The Rundown Take
New DC, New Verdict? U Talk Breaks Down Lance Guidry Coach by Coach
After a technical delay pushed the Friday night start back, Devin and Larry Frank Jr. kicked off a new series: breaking down every incoming Miami assistant one at a time, starting with new defensive coordinator Lance Guidry. The premise — stop reacting to hype and actually study who Mario Cristobal hired, position by position, and give Kane Nation a chance to vent their own message to the new staff.
Key Takeaways
- Larry Frank walks the full Guidry résumé: 51, Welsh, Louisiana, played DB at McNeese State, stops at Miami (Ohio), Western Kentucky, Southeastern Louisiana, Florida Atlantic, and most recently DC/safeties coach at Marshall in 2021-22, where the defense ranked top ten nationally on a 9-4 team.
- The one red flag the panel keeps circling back to: Guidry has never coached at the Power Five level.
- Larry Frank runs a full teaching breakdown of the 4-2-5 defense itself — what it's designed to do, why Miami's personnel (Kam Kinchens, Bobby Washington, James Williams, Jaden Wayne, Caleb Spencer) actually fits it better than it did under Kevin Steele.
- Longtime caller and 22-year youth football coach J Blaze delivers a full message to Guidry: mix your coverage and pressure calls, don't try to do both at once, and be patient teaching a young roster.
- Caller Chris Kane's message is about communication: keep the scheme simple enough that players can talk on the field, something he says was missing almost entirely last season.
Reading the Résumé
Larry Frank landed hardest on the Marshall tape: complex blitz packages, aggressive down-and-distance calls, and a coach who gets in players' faces rather than standing on the sideline with his arms folded — the opposite, in Larry Frank's telling, of what Miami had the last few years. The panel weighed that against the obvious gap: Guidry has coached Sun Belt and Group of Five competition, not the schedule he's walking into now.
Breaking Down the 4-2-5
Rather than just calling the scheme by name, Larry Frank walked through what a 4-2-5 is built to do — swap a traditional linebacker spot for a fifth defensive back to match tempo offenses, use hybrid safety/linebacker types to fill gaps and set the edge, and generate complex blitz angles. He argued Miami finally has the personnel to run it as drawn up, pointing to Kam Kinchens' versatility, and drew a pointed contrast with the Manny Diaz-era defense, which he said looked good for exactly one year before falling apart because the scheme was never really Diaz's own.
Culture Check
Caller Chris Kane pushed the conversation past scheme into accountability, arguing some players on last year's roster simply couldn't handle hard coaching and that the ones who left weren't meant to be there. He and the panel pointed to Tyler Van Dyke's offseason as the standard — a quarterback who didn't need to fly in from Connecticut for voluntary work but did it anyway. The rundown closed with a receiver-room note crediting new position coach Kevin Beard for the current group, and a shoutout to Akheem Mesidor as a defensive-end name to watch.
"He knows how to run his defense. Not like Manny — Manny just put that diva together... this coach come in, he already know how to run the four-two-five, because that's his defense."
Larry Frank closed the show with his own message to Guidry: forget perfecting the playbook this spring, focus on establishing an identity and identifying who the defensive leaders will be. The panel promised to keep the position-by-position series going next week with new defensive line coach Jason Taylor.