Let’s get the easy part out of the way: yes, the offense was miserable. Yes, the play-calling curdled somewhere around midseason and never recovered. Yes, plenty of Canes fans have already made up their minds about Josh Gattis and would happily hold the door for him. That conversation is loud, it’s fun, and it will dominate every barbershop, every group chat, and every call-in line until somebody’s employment status changes.
But it’s also the shallow end of the pool. Because if you fire the coordinator tomorrow and hire the sharpest offensive mind available, you still have to answer the question that actually ended Miami’s season: why does this team stop competing in the fourth quarter?
“The Fourth-Quarter Program Broke”
Somebody on a call-in line said it better than any columnist has: the fourth-quarter program broke. Sit with that phrase, because it isn’t about scheme. It isn’t about a quarterback room held together with tape. It’s about a roster that developed a habit — a real, repeatable, muscle-memory habit — of folding when the game got heavy.
And the bowl game wasn’t an aberration. It was the final exam on a semester of the same thing. When the team didn’t show up, nobody who’d watched the season was surprised. That’s the tell. Fans weren’t shocked, they were resigned. Nobody stayed up wondering what went wrong. Everybody already knew.
That’s the part that should terrify you more than any coordinator’s job status. Shock is fixable. Resignation is cultural.
Scheme Problems Have Fixes. Habit Problems Have Funerals.
Here’s the uncomfortable math. An offensive script that worked against Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, then got run straight into the ground against Florida State, Duke, North Carolina and Clemson — that’s a diagnosable problem. You can chart it. You can point at it. You can hire around it. Coordinators get replaced for exactly this and programs move on within a season.
What you can’t chart is a locker room that has learned, week after week, that the fourth quarter is where things fall apart. That’s not on a whiteboard. That lives in the body. Guys start playing the last twelve minutes like they already know the ending, because they do — they’ve lived it six or seven times. Ask any coach who’s inherited a losing program: the scheme install takes three weeks. Rewiring what a team believes about itself when it’s tied with eight minutes left takes a full calendar year, minimum, and it takes personnel turnover to do it.
Which is exactly why the portal churn is more interesting than the coordinator drama.
The Portal Isn’t a Talent Problem. It’s a Culture Filter.
Everybody wants to grade the portal like it’s a shopping list — names from Alabama, Ohio State, Texas A&M, stars and rankings and highlight reels. Fine. Talent matters. But this specific Miami roster doesn’t primarily need more talent in the abstract. It needs a different response to adversity, and the fastest way to change a response is to change the people producing it.
That cuts both ways. Some guys need to be walked out the door — and if Mario Cristobal is doing that job himself rather than waiting for players to self-select, good. That’s the correct read on a program that just quit on a bowl game. But the incoming side matters just as much: the question on every transfer shouldn’t only be “can he play,” it should be “has he ever won a hard game late.”
You saw the instinct play out in the quarterback conversation, even if nobody framed it this way. When somebody with real knowledge of a target’s high school program raises doubts about whether he can throw consistently against actual competition, that’s not just a scouting note — that’s a durability question. Can this kid still function when the defense is legitimately good and the pocket isn’t clean? Miami has been burned enough by that gap that skepticism has become the responsible position.
Same energy on the Jacurri Brown debate, honestly. The dual-threat ability is real. The size is real. Whether you trust him to carry a 25-to-30-attempt passing game is a different question entirely, and it’s fair to answer no right now without it being a shot at the kid. Those are two separate evaluations and Canes fans keep collapsing them into one argument.
Why Kevin Steele Chatter Actually Matters
Here’s where the offseason speculation gets genuinely interesting instead of just noisy. The buzz that Kevin Steele might step away from LSU and could conceivably find his way back to Coral Gables isn’t compelling because of any scheme he’d install. It’s compelling because of what a veteran, hardened, no-nonsense presence does to a room full of guys who’ve been folding.
Programs that fix their fourth quarters usually don’t do it by out-thinking anybody. They do it by importing standards — a coach or a group of players who visibly refuse to accept the losing behavior, and who make the rest of the room uncomfortable enough to change. That’s a personnel and staff question, not a playbook question.
So when you’re grading this offseason six months from now, don’t grade it on the recruiting service composite. Grade it on how many people Miami added — coaches and players both — who have personally been part of finishing a game against a good opponent.
The Optimism Case, and Why It’s Not Crazy
There’s a real argument for buying in, and it deserves better than eye-rolls. The athletic department alignment is genuinely different than it’s been. The resources are there in a way they weren’t during the wilderness years. Cristobal is not a guy anybody has ever accused of being soft or unserious about the physical part of football. Those are the ingredients you actually want if the disease is culture rather than talent.
The catch is that alignment and resources are inputs. They buy you the ability to fix the problem. They don’t fix it. Plenty of programs have had money, facilities, and a hard-nosed head coach and still spent three years losing games in the last ten minutes because the roster hadn’t turned over enough yet.
So the honest position sits between the two camps. This isn’t hopeless — the structural stuff is more sound than it’s been in a long time. But it’s also not one hire away, and anybody selling you a coordinator change as the fix is selling you the easy version of a hard story.
The Bar for Next Season
Here’s the metric I’d hold Miami to, and it has nothing to do with wins. Take every game next year that is within one score entering the fourth quarter. Count how many of them Miami wins. That number — not the record, not the recruiting class, not who’s calling plays — tells you whether the program actually got fixed or just got redecorated.
Because a good spring means nothing. A pretty first drive in September means nothing. The judgment comes when it’s 24-24 with nine minutes left on the road and the crowd is going, and you find out whether this team learned anything at all.
Everything else is offseason talk. Entertaining offseason talk — I’ll be in it with you — but talk.
This take grew out of this week’s U Talk Live, where Devin and Larry Frank Jr. spent the season finale sorting through who stays, who goes, and whether the coordinator is really the story. Worth your time if you want the full argument.
This take grew out of the December 3, 2022 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-161