Seven and one. Say it out loud and it sounds like a season worth celebrating. Look at the tape and it sounds like an accusation.
Because here’s what a 7-1 record does to a program like Miami: it buys everybody cover. It buys the play-caller cover. It buys the offensive line cover. And most of all, it buys cover for the thing that’s actually been eating at this team all fall — the guys who deserve snaps aren’t consistently getting them, and the guys who’ve earned expanded roles keep getting handed narrow ones instead.
Corey Couch and the Package Problem
Start with Corey Couch, because Couch is the cleanest example of the disease. Against Virginia Tech he was the best player on the field — ball skills, football IQ, effort on special teams, the whole package. He got real snaps for essentially the first time and immediately looked like a guy who should have been getting them in September.
And what’s the reward? A nickel role. A package. A situational job.
That’s the part that should bother you more than any single play call. Not that the staff didn’t know Couch was good — they clearly did, or he wouldn’t have been on the field at all. It’s that the coaching instinct at Miami keeps defaulting to let’s find him a package instead of let’s find him a starting job. Those are two completely different philosophies. One treats a young player as a specialist you deploy. The other treats him as a building block you commit to. Programs that win big do the second thing. Programs that stay stuck at seven wins do the first.
Al Blaze getting the earlier reps wasn’t a crime. Coaches trust what they’ve seen in practice, and there’s a real case for veterans in a season this chaotic. But once the tape says the freshman-energy guy is the better football player, the depth chart is supposed to move. Fast. If it takes eight games to make that adjustment, the problem isn’t evaluation — it’s institutional slowness.
Two Tight Ends Is Not a Trick Play
Same disease, different position group. Will Mallory and Brevin Jordan combined for four catches against Virginia Tech. Four. Between two tight ends who, on talent, are among the most dangerous mismatch pieces on the entire roster.
The fix isn’t complicated and it isn’t novel. Put them on the field together. Not as a gimmick, not as a short-yardage look, but as a base personnel grouping you run twenty-five snaps a game out of. Two-tight-end sets are the most honest cheat code in college football: they force the defense to declare, they make the run game heavier without subbing, and they give a quarterback under pressure two immediate outlets who can win against linebackers.
Miami keeps treating that grouping like a special occasion. Which means the defense gets to treat it like a tell.
The Line Is the Root, Not the Symptom
You can’t have this conversation honestly without going through the interior of the offensive line, because that’s where a lot of the play-calling criticism actually terminates. When people say the offense looks vanilla and stagnant, some of that is genuine coordinator conservatism — but a lot of it is a play-caller trying to hide a problem he can’t fix on a Saturday.
D’Eriq King has not had time to throw. That’s not a subjective read; it’s the whole texture of the offense. When the pocket collapses from the inside, the deep concepts die before they develop, the quarterback’s eyes drop, and the call sheet shrinks to whatever can be executed in 2.2 seconds. That’s how you end up with an offense that looks scared even when the record says it shouldn’t be.
So the screen game isn’t a stylistic preference. It’s a survival mechanism. More screens, more motion, more designed movement of the pocket — those are the tools you use when the interior can’t hold up straight. Miami has used them sparingly. That’s a coaching choice, and it’s a bad one, because the alternative has been asking five guys to win a fight they’re currently losing.
The Fake Field Goal Tells You Everything
And then there’s the fake field goal in the red zone, which I’d argue is the single most revealing moment of the whole afternoon — more revealing than any play that actually worked.
Think about what a red-zone fake represents philosophically. You are inside scoring range. You have the personnel advantage. You have a quarterback who’s a proven playmaker. And instead of trusting your football team to execute football, you reach into the bag for a trick. That’s not aggression. Aggression is going for it on fourth down and running your best play. A fake field goal in the red zone is the opposite — it’s a coach who doesn’t believe his base offense can win the moment, so he tries to steal points instead of earning them.
Just play football. That’s not a hot take, that’s the whole complaint distilled. When your identity is unclear, you start reaching for gadgets. When your identity is clear, you line up and dare people.
The Defense Is Building Something Real
The one place the arrow is genuinely pointing up: the front. Jaelan Phillips finally looked like the version of himself the hype promised, and the reason matters — Jestor Cervera was commanding double teams, which is what creates the one-on-one Phillips can actually win. That’s not luck. That’s a defensive line functioning as a unit, where the guy who doesn’t get the stat makes the guy who does.
Sam Brooks earning real trust in the linebacker room is the other quiet win. Meanwhile DJ Ivey has struggled, which loops right back to the central argument: if the best corner on the roster is the young guy who just broke through, the depth chart should say so. Not the package sheet. The depth chart.
So Is Manny the Guy?
Here’s my honest position: that question is being asked a year too early and about the wrong thing.
Manny Diaz has this team at 7-1 in a season where half of college football has been held together with duct tape and negative tests. That’s real. What’s also real is that the second-year evidence keeps pointing toward a head coach who still thinks like a coordinator — obsessed with situational packages, slow to promote on merit, willing to reach for a gadget instead of committing to an identity.
The good news is that’s a fixable flaw, not a fatal one. The COVID pause pushing the next kickoff all the way to December 5th against Wake Forest is, weirdly, the best gift this staff could have received. Two weeks with no opponent is two weeks to rebuild a depth chart on merit, to install a real two-tight-end package, and to decide what this offense actually wants to be.
If Miami comes out of that layoff with Couch starting, Mallory and Jordan on the field together, and a screen game that gives King a breath — then Manny showed he can adapt, and that’s most of the answer right there. If they come back running the exact same thing? Then 7-1 was never the story. It was the disguise.
This take grew out of this week’s U Talk Live conversation, where the crew went back and forth on Couch, the tight ends, and whether Diaz has grown into the job — worth your time if you want the full unfiltered version.
This take grew out of the November 17, 2020 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-61