Everybody wants to talk about the culture. Fine. The culture is real, the culture is loud, the culture is finally something you can point at on a practice video instead of squinting for. But culture doesn’t wrap up a running back in the open field on third-and-4. Culture doesn’t make a safety square his shoulders instead of leaving his feet and diving at air like he’s trying out for a highlight package that never airs.
Miami was the worst tackling defense in the Power Five last season. Sit with that sentence for a second. Not bottom five. Not “needs work.” The worst. In a conference where you play Duke and Virginia and Georgia Tech, Miami could not get a grown man to the ground. That is not a scheme problem, that is not a talent problem, and it is definitely not a “we need one more four-star” problem. That is a fundamentals problem, and fundamentals problems are the only kind of problem in football that is actually, genuinely, boringly fixable.
The least sexy fix in college football is the one Miami needs most
Here’s what nobody wants to hear: the single biggest jump this defense can make in 2022 has nothing to do with a five-star transfer or an exotic blitz package. It’s just tackling. Reps of it. Hundreds of them. Angles, leverage, wrapping, driving the feet, second man in. The stuff eighth-grade coaches yell about.
And that is reportedly exactly where Kevin Steele has planted his flag. Heavy, heavy emphasis on tackling. Not on installing forty-seven coverage checks in week one of spring. Not on scheming his way out of a fundamentals hole. On getting people on the ground.
If you’ve watched enough football, you know why that’s the right call and you also know why it’s rare. Coordinators love install. Install is where you look smart. Install is what you put on the whiteboard when the athletic director walks through. Tackling circuits are ugly, repetitive, and they don’t produce a single viral clip. A coordinator who spends spring hammering tackling is a coordinator who has decided he’d rather be right in November than impressive in March.
That’s a tell about the whole operation. You don’t fix the worst tackling defense in the Power Five by being clever. You fix it by being relentless about something unglamorous for about four months straight.
“The 11 best players play” is a threat, not a slogan
Steele’s other message — the 11 best players will be on the field, not the 11 with the most service time — sounds like the kind of thing every coach says in every spring press availability since the invention of the forward pass. It is not. Not here. Not at this program, at this moment.
Because seniority is how you end up with the worst tackling defense in the Power Five. Seniority is the quiet mechanism by which a guy who was good two years ago keeps taking reps from a guy who’s better right now. It’s how a depth chart calcifies. It’s comfortable for the staff, it’s comfortable for the veteran, and it’s absolutely lethal to a defense that needs its most willing hitters on the field regardless of what year they were signed.
If Steele actually enforces that — and “actually enforces” is the whole ballgame — the practical effect is that every rep in spring is an audition and every veteran has to re-earn a job he thought he owned. That is a much bigger deal than any single position battle. It changes what a Tuesday practice means to a fourth-year player. It’s the difference between competing and coasting, and coasting was the accusation that followed this program around for years.
The safety puzzle is a tackling puzzle
Which brings us to the most interesting structural idea floating around this defense: get James Williams, Avantae Williams and Cam Kitchens on the grass at the same time. Three safeties. One package. Possibly with a safety walked down into a linebacker-hybrid role.
People will pitch that as a coverage innovation. It isn’t, really. It’s a tackling solution dressed up as a coverage package.
Think about what a three-safety look actually buys you. It puts more rangy, closing-speed athletes in the second and third levels of the field — which is precisely where Miami’s tackling collapsed. A missed tackle at the line of scrimmage costs three yards. A missed tackle at the second level costs a first down. A missed tackle by the last man costs seven points. You cannot survive being bad at the deepest layer of the defense, and Miami was.
Walking a safety down into a hybrid linebacker spot is the interesting wrinkle, because that role is a tackling job first. You are asking a defensive back to fit runs, take on blocks, and finish in traffic — all the things that require exactly the technique Steele is reportedly grinding on. It’s a package that only works if the fundamentals work. Which means it’s also a package that tells you, honestly and immediately, whether the spring emphasis took. If those three are on the field together in September and Miami is still leaking yards after contact, you’ll know.
There’s also a roster logic to it that’s simple and good: when you have three players at one position who all deserve to play, the cheap answer is to rotate them and the smart answer is to build a package that plays all three. “The 11 best players play” isn’t just a promise about fairness. It’s a design constraint. If your three best defensive backs are all safeties, you go find a formation that lets them coexist.
The Hall of Famers in the building matter for one specific reason
Jason Taylor and Ed Reed on staff as Hall of Fame consultants makes for a great graphic. But the actual value isn’t nostalgia and it isn’t recruiting juice — it’s that both of those men are technicians at exactly the two spots where this defense bleeds.
Taylor’s whole career was hand usage, leverage, and getting off blocks. Reed’s whole career was angles, anticipation, and getting to the football. Neither of those is a motivational speech. Those are teachable, granular, position-specific skills. You put Ed Reed in front of a room of safeties who missed tackles in space last year and he can tell them, in about ninety seconds, why they missed — the angle they took, the depth of their eyes, the moment they committed. That’s not a legend visiting. That’s a coach.
The best-case version of this defense in 2022 is not a top-ten unit. Let’s be adults. The best-case version is a defense that tackles like an average Power Five team instead of the worst one. That alone is worth two or three wins. That alone flips a couple of games that got away late. And it doesn’t require a single miracle — just a coordinator willing to be boring about the right thing, a promise about playing time that actually gets kept, and a package that puts your best closers where the misses happened.
Fix the tackling and everything else on this roster starts looking a lot more like it’s supposed to look. Don’t fix it, and no amount of energy on a practice field is going to save a fourth quarter.
This take grew out of the March 12, 2022 episode of U Talk Live, where Devin and Larry Frank Jr. dug into the first week of spring practice and what Kevin Steele is building on that side of the ball.
This take grew out of the March 12, 2022 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-123