Let’s cut through it. Every phone line, every group chat, every barbershop argument in Dade County right now ends up in the same place: fire Josh Gattis. Get a new offensive coordinator. Blow it up. And look — nobody’s going to tell you the red-zone play-calling this season has been anything close to acceptable. It hasn’t. But if you think swapping the guy holding the call sheet fixes what’s wrong with this offense, you’re treating a broken leg with a Band-Aid and wondering why the patient still can’t run.
You Can’t Install a Scheme With People Who Aren’t There
Here’s the argument that doesn’t get made enough, and it’s the one that actually holds water. An offensive install isn’t a suggestion. It’s eleven guys executing eleven assignments on the same count. One busted protection, one receiver who runs the wrong depth on a route, one back who doesn’t pick up the right blitzer — and the play that looked beautiful on the whiteboard Tuesday looks like malpractice on Saturday.
Now look at who Miami is actually putting on the field. A patchwork offensive line that’s been reshuffled more times than a deck at a card table. Young receivers who are learning the difference between college leverage and high school leverage in real time. A quarterback situation that’s been held together with tape and prayer. When you’re running third- and fourth-string personnel through a first-year scheme, you don’t get to find out whether the scheme is good. You find out whether the guys know where to line up.
That’s not a defense of Gattis so much as it’s an honest accounting of the evidence available. You cannot evaluate an offensive coordinator on a sample where his offense has never once been fully staffed. The verdict everyone wants to render simply hasn’t had a fair trial.
But the Red Zone Is a Different Conversation
Here’s where the defense runs out of road. Personnel explains a lot of things. It doesn’t explain calling a designed quarterback run for a quarterback who can’t run.
When Miami got down into the red zone against Texas A&M and dialed up a keeper for a Tyler Van Dyke who was visibly compromised — with a healthy Thad Franklin standing on the sideline — that wasn’t a young lineman blowing an assignment. That wasn’t a freshman receiver running the wrong route. That was a decision made by an adult with a headset and a laminated call sheet, and it was the wrong one.
The frustrating part isn’t that it happened once. It’s that the red-zone issues had been flagged all season long. Week after week, the same complaint from the same people watching the same tape. When the problem shows up again in a high-leverage spot, that shouldn’t register as a surprise. It should register as confirmation. And confirmation is a much harder thing to explain away than a bad Saturday.
So the honest position — the one that doesn’t require you to pick a tribe — is this: the personnel excuse is real, and it does not cover the red zone. Both things are true. Miami fans have gotten so used to arguing in absolutes that the actual answer, which sits right in the middle, keeps getting shouted past.
The Precedent Everybody Keeps Bringing Up
There’s a comparison making the rounds that deserves a longer look than it usually gets. When Manny Diaz swapped out Rhema Enos for Cade Lashlee, the offense got better. It’s a clean, tidy data point that people wave around as proof: change the guy, get results.
And the follow-up question is fair. If Manny could make a mid-course correction on his own staff, why can’t Cristobal?
But be careful with that one, because it cuts both ways. Diaz made staff changes and it bought him time, not tenure. He’s not walking these sidelines anymore. Changing a coordinator is the easiest lever in college football to pull, which is exactly why it gets pulled so often, and exactly why it so rarely fixes anything structural. If the roster is the problem, a new voice in the headset just means somebody new gets to be frustrated by the same personnel.
The Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Roughly twenty-five transfers out after the season. Twenty-five.
Sit with that. That’s not a roster tweak. That’s not a normal attrition cycle. That’s a program getting turned inside out — and if that projection lands anywhere close to accurate, it reframes this entire Gattis argument. Because it means the guys who’ve been struggling to execute the install aren’t going to be here to execute it next year anyway. It means the depth chart that’s been the alibi all season is about to become somebody else’s problem.
It also means the real evaluation window hasn’t opened yet. You want to know if Josh Gattis can coach? Give him a room where he picked most of the people in it. Give him a line that’s been together through a spring and a fall camp. Give him receivers on their second year in the system. Then look at the red zone and render your verdict. Anything before that is guessing with extra steps.
Rashada Changes the Math
And there’s the other piece of this that the fire-Gattis crowd tends to skip right over. If Jaden Rashada is the quarterback of the future once the dust settles, then every scheme conversation happening right now is being had about the wrong offense.
You don’t build an offense around a coordinator. You build it around a quarterback. What Miami wants to run in two years is going to be shaped by what its quarterback can do — his legs, his arm, his processing speed, what he sees pre-snap. Judging a play-caller on how he’s managing a compromised veteran under duress tells you almost nothing about how he’d operate with a franchise arm and a functioning line.
Meanwhile, the Defense Is Getting the Same Bad-Faith Treatment
Same story on the other side of the ball, different complaint. Everybody wants to know why Kevin Steele isn’t blitzing more. Bring the house. Get after the quarterback. It looks so easy from the couch.
Except a blitz is a math problem, and the math requires cornerbacks who can survive alone. When your corner play is thin, you can’t send five and six — you have to keep help over the top, or every third-and-seven turns into a walk-in touchdown. Steele isn’t sitting back because he’s timid. He’s sitting back because the alternative is worse, and he knows it even when the crowd doesn’t.
That’s the throughline for this whole season. Both coordinators are getting judged on decisions that were made for them by a roster that can’t support the thing everybody wants to see. The scheme critiques aren’t wrong so much as they’re premature.
Where That Leaves You
Root for the young guys. Genuinely. When the season’s outcome is already written, the only thing worth watching is who’s playing hard and who’s getting better — because those are the names that’ll still be on the roster when the transfer dust settles and the real evaluation actually starts.
Fire Gattis in November if it makes you feel better. Just understand you’d be firing him for a crime the roster committed.
This take grew out of an argument that took over this week’s U Talk Live, where the phone lines went to war over whether Josh Gattis is the problem or just the guy standing closest to it. Go listen to the full show — the callers earned it.
This take grew out of the November 1, 2022 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-153