Every April, Miami fans do the same beautiful, ridiculous thing. We take three hours of glorified practice in an empty-ish stadium, run it through the emotional processor, and come out the other side with a season-long verdict. The quarterback is finished. The freshman is a first-rounder. The offensive line is a disaster that will get somebody killed. And then September arrives and reminds us that we were watching a scrimmage where nobody was allowed to hit the quarterback.
So let’s do something a little different than the usual grade-the-spring-game exercise. Let’s talk about what a spring game can actually tell you — and what it structurally, physically cannot. Because after this spring in Coral Gables, the gap between those two categories is the whole story of Miami’s 2023 season.
What Spring Ball Tells the Truth About: Bodies
Here’s the one thing a spring game never lies about. It tells you who is physically ready to play major college football right now. Not who understands the offense. Not who will handle a road crowd. Who can win a rep with their body.
That’s why Rueben Bain jumped off the screen the way he did. When a true freshman defensive lineman is disruptive against extra blocking — when teams are chipping and helping and he’s still living in the backfield — that isn’t scheme, that isn’t a coach dialing up a pressure to make a kid look good, and that isn’t spring-game noise. That’s a grown man’s frame and a grown man’s motor showing up in April. You can fake a lot of things in a controlled scrimmage. You cannot fake making a blocking scheme adjust to you.
The flip side of that same coin is the two true freshman tackles who got exposed. That’s the same signal, just pointing the other direction. When young players get overwhelmed physically in a scrimmage against their own teammates — teammates they practice with every day, who they know the tendencies of, in a setting with no crowd noise and no game-plan wrinkles — the body is telling you something. Spring ball is the friendliest possible environment for a young offensive lineman. If the friendliest environment is already hard, the SEC-caliber Saturday is going to be a different conversation entirely.
That’s the honest read on the physical layer. One defensive freshman who looks like he skipped a developmental step. Two offensive tackles who very much have not.
What Spring Ball Lies About: Everything Involving a Quarterback
Now the part where fans get themselves in trouble.
Tyler Van Dyke looked uncomfortable. Hesitant. Not in rhythm. Every one of those observations is probably accurate as a description of what happened on the field. And every one of them is also almost meaningless as a prediction, because of what the situation actually is: a quarterback operating a brand-new offense under a brand-new coordinator, in a live-rep setting designed specifically to be uncomfortable.
Think about what a spring game asks a quarterback to do. Learn a new system in a handful of weeks. Run it against a defense that knows every call because they’ve been practicing against it all spring. Do it in a red jersey where he can’t extend plays, can’t take off, can’t do the improvisational stuff that makes quarterbacks look good. Do it with an offensive line missing pieces and starting freshmen. Do it with a receiver room still sorting itself out.
Hesitancy in that environment is the most predictable outcome in football. It’s what learning looks like from the outside. A quarterback in a new system processes slower because he’s thinking instead of reacting — that’s not a talent problem, that’s a reps problem, and reps are the one thing April cannot give you. The dangerous version is if he’s still doing it in October. In April, it’s just Tuesday.
Same logic applies to Jacurri Brown pressing. A young quarterback who knows he’s competing, in front of a crowd, in a limited number of series, is going to try to make something happen. Of course he forced it. The alternative — checking it down eight times and walking off — doesn’t win anybody a job either. Spring games actively incentivize the exact behavior fans then criticize.
The Offensive Line Is the Only Panic Worth Having
If you’re going to pick one thing from this spring to genuinely lose sleep over, make it the front five. Not because the spring game proved anything — but because of the compounding math.
Offensive line is the position group where spring struggles matter most, because it’s the group with the least margin for on-the-job learning. A quarterback learning a new offense will get better every single week just by taking snaps. A freshman tackle facing a legitimate edge rusher does not get better fast enough to survive that first month. He gets his quarterback hit, the quarterback starts flinching, and now you have two problems that look like one problem and everybody blames the guy throwing.
And it isn’t just pass protection. The run-blocking issues are arguably louder, because run blocking is where scheme understanding matters least and want-to matters most. Missing run-blocking assignments in a spring game against your own defense is a fundamentals flag, not a complexity flag. That’s the fixable-but-only-with-work bucket, and there’s a summer between now and the answer.
Here’s the uncomfortable connection nobody wants to make: you cannot evaluate the quarterback until you fix the line. Every criticism of a quarterback’s rhythm, comfort, and decisiveness is downstream of whether he trusts the pocket. Miami’s 2023 quarterback question and Miami’s 2023 offensive line question are not two questions. They’re one question wearing two jerseys.
The Staff Question Is a Real One
The tight ends job going to a former offensive lineman making the jump from graduate assistant to his first full-time position role is a legitimate thing to have an opinion about — and the skepticism isn’t unfair. Blocking fundamentals from an O-line background should translate cleanly to a tight end room; that part’s straightforward. Route running is a genuinely different craft, and it’s fair to wonder where that development comes from.
But that’s also exactly why the answer probably lives elsewhere on the staff. A coordinator running the passing concepts and a receivers coach who lives in route detail are the natural places for that development to happen. Position coaches aren’t islands. The question worth tracking isn’t whether one young coach can do everything — it’s whether the staff is structured so nobody has to.
The Recruiting Piece Everybody Underrates
Meanwhile, a 2024 receiver in Chance Robinson picked Miami — and committed in real time while fans were literally watching and reacting to it. That’s the part of the modern cycle that a spring-game grade sheet never captures. Recruits are watching the same broadcast you are, reading the same energy, feeling the same room. April in Coral Gables isn’t just an evaluation. It’s a pitch, and it’s landing.
So here’s the honest scorecard from a spring where everybody wants a verdict. Rueben Bain is real, and the physical evidence supports the hype. The offensive line is the actual problem, and it’s the one that has to be solved before any other evaluation means anything. And the quarterback situation? Genuinely unknown, in both directions — which is a more honest answer than the confident version anybody wants to give you in April.
Spring ball is a physical exam, not a diagnosis. Trust it on bodies. Ignore it on brains.
This take grew out of the April 15, 2023 episode of U Talk Live, where Devin and Larry Frank Jr. opened the lines and let the family sort real signal from spring noise. The callers did the hard part — this column just followed the thread further down.
This take grew out of the April 15, 2023 episode — watch it here: Miami Hurricanes U TALK LIVE-169