Mora: "There's gonna be a lot of changes around here"

UConn's head coach laid out an ambitious transfer recruiting plan and may also make some staff changes this offseason.

UConn football sits at 1-9 going into the final two weeks of the season. While this record is surely a disappointment for the team and its fans, head coach Jim Mora has said progress is being made.

“This program’s grown this year. The record doesn't reflect it, but it's a much better football team,” he said in Tuesday’s weekly press conference.

Mora said he’s also planning for “a lot of changes” this offseason, involving the roster and also perhaps his coaching staff, though he would not confirm the latter.

“We plan on being very, very, very aggressive in the transfer portal,” Mora said before the James Madison game. “We're done recruiting high school athletes for this year. We've got I think 10 or 11 commits and we're not after any more.

“Now, it's all about the portal.”

He added that they’re looking to bring in “about 12 to 14 impact players” via transfer.

Mora also mentioned that junior college players will be part of this building process. Because they can’t recruit enough quality high school football players, he shared that they’re mostly looking for experienced transfers.

“We don't have the ability right now to recruit high school kids in our footprint and come in here and be impact players immediately,” Mora explained. “I want to win and I want to win now, so we're going to attack the portal and we're going to attack junior college and bring players in here that have done it at a higher level.”

It appears that a lot of junior college defensive backs have been announcing offers from UConn, to give some hint of where things are heading.

With FCS Sacred Heart and fellow FBS Independent UMass left on the schedule, UConn will be going up against two regional peers that it should beat. We’ll probably also start to see more of this team’s promising underclassmen on the field across these last two games.

Mora mentioned defensive lineman Tim Passmore, linebacker Langston Hardy, and wide receivers Zack Drawdy and Jackson Harper as younger guys who saw action against Tennessee. Going forward, we can expect to see more of them and others like them as the Huskies look to close their season on a positive note.