Pac-12 hot seat: Pressure mounts for Rich Rodriguez, Todd Graham, Jim Mora

In an alternate universe, Mike Bellotti, June Jones and Kevin Sumlin would have coached at Arizona, Arizona State and UCLA. And, given the fickle nature of college football, maybe they would’ve already been fired.

It almost happened, for real.

The Pac-12 coaching shuffle began back in 2012, when Arizona fired Mike Stoops midseason. Arizona State went 6-7 and fired Dennis Erickson. UCLA won the Pac-12 South, but canned Rick Neuheisel anyway.

The three schools went looking for coaches at roughly same time. Arizona was linked to Bellotti, the former Oregon coach. ASU offered its job to SMU’s June Jones before rescinding it. UCLA initially targeted Sumlin, then at Houston, before turning their attention to Boise State’s Chris Petersen. The Bruins struck out with both candidates.

College football fans know what happened next. Arizona hired Rich Rodriguez, who hadn’t coached in a year after a tumultuous three-year run at Michigan. ASU poached Todd Graham from Pittsburgh after just one season. And UCLA eventually picked Jim Mora, a former NFL boss with no college head coaching experience.

All three were initially thought to be home run hires. Mora won the Pac-12 South in his first season, and Graham’s Sun Devils took the division a year later. RichRod and Arizona shocked the conference in 2014, capturing the Pac-12 South with a last-day-of-the-season win over Arizona State and a Stanford upset of UCLA.

Now it’s 2017, and all three coaches are linked again. A Las Vegas sportsbook has pegged Mora (9-to-1 odds) Graham and Rodriguez (15-1) as the three coaches most likely to be fired this season. Perhaps, the thinking goes, it’s just time for a change. Consider: Between December 2011 and January 2012, 27 schools hired new coaches. Only eight of those coaches remain — and of those eight, Rodriguez (10-15), Graham (11-14) and Mora (12-13) have the three worst records over the last two seasons.

Here’s a year-by-year look at how Rodriguez, Graham and Mora went from hotshot hires to the hot seat:

Preseason hype

Rodriguez: “I wanted to jump into someplace that I thought could be special and you could build a championship program. … I think it’s going to be great to compete for championships each and every year, and we can do that at U of A.”

Graham: “We’re looking forward to this season, our program, we’re proud to be here and to have the goal and expectations of restoring this program and winning championships. We have won Pac‑10 championships, we have won Rose Bowls, and that’s what our program is going to be about.”

Mora: “We look forward to an exciting season where hopefully every game we get better, (we’re) playing our best football at the end of the year and (doing) things that make UCLA fans proud.”

Final Pac-12 South standings

1. UCLA: 9-5, 6-3 Pac-12 (lost Pac-12 championship game to Stanford)

3. ASU: 8-5, 5-4 Pac-12

4. Arizona: 8-5, 4-5 Pac-12

Preseason hype

Rodriguez: “Excited to go into the second season certainly as a coaching staff making the transition. Thought we learned a lot about our team, about what we need to do moving forward, got a great group of young men in our program.”

Graham: “There’s a lot of excitement around our football program this year. Last year we laid a great foundation … (this is) the best football team that I’ve ever coached and we have developed. This is a much more mature football team.”

Mora: “We made some progress last year, and I think these two guys would tell you we’re nowhere close to where we want to be. We have a vision, we’re headed in the right direction but we have challenges we have to overcome this year in order to become the team that we desire to be.”

Final Pac-12 South standings

1. ASU: 10-4, 8-1 Pac-12 (lost Pac-12 championship game to Stanford)

2. UCLA: 10-3, 6-3 Pac-12

4. Arizona: 8-5, 4-5 Pac-12

Preseason hype

Rodriguez: “We’re going into our third season at Arizona, and we are pretty excited about where we’re at and where we’re going.”

Graham: “Going into my third year at ASU coming off the Pac‑12 South championship last year, got a lot of confidence in this group. …This will be the best offensive football team that I’ve ever coached.”

Mora: “UCLA showed a tremendous commitment to me and they trusted me by hiring me. I love it there, and I don’t want to go anywhere. It’s home now. I want to see us build something special.”

Final Pac-12 South standings

1. Arizona: 10-4, 7-2 Pac-12 (lost Pac-12 championship game to Oregon)

2. UCLA: 10-3, 6-3 Pac-12

3. ASU: 10-3, 6-3 Pac-12

Preseason hype

Rodriguez: “We were picked fourth? Is that where we were picked last year? It is, right? Good, that’s a good sign. I’ve been in situations where we’ve been the league favorite to win and I’ve been in situations like last year or this year, where nobody predicts you’d win.”

Graham: “I’ve got a tremendous belief in this football team. It’s the best football team that we’ve had since we’ve been at Arizona State.”

Mora: “I think we’re a team that has potential. …We have to maintain focus, find that level of consistency that we have not been able to attain in the last three years. If we can do that, then we’ll have a chance.”

Final Pac-12 South standings

3. UCLA: 8-5, 5-4 Pac-12

4. ASU: 6-7, 4-5 Pac-12

5. Arizona: 7-6, 3-6 Pac-12

Preseason hype

Rodriguez: “It sounds like coachspeak, but hell, I don’t really know how good we’re going to be, I just know we weren’t really good last year, and we need to get better. The first person has got to take responsibility, that’s me.”

Graham: “Obviously we learned some lessons last year. The good news is we had put ourselves in position of having high expectations because we’d had back‑to‑back 10‑win seasons, and we lost a lot of close games is the reality of it, and we’ve got to win those close football games.”

Mora: “We’re coming off a season that was, in our estimation, a little bit disappointing to us, especially the way that it ended, and we’d like to make amends for that.”

Final Pac-12 South standings

4. ASU: 5-7, 2-7 Pac-12

5. UCLA: 4-8, 2-7 Pac-12

6. Arizona: 3-9, 1-8 Pac-12

Preseason hype

Rodriguez: “I don’t think you should bury your head in the sand and kind of pretend it wasn’t there. It was there. You’ve got to evaluate yourself, your staff, your program, and everything that you’re doing so you don’t go through it again.”

Graham: “We basically got knocked on our can. You can sit around and make every excuse for it. Nobody cares you had injuries. Nobody cares about any of that.”

Mora: “It’s hard. You’re not in this to do anything but try to have success. And every loss rips your guts out. The first thing you do is point your finger at yourself. You say: Where did I not do a good enough job and how are we going to learn from this?”

Preseason Pac-12 South media poll

3. UCLA

5. ASU

6. Arizona