Every August, Canes fans do the same dance. We line up the schedule, we squint at it, we count wins on our fingers like we’re doing long division, and we walk away with a number. Ten. Nine. Eight. Somebody in the group chat says eleven and gets clowned. Somebody says seven and gets clowned harder. Then the season starts and the number never once explains anything that actually happens on the field.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to say two weeks before we go into the swamp: the number is the least interesting question about this football team. The interesting question is the one underneath it. What IS Miami right now? Not what’s the record. What’s the identity? Because a program that can’t answer that question in year three is a program that’s still auditioning for itself.
Instant Grits or Slow-Roasted Brisket
The best framing I’ve heard on this all offseason came out of our own family, and it’s stuck to me like a bad hamstring: is Mario building an instant grits team, or a slow-roasted brisket program?
Instant grits is the portal. It’s five minutes and hot food. You identify a hole, you go shopping, you plug it with a guy who already proved it somewhere else. Nothing wrong with grits — everybody’s eating them now, and the teams that refuse to eat them are getting lapped.
Brisket is the other thing. Brisket is signing a kid at seventeen, redshirting him, putting weight on him, teaching him the defense, watching him get beat in practice for two years, and then watching him become a problem for everybody else as a junior. Brisket takes twelve hours and you can’t rush it. You can’t microwave a brisket. You try, you get a hockey puck.
Miami keeps signing top-tier recruiting classes — genuinely elite hauls, the kind of classes that used to be the entire argument for why the sleeping giant was about to wake up. And then, before those kids ever get real reps, we go bring in a transfer over the top of them. Both things are true at once, and that’s the tension. You can’t hand a family a top-five class in February and then tell them in August that the answers are all guys who wore somebody else’s jersey last fall.
The Guys Who Left Weren’t “Not Miami Guys”
Run through the names of kids who came in with hype and left before the story finished. Don Chaney. Kobe Young. Jacurri Brown. And watch what happened to each of them the second the transfer paperwork hit: the fan base decided, retroactively, that they were never Miami guys in the first place. Wasn’t tough enough. Didn’t want it. Not built for this.
That’s a lie we tell ourselves because it’s more comfortable than the alternative. The alternative is that they never got real reps. That they were five-star talent who sat behind a stopgap, watched somebody get imported into their room, and did the math a nineteen-year-old is going to do.
And we’ve got the receipts on what happens when those guys finally get coached up. Will Mallory. Lena Taylor. Get to the league, get NFL-level position coaching, and suddenly the talent that was allegedly missing is right there in high definition on Sunday. The talent was never the problem. The developmental runway was.
So when somebody says Miami has a recruiting problem, I push back. Miami has a finishing problem. We’re great at the sales pitch and shaky on the four-year build. Those are completely different diseases with completely different cures, and if you misdiagnose it you go spend money in the wrong place for three more years.
Why This Matters More Than Your Win Total
Let’s say Miami goes 10-2 this year on the back of a portal haul. Great. Genuinely great, I’ll be in the streets. But ask yourself the follow-up: what does year four look like? Because if the roster is a rental fleet, you’re re-buying the entire thing every January, forever, at market rate, against schools with bigger checkbooks and better closers. That’s not a program. That’s a hedge fund with a fight song.
Now flip it. Say Miami goes 8-4 but three homegrown sophomores take over their position rooms and don’t leave. That’s a worse Saturday and a much better decade. The record lies to you. Player development doesn’t.
This is why I have no patience for the shoe-shiners — the folks who only turn up when the shine is on, who ride a quarterback all season and then flip on him the second the pick-six happens. Same fans who were carrying Tyler Van Dyke a year ago were burying him by November. If your evaluation of a player can swing that hard in twelve months, you weren’t evaluating. You were reacting to the scoreboard and calling it analysis.
The Bar Is the ACC Championship, and It’s Not Unfair
Twenty years. That’s how long it’s been since Miami played for a conference title. Twenty years of “wait till next year,” of recruiting-class screenshots, of coaching hires that were going to change everything. At some point the thing has to actually happen or the words stop meaning anything.
So set the line honestly. Ten-plus wins and a trip to the ACC Championship game — that’s real credit, that’s a coach who has moved the program, and anybody who wants to argue is arguing with arithmetic. Eight wins or fewer with THIS roster, with these recruiting classes, with this portal spend? Houston, we have a problem, and the seat gets exactly as warm as it should get.
What I refuse to accept is the middle-ground mush where we go 9-3, beat nobody who matters, lose to somebody we shouldn’t, and then spend December telling each other the arrow’s pointing up. That’s how you lose five years. The arrow has been pointing up since I was in high school.
Where I Actually Land
I want to see one thing on August 31 in the swamp, and it isn’t the final score. I want to see young guys — Miami’s own guys — on the field in leverage situations. Not mop-up duty. Not the fourth quarter of a blowout. Third and six in a tie game with the crowd losing its mind. Put a kid you recruited out there and let him play.
Watch who’s on the field when it matters. Count how many of them Miami signed out of high school versus how many Miami rented. That ratio tells you more about the next five years than the win column will tell you about the next five months. The portal can win you a season. Development wins you an era. And it’s been an awful long time since anybody in Coral Gables strung together an era.
Two weeks. Grits or brisket. We’re about to find out what’s actually cooking.
This take grew out of this week’s U Talk Live conversation, where the family got into it over expectations, patience, and what actually counts as progress in Coral Gables — worth your time if you want to hear the debate that sparked it.
This take grew out of the August 17, 2024 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-218