Let’s cut through it. Every offseason around this program produces a list. Fix the offense. Get explosive. Win on the outside. Rush the passer. All true, all fine, all the kind of thing you can say at a booster lunch and get a round of applause. But lists have an order, and the order matters more than the list. Because if you strip Miami’s 2020 to-do list down to the one number that actually explains the last two seasons, it’s this one: 121st nationally in sacks allowed. Fifty-one of them. In one year.
Fifty-One Is Not a Statistic, It’s a Diagnosis
Fifty-one sacks isn’t a bad-luck number. It isn’t a “we had some tough matchups” number. Fifty-one sacks over a season is roughly four a game, which means roughly four times a game, the play didn’t just fail — it went backwards, off schedule, into a down-and-distance that took the entire playbook off the table. That’s not an offensive coordinator problem in the way people mean when they say “offensive coordinator problem.” That’s a structural problem that eats coordinators for lunch and spits them out with a losing record and a fanbase calling for their head.
And here’s the part that makes it worse: sacks don’t stay in the sack column. They metastasize. They show up in the scoring-offense number, because you can’t score from second-and-19. They show up in the explosive-play number, because deep shots require the quarterback to still be vertical at 2.4 seconds. They show up in the third-down number, and the third-down number shows up in time of possession, and time of possession shows up as a defense that’s been standing on the field long enough to start looking at the sideline. Everything downstream of the offensive line is a symptom. The line is the disease.
So when you hear a five-point checklist for making Miami a contender — fix the scoring offense, get explosive through the air, sustain drives and cut the sacks, win man coverage outside, find a pass-rush duo — understand that item three isn’t the third-most-important item. Item three is the reason items one and two exist as problems at all.
Why the Jared Williams Move Is Bigger Than It Reads
Which is why a grad transfer offensive tackle out of Houston deserves more than the two lines he usually gets in a roster note. Jared Williams is 6’7″, 305, and he arrives into a competition that already includes Zion Nelson and DJ Scaife. On paper, that reads like depth. In practice, for a line that surrendered fifty-one sacks, depth is the fix — or at least it’s the mechanism of the fix.
Here’s the logic. Bad offensive lines are almost never bad because all five guys are bad. They’re bad because one or two spots are indefensible and the other three spend every snap compensating, which means the tackle who could be good is instead helping, and the center who could be making calls is instead sliding protection toward the fire. Adding one legitimate body doesn’t just upgrade one spot. It frees the other four to do their actual jobs. That’s the multiplier. That’s why a grad transfer with real snaps on his resume can move a line more than his individual grade suggests.
The second thing Williams brings is competition, and competition is the only honest evaluator in football. When a lineman knows the guy behind him is a legitimate threat, technique tightens. Film study gets longer. The margin between “good enough to start on this roster” and “good enough to protect a quarterback in the ACC” is exactly the margin that competition closes. Miami hasn’t had enough of it up front. Now there’s more.
D’Eriq King Changes the Math — But Only If the Math Is Already Close
Pair that with a quarterback who can move. D’Eriq King with Rhett Lashlee calling plays is the kind of combination that lets a coaching staff manufacture protection instead of just blocking for it — movement, tempo, quick game, keeping a defense from teeing off on a static launch point. A mobile quarterback is worth a couple sacks a game all by himself, purely by refusing to be where the defensive end expected him to be.
But — and this is the part fans skip in June — a mobile quarterback is a bandage on a bad line, not a cure. If protection is broken, the mobility that was supposed to create explosive plays gets spent surviving instead. The scramble that was designed to buy a shot to Brevin Jordan down the seam turns into a two-yard gain and a hit. The play-action that was supposed to hold a safety turns into a sprint to the sideline. You don’t get the upside of a dual-threat quarterback until the floor underneath him is stable. Get to five-ish seconds of clean pocket on the snaps that matter, and now King is a weapon. Stay at four sacks a game, and he’s just a guy running for his life with better burst than the last guy running for his life.
The Same Logic, Flipped, on Defense
Now run the exact same reasoning across the ball, because it’s the same argument wearing a different jersey. The checklist wants receivers who win man coverage and it wants a real pass-rush duo off the defensive line. Those two things are not separate wishes — they’re the same wish, from opposite sides.
Corners can’t cover forever. That’s not a criticism of any corner; it’s physics. Ask a defensive back to stay attached in man for four-plus seconds and eventually the receiver wins, because the receiver knows where he’s going and the corner doesn’t. The only thing that makes man coverage sustainable over sixty minutes is a pass rush that shortens the clock. Get two guys who can actually win off the edge, and suddenly your secondary looks dramatically better without a single personnel change. Fail to get them, and you will spend all season watching perfectly competent defensive backs get labeled as liabilities for the crime of being asked to do the impossible.
Line of scrimmage, offense. Line of scrimmage, defense. Five keys, and the two that hold up the other three both live in the trenches. That’s not a coincidence. That’s how football has always worked, and it’s how Miami’s best teams were built in the first place — big, nasty, and decided before the ball ever got to a skill player.
Which Is Also Why the Recruiting Board Reads Different Now
Locking in a four-star receiver like Jacoby George out of Plantation, chasing Romello Brinson out of Northwestern with Georgia in the room, tracking a safety like Cam Kitchens — all of that is genuinely good news, and the fact that it’s happening in South Florida’s own backyard matters culturally in a way that’s hard to overstate. Miami got great by fencing off the tri-county area. Every commitment that stays home is a brick back in a wall that got knocked down.
But if you’re asking what turns this program from a team people are curious about into a team people are afraid of, the honest answer isn’t at receiver. Skill talent has never been the shortage here. South Florida produces receivers and defensive backs the way other places produce weather. The shortage is the unglamorous stuff — tackles, guards, edge rushers, the players who don’t trend on signing day and decide games in November. The class that finally fixes Miami won’t be the one with the flashiest skill haul. It’ll be the one that gets four linemen who can play, and holds onto them.
The Test That Actually Tells You Something
So here’s a cleaner way to judge this season than the standings. Forget the scoring average for a second. Watch two numbers: sacks allowed, and sacks generated. If Miami cuts fifty-one down to something in the twenties and gets two guys into double-digit-adjacent territory off the edge, this team will be dramatically better than its record suggests, and everything on the checklist takes care of itself as a byproduct.
And if those numbers don’t move? Then it won’t matter how good King looks in space, how many stars are in the class, or how loud the offseason optimism gets. You cannot out-scheme a broken line of scrimmage. Nobody ever has.
Fix the trenches, and everything else on that list stops being a list. It just becomes what the tape shows.
This take grew out of the June 13, 2020 episode of U TALK LIVE, where Devin went solo to run through his own five-point checklist for what has to happen this fall — this column is one man’s argument about which of those five actually holds up the other four.
This take grew out of the June 13, 2020 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-35