Cane fans, let’s have an honest conversation, because December is the month this fan base lies to itself the best. There’s no game to argue about. The bowl matchup isn’t even announced yet. So we do what we always do when the schedule goes quiet: we open up the recruiting rankings, we see Miami sitting 14th in the country, and we start building a national championship out of star ratings and highlight tape.
Fourteenth. Up from 27th a year ago. That’s a real jump and nobody should pretend otherwise. But here’s the thing about a top-15 class that nobody wants to say out loud in December: a recruiting ranking is a receipt for potential, not a receipt for wins. It tells you what you bought. It doesn’t tell you whether you know how to use it.
The Skill Positions Look Like The U. The Line Doesn’t.
Look at the pieces coming in and the excitement makes sense. Don Chaney Jr. is a four-star running back walking into a room that already has DeeJay Dallas and Cam’Ron Harris. Tyler Van Dyke is a four-star quarterback. Michael Redding is a four-star receiver. On paper, that’s a skill-position haul that looks like the Miami of the posters on your wall — speed everywhere, playmakers stacked three deep, guys who make you get up off the couch.
Now count the offensive linemen. Two. That’s it. Jaylen Rivers out of Orange Park — six-six, 331 pounds, four stars, the biggest name in the class and legitimately a guy who could start early. And three-star guard Antonio Smith. Two bodies for the most important, most physically demanding, most attrition-heavy room on the entire roster.
You cannot build a football team from the outside in. You just can’t. Every fan base learns this the hard way and Miami has been learning it on repeat. You can sign the fastest receiver in the state of Florida and it does not matter one bit if your quarterback is on his back at 2.1 seconds. You can sign a four-star tailback and he’ll run into an unblocked linebacker in the backfield twelve times a game and everybody will spend the offseason arguing about whether he was overrated.
That’s the trap. The trenches don’t just lose games — they make everybody else look bad while they’re losing them. Bad line play is the great equalizer in the wrong direction. It takes your four-stars and makes them look like two-stars, and then the recruiting service that ranked you 14th gets blamed for the evaluation when the evaluation was fine. The blocking wasn’t.
The Van Dyke Question Is Really a Line Question
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Tyler Van Dyke is a pocket passer. That’s not an insult — pocket passers have won a whole lot of football at the highest level. But a pocket passer is a bet. Specifically, he’s a bet that you will build him a pocket.
Signing a pocket quarterback with two offensive line commits is ordering a steak and forgetting to bring your wallet. It’s a plan that only works if the second half of the plan shows up. And right now the second half of the plan is Rivers, Smith, and a whole lot of hoping the portal and the development staff cover the difference.
A mobile quarterback can hide bad protection. He can escape, extend, buy the extra beat, turn a busted play into eight yards and a fresh set of downs. He’s an insurance policy against your own weakness. A pocket passer offers no such insurance. He’s a luxury purchase. He only pays off in a well-built house.
So the honest read on Van Dyke isn’t “is he good?” It’s “do we have any business signing this specific archetype right now?” And the answer depends entirely on things that haven’t happened yet.
Go Get the Cold-Weather Maulers
Here’s a take that’ll annoy some folks: Miami needs to stop recruiting the offensive and defensive lines like a South Florida program and start recruiting them like a program that intends to play in January.
Go north. Wisconsin. Minnesota. That part of the country grows a very specific kind of football player — big, mean, technically coached from the time he’s fourteen, raised in a culture where moving a man off the ball is the point of the sport rather than a chore you do before the ball gets thrown. Those kids exist and most of them never get a Miami phone call because the recruiting map has been drawn the same way for thirty years.
Speed you can find in the 305. Everybody knows that and everybody recruits it. But beef — real, program-changing, four-year-starter beef — requires you to go where the beef is and convince a kid from a cold state that he wants to play in the heat. That’s harder work. It’s also the work that actually separates good recruiting classes from good football teams.
Same story on the other side. The defensive end group in this class has bodies — Chance Williams, Quentin Williams — and there’s real depth there. But depth at end doesn’t fix the middle. If you can’t hold the point of attack, you get gashed on the ground and you never get to unleash the pass rushers you were so proud of signing. Front-seven talent is a system, not a collection.
Ten Decommits and a Top-15 Ranking Is a Warning, Not a Flex
Something else worth sitting with: this class has already lost ten commitments. Jermaine Burton. Darnell Harris. Avantae Williams. Those are not depth pieces you shrug about — those are guys other people’s fan bases are currently celebrating.
And Miami is still 14th. Which sounds like a compliment and isn’t entirely one. It means the raw pull of the U brand is real, that the talent radius around this program is deep enough to absorb ten losses and stay top-15. But it also means the program has a retention problem that the ranking is papering over. Ten flips is not variance. Ten flips is a message about whether kids believe in the thing they committed to.
The remaining board tells its own story. Justin Flowe is the kind of linebacker who changes a defense, and he’s realistically headed to Ohio State or Alabama. Offensive lineman Darrell Washington is still out there. Landing Washington wouldn’t just add a body — it would triple the offensive line class from two to three, which is a sentence that should embarrass everybody involved.
The Part Nobody Can Sign
All of which brings us to the actual question, the one that outlives signing day: who’s coaching these kids?
Stars don’t develop themselves. A four-star is a projection of what a player could become with three years of good coaching, a good strength program, and a scheme that puts him in position to be great. Take away any one of those and you’ve got an expensive disappointment and a message board full of people insisting the kid was a bust.
Miami has been signing talent for years. Nobody has ever seriously accused this program of failing to attract athletes. What Miami has struggled to do is turn athletes into football players and football players into a football team. That’s a development problem, a strength-and-conditioning problem, a scheme-fit problem — and none of those show up in a December ranking.
So enjoy the class. Genuinely. Chaney is going to be fun. Rivers might start as a true freshman. Redding has real juice. But hold the parade until you see what happens in year two, when these guys are supposed to have grown, and the offensive line is supposed to be functional, and Van Dyke is supposed to have a pocket. The ranking was the easy part. The ranking is always the easy part.
Fourteenth in the country doesn’t mean anything until somebody proves they can coach it.
This take grew out of this week’s U Talk Live conversation, where Devin and caller Billy Barrett spent a bowl-less December night going name by name through Miami’s incoming class and kept landing on the same uneasy conclusion.
This take grew out of the December 7, 2019 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-7