What an unusual Week 1 bye week means for coach Manny Diaz and the Miami Hurricanes
While most teams across the country will spend the weekend playing their first games of the season, the Miami Hurricanes will sit at home worrying about the Miami Hurricanes and, well, Miami hurricanes.
As Hurricane Dorian bears down on South Florida, Miami doesn’t have to worry about how it might have to make up a game washed away by inclement weather. It’s an unusual place for the Hurricanes to be in — it’s Week 1 and there’s no game on the schedule. Miami is in relatively uncharted water and already in the throes of managing a unique challenge.
“The thing that we’ll both have to manage going forward is you’ve got an extra week in your season,” Manny Diaz said last Saturday after Miami opened the 2019 season with a 24-20 loss to the No. 8 Florida Gators in Orlando.
The loss at Camping World Stadium was noticeably gruesome both because it pitted two potentially elite defenses against one another in a rivalry game and because it was the both teams’ first game of the season. It was not ugly, Diaz said, because it was “Week 0.” Both teams had the normal time to prepare, pushing the start of fall camp up a week, and the first game coming a week earlier doesn’t make for unusual weather conditions or anything.
“It affected your summer training a little bit, but it did it for both teams, so I don’t know that there was an advantage one way or the other,” Diaz said. “I think just managing us for the long haul, it’s going to be a long season for these kids.”
The biggest positive of the early bye week, particularly for a team with so many young players starting at key positions, is the chance to immediately step back and evaluate.
At his weekly press conference Monday in Coral Gables, Diaz didn’t answer any questions about the North Carolina Tar Heels, whom the Hurricanes (0-1) play next Saturday. He didn’t have to think at all about coaching against North Carolina’s Mack Brown, who once fired him after just two games in Diaz’s second season as the Texas Longhorns’ defensive coordinator. Miami didn’t have to wonder how it would contend with a freshman quarterback no one has any film on.
Instead, offensive linemen Zion Nelson and John Campbell Jr., the two freshman starting tackles, only had to worry about how to limit their own mistakes. Quarterback Jarren Williams could focused on the chances he only missed because of his own inexperience. The Hurricanes could keep figuring out unique ways to implement quarterback Tate Martell into their offense.
While almost everyone else worries about winning the weekend, Miami can worry about itself.
“Let’s get to work on Miami because what they saw on Saturday is if we will compete and do all the things that we’ve been preaching all offseason — which we had not proven, but we went out there and did it on Saturday — we can play with anybody, so what that means is let’s get Miami right,” Diaz said. “There is no opposition. I think what we found out on Saturday is that we are the opposition, that we’re playing against the best version of ourselves every week and so now to make sure that we present the best version of ourselves on Saturday, I think our players believe it doesn’t really matter who the opposition is, that our best will beat anybody as long as we’re at it.
“There was a little bit different mentality in here [Sunday] when the team came in. It wasn’t a sadness maybe like it had been in the past with some losses or kind of a moping around. It was a little bit more of an edge or an anger, maybe even a little bit of a disgust, which I thought was really good and healthy, and something to build on I think for sure going forward.”
This story was originally published August 31, 2019 at 10:13 AM.