A Miami Hurricanes team that has excelled despite the virus forges on toward Duke
Who knows what will happen Saturday at Duke, or if the Miami Hurricanes will even ever get to Duke with the way this bizarre season has transpired.
All University of Miami football coach Manny Diaz knew for sure Monday was that his team would practice at night for the first time in more than two weeks — the initial step in hopefully boarding the plane on Friday that will fly them to Durham, North Carolina, for the 8 p.m. Saturday game that replaced coronavirus-plagued Wake Forest.
“Happy to be back here in game week and be able to talk about a football game,’’ Diaz, whose Canes are No. 10 in the College Football Playoff rankings, told reporters during a virtual news conference Monday afternoon. “A little bit of an unusual Monday for us. We will practice this evening. We’re normally a Monday-off team, but we took yesterday off so we’ll have maybe an hour-long workout.
“Our players are in the midst of final exams this week which adds another unusual element to a game week. Normally the season is about over at this time. Final exams got moved up because of the academic calendar disruption due to COVID.”
The Hurricanes (7-1, 6-1 Atlantic Coast Conference), who were off the past two weeks because too many of their players tested positive or were quarantining after contact tracing for the coronavirus, as of Monday had enough players in each position group to be able to travel to Duke (2-7, 1-7), Diaz said. But by now, Diaz, who himself is recuperating from the virus and conceded earlier Monday that not everyone will be available for Duke, knows the only thing on which he can focus is what’s right in front of him.
What’s true on Monday is often false by Friday.
‘Unique challenges’
“There will be some unique challenges to this week just to get to Saturday with the way that we practice and the way that we can meet throughout the week,’’ the coach said. “But we’re happy for the league to be able to arrange it, to go get us a game and we’ll be excited to go play Duke Saturday night.”
Diaz cited “dealing with the long layoff” without practicing, “getting our guys back into football shape, back into contact’’ as just some of the considerable issues he faces with really only three substantial days worth of practice before walk-throughs and travel — and even those three days will be far different from normal as he gradually integrates players back into the grind.
“Without getting into specifics we feel like we have enough depth at all positions to be good,’’ Diaz said. “Obviously we still have got a couple rounds of testing we’ve got to get through during the course of the week. That’s kind of what we’ll monitor and that’s when we’ll figure out as the week goes on who we have. But we do feel like our depth gives us the opportunity to play. So we’re up for going to play.”
The coach noted that the players are “very excited to be back.’’
“They want to play. It almost reminds me of when we got back together in the summertime. ...They want to finish the season.’’
Diaz was asked what he has learned throughout this process that opened his eyes a little bit more.
Tests sometimes deceiving
“It’s like playing a game where you know you’ve got a really tough opposition where you’re trying to do right but the opposition is what it is. No amount of good behavior can make up for a mistake once it gets in in its ability to spread. We’ve learned that you can’t trust necessarily negative testing. Because as we’ve known, it could be there and still test negative for a time or two.
“Look, the safest way is you have to assume that everybody has it and assume you have it and stay out of close contact as much as humanly possible — and mask usage and all those types of things. When you go face to face with it you see how really difficult it is.
“Seeing some of the stories of some of the people that have had it, [such as] staff, that’s why I don’t like talking about individual anecdotes. We’ve got so many in our program. We’ve said this over and over again. It is to be taken very seriously and we’re going to try to do what we can to get through December.”
Lashlee on quarterbacks
▪ More, from offensive coordinator Rhett Lashlee, on what would happen if the Hurricanes, like the NFL’s Denver Broncos on Sunday, didn’t have enough quarterbacks available to play:
“I don’t want to think about it,’’ Lashlee said. “What the Broncos had to deal with [Sunday] was unique. I know the ACC has put together a protocol for a limited number of players in positions to be able to play the game, and I don’t foresee anybody in our league being forced to play without a healthy quarterback.
“But if that happened, we’d do what they did. We’d get the dry erase board out, draw up the best we could cook up. Go back to the old...wildcat days when I was at Arkansas and see what we could cook up.’’
This story was originally published November 30, 2020 at 5:19 PM.
