16 110s, those have been gone for about 10 years, I was afraid I was gonna tear an Achilles, and then I would run stadium stairs,” he said. “I’ve been doing that forever and it gets a little nostalgic for me now because my good friend Greg Knapp, who got hit by a car and was killed a few years ago, he was the quarterbacks coach of the Jets, we worked together forever, rode together every day. That’s what we did together for probably 15 years before every game. So it also gives me a chance to think about Knapper when I’m running those stairs.”
The routine, apart from Mora’s stairs, isn’t completely unique to the Huskies’ program. But players have been so ingrained in this slightly altered version of the 49er Way that they may not even realize it – “Now that you say that, that is true,” defensive lineman Jelani Stafford said, thinking back to meals he’s had before games for the last three seasons.
The last 48 hours before a game, Mora says, are the most important to stay “as dead on your routine as you possibly can.”
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This week, when Mora is planning the routine, he will begin with the 2:30 p.m. kickoff time Saturday and work backward. The only difference from recent weeks will be the addition of a two and a half hour flight to Birmingham, Alabama, for the game against UAB. It will be UConn’s first road trip in seven weeks and an opportunity for the team’s first win as a visitor this season.
“Other than (the flight), the timing of what we do leading up to the game in that last 48 hours is exactly the same,” Mora said. “It’s like I told the team, the field is 120 yards long and (53.3 yards) wide, the numbers are where they are on every field. We just have to be able to focus on our execution between the lines and not worry about where we’re playing, or what time we’re playing, or what the surface is or any of those things. Just go out and execute. Have kind of a road warrior mentality.
“It’s us against everybody in the stadium, and everybody that doubts us.”
