All the way into the morning hours of Feb. 1, 2012, national signing day, Jordan Payton spoke on the phone with UCLA football Coach Jim Mora, discussing Payton's future.
About five and a half weeks earlier, when Mora had become UCLA's coach, he said the staff made a choice. They could accept a class hardly ranked in the top 50 nationally and focus their efforts on 2013. Or they could concentrate their resources on a last-minute surge.
"Our option, our only option was we were going to attack 2012," Mora said at the time. "We were going to go after players all over the country that we thought could come in here and help us win football games.