Jim Mora weighed-in on the big controversy over the weekend involving Jim McElwain’s sideline tirade against one of his players.
McElwain, the first-year Florida coach, ripped running back Kelvin Taylor for committing a penalty by doing a throat slash gesture. McElwain went completely overboard and said he was “not proud” of it.
“I’m not proud about it, and neither is my mother,” McElwain said Monday via The Miami Herald. “She’s 94 years old and I got an earful from her, too. Rightfully so.”
Though Mora did not excuse McElwain’s behavior, he tried to place it in proper context.
“The emotion and passion of being on the sidelines is no like anything else in the world,” Mora said in an interview with Rich Eisen Tuesday. “It’s unbelievably intense, it’s unbelievably emotional, the tension is incredible, and sometimes things like that happen. It’s unfortunate that it happens, but it does. It happens in sports all the time in every game. What’s happening now is that everything is happening on video and now audio, and it makes someone look like less than their best self.
“My philosophy is I try not to do that during a game,” said Mora.
He then said disputed the notion that blowups are less frequent than they used to be.
“I think we’ve become so politically correct as a society that people think that the climate has changed. It hasn’t changed. I think coaches have become much more cognizant of being fair and treating these young men with respect than they ever have in the past, and one incident caught on tape kind of destroys that. I feel badly for the coach and I feel badly for the player and I hope we can all move past that.”
Mora was asked to compare how things are now to the past when his father, who was a Marine, coached.
“I still think it’s commonplace. I still think it’s common. I think it happens more than we would ever know,” he said.
Mora, who went viral last year for a sideline argument with his defensive coordinator, also said that given the environment of sports with heightened pressure, emotions and competition, things are said that would not be acceptable in the real world. He knows better than most people how this works.
Here is Mora’s interview with Eisen:
