Who will be top dog?
Mora era begins with quarterback competition front and center
STORRS — Tyler Phommachanh handed the ball off to Brian Brewton during the Uconn football team’s first day of fall camp Friday. Brewton took it and sprinted to the left side, getting around the line and bursting down the sideline.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh,” quarterback Ty’quan Roberson said on the sideline, impressed with the sophomore running back’s speed.
Phommachanh later impressed coaches and teammates alike as he thread the needle on several occasions, keeping the ball away from the team’s improved secondary. He even made a defensive back fall after hitting his receiver in stride at the start of the day.
Roberson and Phommachanh are the front-runners in the quarterback competition that excites first-year head coach Jim Mora.
Roberson, who joined the Huskies last spring after transferring from Penn State, impressed and earned first-team reps to start the fall, but Phommachanh, who started three games for Uconn in 2021, was out recovering from the injury that ended his season.
The race is wide open. “I really like our five quarterbacks as people and as players. I think they have the right mindset, the right attitude, the right work ethic and I’m excited to see how that competition goes,” Mora said after practice. “My eyes had never seen Tyler (Phommachanh) play full speed. He caught my eye. I’m like, ‘Okay, I see why this kid was a starter last year.’ It made sense to me today, and I hadn’t seen that before. Now I want to see him continue.”
A loss at placekicker: The season is just under a month away, but Uconn has already suffered from some unfortunate news. Joe Mcfadden, the team’s placekicker who played all 12
the final minutes, but it was yet another moment to suggest that Bird just has this whole retirement thing figured out. Pitch perfect.
So maybe she’s not the player she was 15 years ago, but she’s going out in style, and with plenty of game left, the way most great athletes dream of going out. Few do.
“I feel very lucky that I’m able to go out on my own two feet,” Bird said. “Both figuratively and literally. I’ve seen other athletes who haven’t been able to do that and I’ve seen the heartache that it’s caused, so more than anything I feel lucky that I’m making the decision and not something else, specifically my body.”
Geno Auriemma watched from a sky box. Surrounded by former Huskies in the starting lineup, Breanna Stewart, Tina Charles and Gabby Williams, who had a sensational night, Bird scored eight points in the first quarter to help Seattle build a 10-point lead. The lead disappeared when she went to the bench, but the Storm surged back when she returned, and so it went.
“She plays the game with her mind,” Quinn said. “She’s the ultimate leader. She’s a coach on the floor. And there are times she can still shoot very efficiently and effectively. There are numerous aspects of her game that are still very potent.”
Bird is playing out this transitional period, with one eye on a glorious past in the game and the other on the future. Among the gifts the Sun’s Jen Rizzotti and Curt Miller presented were a bottle of wine, 2002 vintage to mark the year she started in Seattle, and books curated from her sister Jennifer’s store, Athena Books in Greenwich.
“She tried to surprise me, but she had to tell me,” Bird said. “But the books, that was a surprise. My sister opened up a bookstore and it’s a passion project, but it’s like a family business now and we’re all really proud of her.”
On the night she played in Connecticut for the last time, her own passion project was revealed. Bird joined Eli Manning in making a sizable investment, a $40 million valuation, in the Gotham Football Club in the National Women’s Soccer League.
“My next life, huh?” Bird said. “I believe in women’s sports, I believe in women’s soccer. I think there’s a tremendous amount of growth to be had in the investment aspect of women’s sports, I’ve been saying that a long time, and now it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. Soccer and basketball were my two first loves.”
Bird got her first standing ovation at 6:57 p.m., when she came out for warmups. When the gifts were presented, she held the wine bottle high and blew a kiss to the crowd before joining her teammates in the layup line.
The crowd responded to her every entrance and exit, because it’s this way here: Uconn may be only a small stretch in the timeline of a long, consequential career, in Bird’s case from age 17 to 21, but once you’ve worn that uniform, the love affair never ends.
“I feel like they’ve watched me my whole career,” Bird said. “A lot of times, as a Uconn player, you feel like the fans look at us as family and they stay with us our entire career. It’s something I treasure, that I’ve always really enjoyed when I came back here. So tonight is a perfect way to end that.”