Miami Hurricanes Compress More than a Decade of Failure into a Bizarre Week

The plan was simple.

Blowout Central Connecticut State, claim the team had turned the corner, and try to maintain some relevance. It was a tried and true playbook, one we’ve seen play out for more than a decade. Put lipstick on the pig, claim the program is trending up and that the long-awaited Renaissance was on the way,

Over the last 15 years of failure, the Athletic Department, which sometimes resembles a marketing department that occasionally participates in sports, has been really good at this. Honoring accomplishments of teams’ past, while selling hope that the program would be there again “soon.”

And in the local South Florida community, they had willing buyers of that hope. UM is a university, but it represents an entire Tri-County community that just wants to believe again, searching for hope. The school has used that to brush more than a decade of disaster under the rug.

That plan was in motion on the Saturday of the CCSU game. If it is broke and you can get away with not fixing it, why fix it?

But what no one expected was for ESPN, of all places, to get fed up and take the outrage national, echoing what exceedingly frustrated local fans have been saying for years, accusing the school of not prioritizing winning, accusing the school of not caring, of accepting mediocrity.

This particular criticism is extremely harmful to this school in particular. Why? Well, to be blunt about it, the actual on-field performance and non-reaction to it would lend credence to this theory. And this extends beyond football to most of the athletics program, where underperformance has become the norm.

I’m sure they do want to win on some level, of course they do. But an Athletic Director that has presided over a disastrous head coaching hire (by process and execution) and seen it go this poorly (not his first high profile screw up, remember he tried to not fire Al Golden after Clemson and had to be overruled), that has seen the basketball program descend into one of the worst in the ACC, that has seen the baseball program not be able to get out of Regionals would most likely be out of a job, if winning was prioritized.

And that’s not to say that all of those coaches should be fired. That’s not always the solution.

I’m excited to see what Coach L can do this year. The baseball team is actually my true vice. Give me JD Arteaga and anything, and I’ll convince myself that the team can make it to Omaha. I’m one of those purchasers of hope.

It does mean, however, that someone somewhere should do something about the disintegration of athletic performance, and the buck stops with the Athletic Director, unless the Athletic Director is being evaluated by entirely different criteria.

The Reaction Was Puzzling

The school’s reaction to being eviscerated on ESPN was to flail around.

Manny Diaz, who in his defense, has to do press conferences and is not really responsible for the current state of things spoke on the subject. He is a symptom, not the cause. And he did what he had to do, when put in an untenable position. He had to defend the school from criticism that the school’s frugality leads them to hire unqualified coaches, including one named Manny Diaz.

What you can fault him for is the tired line of “I need more time to recruit.” First, he’s been here 6 years. Second, enough with this canard that the only way for Miami to compete is to string together 10 years of #1 classes to be competitive. Baked into that is that the school has to overcome coaching. The notion that a coach can take equivalent talent (spoiler alert: they usually have more talent than the other team) and actually beat the opponent is not even on the table.

But Diaz had to say something. And frankly, as this season goes on, he’s going to have to continue to justify his tenure when he probably shouldn’t be the coach anymore. Defend the indefensible.

The good news for Miami was that with a quick turnaround, even Miami fans stop complaining near kickoff. For that brief 4 hours, the consumers of hope think, just maybe, things will turn around. Beat a lowly Virginia, who coming into the game was one of the worst teams in the ACC, and with an upcoming bye week, the potential existed for 16 days of delusional daydreaming, a Miami tradition unlike any other. A chance to lie to ourselves, to traffic in hope. 

Why say anything?

And that’s why Julio Frenk’s decision to release a letter that was simultaneously insulting, off topic, delusional, and rambling a few hours before kickoff was so inexplicable.

The story was dying out. Someone at the school for some reason thought this was a good idea. Perhaps they thought ESPN would pick up on it and talk about it on air (while ESPN didn’t mention the letter, they did hilariously talk about how integral Manny Diaz has been in renovating the dorms).

Whatever the reason, it was another unforced error by a school that couldn’t afford it. Say nothing, and frankly, the topic is not even important enough to revisit outside of local media, such is the current irrelevance of the UM program. But they enflamed emotions by putting it front and center.

