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It's a great time to be Mike Riley. He's winning again, he buys his players In-and-Out after games, and he used the tag #BeaverJuice on Twitter without winking once. Already regarded as one of the nicest people in football, Mike Riley is again a nice person that nice things are happening to, and we can all roll in the warm fuzziness of that before engaging in the eternal "in-N-Out vs. Five Guys" debate.
Then there will be blood. You will clean it up because this is not your house and your mother does not live here. She only sleeps her on select weeknights, and rarely in the same bed because they call this a California King for a reason. There's an earthquake, and then your mom's thrown free to sleep on the couch while Your Highness hogs all the pillows.
That sound dickish, but Jim Mora feels what we're talking about here.
He berated an unassuming sports information assistant in front of the whole team for allowing a TV cameraman to stand in the wrong place.
In doing so, he gave the sports information assistant an earful of some very impressive obscenities, which of course the young players would expect from their demanding leader.
We're pulling so many handbrakes at once on this story. There is Mora, who were he not Jim Mora would be just another pro-style coach trying to bark people in line, but instead is Jim Mora, the same man who left every pro job he ever had with employees gleefully yelling out warning about the place where your body is cleaved, and how one should not let swinging doors hit you in said spot.
There is also this: the inherent distrust we have now of any media source utterly and completely turning on a coach, aka "The Freep Protocol" engaged by the Michigan press when Rich Rodriguez hit the skids in Ann Arbor. Rodriguez made it easy, but if Three and Out is even close to right, members of the media wanted Rodriguez's head long before it became patently obvious how much he was not working out at Michigan.
We are sure both are sort of true: Jim Mora is an asshole, albeit a productive one for the moment, and that the LA media is waiting to turn on him the instant UCLA's milkshake curdles. The only trick for Mora is to avoid Rodriguez's mistake: making it easy by a.) losing, or b.) walking facefirst into PR disaster. Considering people are already too happy to detail his locker room tirades to reporters from behind closed doors, he's going to have to justify it with winning.*
*Works for Alabama, terrified underlings and all.