Let’s get one thing straight before anybody gets comfortable: hiring three new offensive assistants is not a plan. It’s a receipt. It’s proof that somebody upstairs looked at 2019 and admitted out loud that what Miami was doing didn’t work. That’s the easy part. Admitting it is always the easy part. Every program in America that finished a season disappointed made a change this offseason. Very few of them turned that change into wins.
So while everybody’s out here arguing about which new name matters most — Rhett Lashlee running the offense, Rob Likens with the receivers, Garin Justice with the offensive line — I want to push the conversation somewhere less fun and a whole lot more honest. Because the truth is, none of those three men are going to be on the field on Saturday. They’re going to be on a headset. And the difference between a Miami team that finally looks like Miami again and one that repeats itself is not going to show up in a whiteboard install. It’s going to show up in the stuff nobody claps for.
The Problem Was Never The Playbook
Here’s what should keep everybody up at night. Look at what Miami actually had in that receiver room in 2019. Mike Harley pulled in 38 catches for 485 yards. Dee Wiggins had 20 for 335. Will Mallory, a tight end, added 16 for 293. Now sit with those numbers for a second. That is not a barren cupboard. That is not a program that can’t get playmakers to campus. Miami has never had a talent problem. Miami has a conversion problem — the gap between what walks through the door on signing day and what shows up on the stat sheet in November.
Those receiving numbers aren’t the numbers of a bad room. They’re the numbers of a good room being used badly. Harley’s yards-per-catch tells you he was getting the ball in tight windows underneath. Wiggins was the vertical guy and barely got 20 looks all year. Mallory is a matchup nightmare who touched the ball 16 times. When your three most productive pass-catchers combine for fewer than 75 receptions across an entire season, the issue isn’t that the receivers can’t get open. The issue is that the quarterback didn’t have time, the play didn’t have a plan, or the coaching didn’t have an answer.
Which is exactly why the offensive line conversation keeps swallowing every other conversation. You can bring in the sharpest spread mind in college football and it doesn’t matter if the pocket collapses in 2.1 seconds. A line that started mostly freshmen in 2019 was going to get bullied — that’s not an indictment of those kids, that’s physics. Eighteen-year-olds get pushed around by twenty-two-year-olds. That’s the entire sport.
But Here’s What Nobody Wants To Say About Year Two
Manny Diaz is a Miami guy. Everybody knows the story. Everybody wanted it to work immediately, and it didn’t, and now year two arrives carrying weight that year one never had to carry. Fair? Probably not. Real? Absolutely.
And the thing Manny actually owes this fan base isn’t a bowl game. It’s not a specific win total. It’s discipline you can see from the upper deck. Pre-snap penalties. Substitution mix-ups. Twelve men on the field. Guys jumping offsides on a hard count in the fourth quarter. Those are not talent failures — those are attention failures, and attention is coached. Every single one of those is a decision somebody made in a meeting room three weeks earlier about what the standard was going to be.
You cannot scheme your way out of undisciplined football. There is no formation that fixes a false start. There is no spread concept that prevents a delay of game. Those things get fixed in the mundane, unglamorous grind of a Tuesday practice where a coach stops the whole period, makes everybody run it back, and does it again the next day and the day after that until it stops happening. That’s the job. And it’s a job that has nothing to do with which coordinator you hired.
The Defense Deserves Better Than It Got
And let’s be clear about who’s been carrying water around here. Blake Baker enters year two as defensive coordinator with a unit that has largely done what it’s supposed to do — except when the secondary got carved up on big plays, which turned close games into ugly ones. That’s the fix that matters most on that side of the ball. Not a total teardown. Not a philosophy change. Just eliminating the one busted coverage that turns a third-and-nine stop into a 70-yard touchdown.
Because here’s the reality of how Miami wins games in 2020: the defense gets stops, the offense doesn’t waste them. That’s it. That’s the formula. Miami’s defense has generally been good enough to keep this team in almost anything. What it hasn’t had is an offense that can take a lead and then actually hold it — which comes back around to protecting the quarterback, which comes back around to the trenches, which comes back around to the fact that everything in football eventually comes back around to the trenches.
The Recruiting Board Says The Pipeline Isn’t The Problem Either
Look at who’s on the board right now. Ryan Rodriguez out of Columbus High, 6-3, 280, exactly the kind of offensive line body Miami has to start stacking every single year without exception. Malik Rutherford, a three-star speedster out of Champagnat Catholic. And Jason Marshall from Miami Palmetto, a five-star receiver sitting on a top seven that includes Alabama, Florida, Clemson and LSU.
Read that Marshall list again. A five-star from Miami Palmetto — a kid who can practically walk to campus — has Miami competing against the four bluest bloods in the sport for his signature. That’s the whole state of the program in one recruiting list. The talent is here. It’s always been here. It’s growing in the backyard. The question has never been whether Miami can find it. The question is whether Miami has built something worth choosing over the alternatives, and right now that’s an open question that only gets answered by what happens on the field.
What I Actually Need To See
Forget the hires for a second. Here’s my checklist, and it’s short.
One: fewer than four pre-snap penalties per game. Not zero — nobody’s perfect. But four is the number where you can tell a team is coached versus a team that’s guessing.
Two: Dee Wiggins doubling his target share. If the new offense is real, the vertical threat gets fed. Twenty catches for a player with his ability is malpractice.
Three: the offensive line group that was young last year looking noticeably bigger and meaner. Year-two jumps up front are the most predictable improvement in college football — if the strength program is doing its job.
Four: no more explosive plays given up in the secondary in the final six minutes of a one-score game. That’s the specific wound. Close it.
None of those four things require a genius. They require accountability, consistency, and a coaching staff that refuses to let the standard slip in February when nobody’s watching. New assistants can help. New schemes can help. But the season gets decided long before the schemes ever get called — it gets decided in whether this program finally decides that details are non-negotiable.
Miami doesn’t need a miracle. Miami needs to stop beating Miami.
This take grew out of a conversation on this week’s U Talk Sports Show, where Devin worked through the new-hire debate solo and a caller phoned in to back the offensive line as the swing factor for 2020. Go check out the full episode.
This take grew out of the March 14, 2020 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK – LIVE -23