And that doesn’t even get into the substance of the letter. Upon reading it, I immediately thought back to my 10th Grade English teacher, Ms. Beam. She would have eviscerated it for not having a central theme, for wildly shifting topics between paragraphs, for not identifying a target audience or identifying a purpose.

I won’t go line by line through the letter, but a quick summary is:

• Paragraph 1: Committed to Building Champions
• Paragraph 2: Academics and Athletics are being “disrupted”
• Paragraph 3: Rails against NIL, attacks on exploitation of athletes, the pandemic
• Paragraph 4: He is appointing two people to work with the Athletic Department in an attempt to solve the problem that the entire letter is meant to portray does not exist
• Paragraph 5: Says it’s important to have coaches, which is fantastic
• Paragraph 6: Lists accomplishments from several decades ago off the school’s wikipedia page
• Paragraph 7: Thanks everyone for trying

What in the world was the point of this? Who was this for?

Just to be clear, the specific criticism from ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit was that the Canes have averaged 7 wins per year for FIFTEEN years. For this letter to say “Conversations about college sports tend to focus on the last game—or even the last play—and I can certainly empathize with the emotions of those moments” when the fans have been watching this for FIFTEEN years…who was that for? This is insulting to those that have suffered through more than a decade of bad football.

He goes on to list out titles from decades ago, including 5 football titles. Who was that for? The fans know this, the national media knows this. It sounds like he just found out about this and wanted to let us know about it. “Hey guess what, did you know we used to be good at football?!”

That weird middle section where he itemizes thing  plaguing all of college sports…okay. If he wants to have that discussion and try to expound on why these things that are part of college athletics only impact Miami, then go ahead. Who was that for? Surely that’s not why the team couldn’t tackle against Michigan State. “Coach, I was going to breakdown and make the tackle, but then I stared thinking about COVID and then the next thing I knew, the RB was passed me. Unfair that we knew about COVID, but Michigan State didn’t.”

In the same letter he somehow managed to say that they have always been committed to athletics at UM, that college athletics in general is screwed up, and that he’s making changes to address the lack of commitment at UM that the entire letter was trying to convey does not exist.

Between the timing and substance, it made no sense, and was insulting to a suffering community. Things couldn’t possibly get worse…

Of Course They Lost to Virginia

So, the thing about this is they didn’t just lose. A running joke after the Alabama and Appalachian State games was that Manny Diaz said “that’s what [insert name of opponent] does.”

Well, even he couldn’t claim that here.

Virginia came in 0-2 in the ACC. In those 2 games, they had rushed for a total of 123 yards and recorded a total of 1 sack while losing by a combined 40 points.

Against Miami? 181 yards rushing, 4 sacks, and a win. That’s right, they did more in one game against Miami than they did in 2 previous ACC games.

It must be said, however, you gotta give up to the players. They overcame poor coaching, and poor game plans, and actually put the team in a position to win, only for one last coaching error to sentence this game to the loss column, like so many games before.

You can debate whether or not playing for a FG or a TD is the right move here. But it’s hard to defend not moving the ball closer to make the FG easier. According to this great analysis, advancing the ball 5 yards instead of backing up 2 yards, Miami could have increased the chances of making the FG by 10%. That would have won the game. Sometimes you make your own luck and after catching a break on a missed targeting call to even get the ball back with a chance to win, the Canes blew it.

The reaction was typical. Diaz said they almost did something “special” exaggerating what a win over lowly Virginia would mean (much like he celebrated a win against Appalachian State as monumental), not acknowledging that they spent much of the game being pushed around by a team that had done that to no one. Trying to be sunshine and flowers while not addressing the systemic problems that put them in that position to begin with.

We have seen that look before pic.twitter.com/pqNXwuukmg

— Corey Enfield (@CoreyEnfield) October 1, 2021

Diaz knows he’s done, just like Coker, Shannon, and Golden before him. He came into this year with a veteran team that had taken advantage of the pandemic rule to bring back several players that shouldn’t have had eligibility. He personally took over the defense because he was going to fix it. Through 5 games:

• 2 blowout losses
• 1 blowout win
• 2 games came down to a kick, the Canes made 1 and missed the other

2-3 is a fair representation of how they’ve played. And they haven’t even played a road game yet. This was the time to bank wins at home.

