Everybody wants to argue about the coordinator. That’s the fun argument. Rhett Lashlee versus Ed Reed versus Gary Justice versus Rob Likens, four new names on Manny Diaz’s staff, pick the one who moves the needle. It’s a good bar debate and it fills a July show just fine. But it’s the wrong argument, and the number that proves it isn’t 25 points a game. It’s 121.
Miami finished 121st in the country in sacks allowed. One hundred and twenty-first. Roughly 75 quarterbacks buried in a single season at a place that has produced more NFL talent per square foot than any campus in America. You cannot scheme your way out of that. You cannot recruit your way out of it in one cycle. That is not a playbook problem. That’s a standard problem — and standard problems don’t get fixed by a new coordinator’s whiteboard. They get fixed by somebody in the building who refuses to let a bad rep slide.
Scheme Fixes Points. It Doesn’t Fix Habits.
Here’s the honest math on the offensive-coordinator hire. Yes, a spread system that gets Brevin Jordan running free from the tight end spot and turns Mike Harley and Mark Pope loose in space is worth points. Callers on the show floated 14 to 17 more a game if it all clicks, and that’s not crazy — take a 25-point offense with real skill talent and give it tempo and horizontal stress, and the scoreboard moves.
But watch what that assumes. It assumes the quarterback gets to the top of his drop. It assumes there’s a pocket. It assumes a tackle who got beat on the play before comes back and doesn’t get beat again. Tempo without protection isn’t an offense — it’s a faster way to punt. Ask anybody who has watched a spread team with a leaky front: the plays come quicker, the drives end quicker, and your defense is back on the field before it’s had a sip of water.
Which is why the sack number is the tell. Giving up 75 sacks isn’t one busted assignment. That’s a full season of the same busted assignment. That’s an entire unit that got beat, watched the tape, and got beat the same way the following Saturday. Somewhere in there, a rep got graded as acceptable that should have been unacceptable. That’s not X’s and O’s. That’s culture.
The Hire Nobody Rates Because It Doesn’t Have a Stat Line
Chief of staff is the least sexy title on a football staff. It doesn’t call plays. It doesn’t have a position room. It doesn’t show up on the broadcast graphic. It’s the job that gets described as “handles the details,” which is coach-speak for the thousand small things that decide whether a program is serious or just talented.
Now put Ed Reed in it.
Understand what that actually means in a building. You have twenty-year-olds who have been the best player in every room they have ever walked into. They have been told they’re special since they were fourteen. There is no coach on staff — none, at any school — whose word overrides a young player’s own belief in himself. Except a guy who did exactly what they want to do, at both stops, at the highest level, and has the hardware to end the conversation.
Ed Reed doesn’t have to give a speech. He has to walk past a rep that was loafed and not say “good job.” That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. When a Hall of Famer’s silence costs you something, you stop giving him reasons to be silent. Multiply that across every drill, every walkthrough, every conditioning period from January to August, and you get a different football team in November — not because the plays got better, but because the floor came up.
And the floor is the whole issue. Miami’s ceiling was never the question. Nobody watched that roster and thought the talent had topped out. The problem was the bottom of the performance range — the plays where the effort dipped and the technique got sloppy and it turned into third-and-fourteen. Coordinators raise ceilings. Standard-setters raise floors. Miami in 2020 needs the floor more.
The Quarterback Question Is Really a Patience Question
This is where it connects. The push to hand the job to a grad transfer for 2020 — one year, no more waiting — isn’t really a talent evaluation. It’s an argument about how long a program is allowed to keep saying “next year.”
N’Kosi Perry has upside and he’s been loyal to the place, and that matters more than message-board people admit. A quarterback who stays and competes instead of hitting the portal the first time he loses a rep is doing something for the room whether he starts or not. But loyalty is a reason to respect a guy, not a reason to keep waiting on him. “Developmental” is a beautiful word in year one. In year two under the same head coach, it starts to sound like an excuse.
The grad-transfer play is the anti-patience play. It says: we are done treating this season as a runway. That’s the same instinct as hiring a Hall of Famer to set the standard and a coordinator to overhaul the scheme in one offseason. Diaz didn’t make four hires because he thought things were trending fine. Four new assistants is a man saying out loud that the process wasn’t working.
What Would Actually Prove It Worked
Forget the point total. If you want a real progress marker in 2020, watch the sack column. Not the total — the distribution. A team that gets sacked twice a game because the quarterback holds it is a team with a functioning offensive line and a young passer. A team that gets sacked once in one game and six in the next is a team that still hasn’t fixed anything; it just played somebody who couldn’t rush the passer.
Consistency is the thing. It’s always the thing. That’s why the offensive line coach and the chief of staff matter more than they look like they matter, and why the coordinator, for all the noise, is inheriting a job whose success depends on two other guys doing theirs first.
Miami has never had a talent problem. Five-stars still take the visit — even the ones like Mason Smith who end up staying home. What Miami has had is a reliability problem, a program that could beat anybody on a Saturday and lose to anybody the Saturday after. The four hires are all aimed at that same target from different angles. The coordinator is just the loudest one.
Cut the check, sure. But cut it for the standard, not the scheme.
This take grew out of a Fourth of July weekend edition of the show, where the debate over Miami’s four new hires got going and never really settled — worth a listen if you want the full argument and the callers who pushed back.
This take grew out of the July 4, 2020 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-38