Let’s get the easy part out of the way: the Canes won. In the 2025 season, in a rivalry game against Florida, with a defense on the other side that is legitimately, verifiably good — Miami came out on the right end of it. That is the number that goes in the book, and nobody hands it back at the end of the year because the box score wasn’t pretty enough.
But there’s a debate rolling around Canes circles right now that deserves better than a shrug, and it’s this: did Miami leave three touchdowns out there against the Gators, or did Florida’s defense simply take them? Because those are two completely different diagnoses, and they lead to two completely different Novembers.
The Difference Between “We Got Stopped” and “We Stopped Ourselves”
Here’s why this argument matters more than it looks. If Florida’s defense is the reason Miami’s drives died, then the fix is talent and matchups — you go recruit, you go develop, and you accept that some Saturdays a good front seven eats. That’s a fine answer. It’s also a passive one.
If, instead, the drives died because of play calling that got conservative at the exact moment it needed to get greedy, and because of pre-snap penalties that turned first-and-10 into first-and-15 three separate times, then the fix is Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. It’s a walkthrough and a snap count and a whiteboard. That’s an active answer, and it’s the one you’d rather have, because it means the ceiling is still up there waiting.
I lean hard toward the second read, and here’s the logic: you cannot simultaneously argue that Miami had 47 points of realistic offense available and that the defense was the problem. Those two claims cancel each other out. If the yardage was there — if the explosive plays were sitting on the field waiting to be picked up — then the unit across from you was not the obstacle. The obstacle was in the huddle, or on the headset, or standing on the left side of the offensive line moving before the ball did.
The False Start Is Not a Small Thing
I want to spend a minute here because I think fans underrate this and coaches never do. A false start is the single most self-inflicted play in football. Nobody blocked you into it. Nobody disguised a coverage that confused you. You moved. In a road-atmosphere rivalry game, with crowd noise doing exactly what crowd noise is designed to do, an offensive lineman jumping is a communication failure and a preparation failure stacked on top of each other.
And it compounds. First-and-15 is a fundamentally different down than first-and-10. It kills your two-play sequencing. It takes the run-pass balance out of the play caller’s hands and hands it to the defensive coordinator, who now knows you have to throw. A defense as good as Florida’s, given that information for free, three times? That’s not a defense beating you. That’s a defense being handed a cheat sheet.
Brock Brockermeyer is going to be fine — this is a fixable, coachable, entirely correctable thing, and I’d bet good money it looks different in a month. But it’s the kind of thing that beats you in a playoff game if it’s still around in December, and Miami is a team with playoff-game aspirations in the 2025 season. So it gets named now, out loud, while there’s still runway.
The Play Calling Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Here’s the uncomfortable one. When an offense that should score 40-plus doesn’t, the fan instinct is to blame execution — a drop, a missed block, a bad read. Sometimes that’s right. But sometimes the calls themselves were the problem, and that’s harder to see from the couch because you don’t know what wasn’t called.
What you can see is tendency. When Miami got into scoring range and got conservative — when the sequencing went run, run, low-percentage third down — that’s a choice, and against a defense that is good specifically at taking away the safe stuff, it’s a choice that plays into their hands. Good defenses don’t beat you on the plays where you’re aggressive. They beat you on the plays where you’re trying not to lose. Florida’s group is built to punish caution.
The counter-argument is real, and I’ll give it its due: in a rivalry road game, ball security is currency. You don’t want to trade a field goal for a turnover trying to be a hero. Fine. But there’s a version of aggressive that isn’t reckless, and Miami has the personnel to play in it. That’s the whole point of having weapons — you’re supposed to make the defense cover them.
What This Actually Tells Us About the Rest of 2025
Now here’s the optimistic turn, because this column isn’t a funeral. A team that wins a hard rivalry game while playing below its own standard is in a genuinely enviable position. The floor is high enough to survive an off day against real competition. That is the single most predictive quality a contender can have. Teams that need everything to go right don’t play in January.
The correction list is short and it’s all internal: clean up the pre-snap operation, trust the aggressive call in scoring range, and stop treating a good defense as a reason to shrink. None of that requires a transfer portal move or a scheme overhaul. It requires reps and conviction.
And the schedule ahead is going to test whether that correction actually happened, because there’s a version of this season where Miami and Florida State both arrive in Tallahassee undefeated and everybody in this state stops breathing for three hours. That’s the game everyone wants — a top-five matchup with the whole thing on the line. But you don’t get to that game by winning ugly forever. Eventually the margin runs out.
The Standard Is the Standard
The thing about being Miami is that the bar was set by people who are still alive to remind you where it was. This program’s identity was never “we found a way.” It was “we imposed our will and you knew it by the second quarter.” Winning a rivalry game ‘t looks like survival is a data point, not an identity.
So take the win — genuinely, take it, it counts the same as any other. But don’t let the scoreboard talk you out of the tape. The three touchdowns that didn’t happen weren’t stolen. They were misplaced, by us, in ways that have names and fixes. That’s the good news. That’s also the homework.
This take grew out of this week’s U TALK LIVE NFL Edition episode, where the Miami-Florida detour turned into the best argument of the show — and honestly, the one worth having.
This take grew out of the September 25, 2025 episode — watch it here: “Week 3 Winners” U TALK LIVE NFL Edition-6