Miami is the only ACC team that has both a losing overall record and is winless in the ACC. The 3 other teams without an ACC win are BC, Duke, and Syracuse, but they all have winning records. It is that bad right now, and we are almost halfway through the season. Just to contextualize, an unimaginably good 5-2 finish to the season would leave the Canes at 7-5 and 5-3 in the ACC, which is fireable. So what’s the point?

What Now?

On Saturday, “sources” leaked to Bruce Feldman that the buyout was too expensive (allegedly $8 million), that as long as the players don’t quit Diaz is safe (because I guess that is the standard now, if you don’t quit in a loss, did you really lose?), and that everything is okay because Miami played a 3rd string QB (which was news to anyone that actually follows the program since Tyler Van Dyke has always been the backup).

As an aside, Van Dyke made a ridiculous TD run, threw a strike on 3rd and forever on the last drive, and put the team in position to win. So whoever is trying to blame the loss on him and leaked that to Feldman is disgusting, blaming a kid for the coach’s shortcomings. These people are low.

It’s the same old story for Miami, 2 decades of horror compressed into one week. Bad performances, seasons lost, while those in charge of fixing it, paid to do so in fact, continue to fall short while excusing it, continue to argue with those that have supported the program decades and will be there long after these administrators have moved on, continue to pretend that the complaints are about being “not good enough” when it is in fact about horrific play. Even when the team has won over the last 15 years, it was rarely a strong all-around performance, and often hinted at the losses to come. This year is no different.

This is not an overreaction to the last game or the last play. This is an underreaction to 15 years of wasting these kids’ opportunities to win on the college level.

It went national this season, as ESPN went in on Miami, and the missed tackles became a national joke. But Miami’s response was depressingly familiar.

We’re going to Deserve Victory by Building Champions.

Since 2006, Miami has lost EIGHTEEN times to teams that ended the year with 6 or more losses. EIGHTEEN. In that period they have twice promoted the defensive coordinator (once hilariously having to pay a buy out because when market forces spoke, his level was Temple, but what does anyone else know, they know better, right?). They have hired Temple’s coach twice. Only once, for 3 years under Mark Richt, did they even have a coach that would not be laughed at had he been the head coach at a similar caliber school.

My questions to President Frenk is this. In your letter, you wrote “From my arrival here, I underscored that with respect to athletics our devotion must be first and foremost to our student-athletes, whose considerable talent we have a duty to develop both on and off the field.”

Do you believe, based on over a decade of wasting talent (as many of these players go on to succeed in the NFL), that they are developing that talent on the field?

By repeatedly hiring coaches that no other major program would, and then allowing them to hang on long past when other major programs would have fired them?

By paying a buyout to get back your own defensive coordinator without a proper head coaching search and then actually ending up as the second best team in Miami in his first year?

By repeatedly reaching for increasingly detached justifications to maintain status quo, drifting further and further away from the goal of winning?

Is that how you show “devotion” to the student-athletes? By hiring coaches on the cheap and then letting them stay past their sell by date?

If not, then what are you prepared to do about it? We don’t need more hot air, we don’t need to hear there are a few more meetings a week with some advisors. We need action, as we’re all talked out.

Paraphrasing the late, great Phil Hartman’s character Bill McNeal from 90s sitcom Newsradio, this school has barfed in the punch bowl we all drink from and now they expect us to believe it’s alphabet soup.

The problems started long before Julio Frenk arrived, and I do believe he is being unfairly blamed for a lot of the school’s ills. But he is in a position to address the shortcomings in the Athletic Department, and we can certainly expect that action out of him.

At the very least, can we get a baseball player that transferred to FSU off of the official University of Miami commercial? Is anyone paying attention to anything in Hecht?

Vishnu Parasuraman is a contributor for @FiveReasonsSports and generally covers the Miami Hurricanes. You can follow him on twitter @vrp2003