Kansas State and UCLA meet in a bowl for the first time since a late-gate dustup led to Jim Mora literally logging offline

Kansas State and UCLA won’t be meeting for the first time in the Cactus Bowl. In fact, the last time the teams faced, we got one of the most interesting moments of Bill Snyder’s coaching career.

Although Snyder is the venerable statesman of college football, his team pulled a faux pas late in the 2015 Alamo Bowl against the Bruins. It got then-UCLA coach Jim Mora a little upset and set us up on a weird social media journey that only college football can produce.

UCLA won, 40-35. It featured a wildly entertaining second half and a late touchdown by the Wildcats to make it a one-score game. The Wildcats failed to recover the onside kick, and UCLA only had to kneel on the ball and close out the game’s final 80 seconds.

First and second downs went normally. But as UCLA began to celebrate on the sideline, the refs called the Bruins back out onto the field because Kansas State had used its last timeout to stop the clock and force another play. With less than 40 seconds on the clock, UCLA shouldn’t have had to run another play.

ESPN even assumed it was over and fired off a graphic congratulating UCLA:

Those are Kansas State defenders diving both under and over UCLA’s offensive line to try and force a fumble.

Some consider this one of the most bush league things in football. There’s an informal code to the kneel-down play in most situations. The QB receives the snap and kneels, and we all go about our business.

Do you play all the way to the final whistle and keep actively trying to win? Or do you just play it cool?

That can lead teams to get into trouble. That’s what happened when Greg Schiano’s Tampa Bay Bucs dive-bombed kneel-downs in the NFL. Offensive linemen aren’t expecting contact. It can lead to injuries because players aren’t protecting themselves and don’t realize that defenders are coming at them full bore. Schiano’s tactics prompted the Eagles to kneel out of the shotgun a few weeks later:

Kansas State’s players apparently weren’t freelancing. UCLA tackle Caleb Benenoch tweeted that K-State players said on the field they didn’t want to run the kneel-down interference:

Mora initially ripped out of the handshake with Snyder, and you can tell Snyder was a bit surprised at how brief it was:

And then they had a bit more dialogue. He pantomimes what he was really upset about, and it’s clearly the player going over the top of the line:

Take earlier this season, for instance, when he went on a mini rant when ESPN’s Brock Huard questioned Josh Rosen’s draft stock.

So Mora was a tad prickly in the postgame Alamo Bowl press conference:

After the game, Mora tweeted in the most passive aggressive way possible:

Then he deleted his Twitter account and resurfaced with a new private account the next day:

Mora appeared to bring back the deleted public Twitter account later that week, but there was a catch that manifested itself later that month: He was hacked (maybe):

The admission of the hacking came after the account tweeted out a graphic of a recruit.

These days, the account is “suspended,” but it won’t be coming back because Mora is no longer in Westwood.

Snyder outlasting Mora wasn’t something we expected, particularly after the Bruins had two consecutive 10-win seasons. Interim coach Jedd Fisch will coach the Bruins in the bowl, then step aside for Chip Kelly.

The enduring lessons of all this: