Manny Diaz: Miami ‘to look at some different changes’ as offense struggles, losses mount
The Miami Hurricanes’ bye week comes at a pivotal moment in the Manny Diaz era. Miami began the season in the top 15 and with College Football Playoff aspirations, and is instead on pace for its second losing season in three years. Even before the Hurricanes lost their third game Thursday, Diaz came under heavy fire, and the outside criticism grew so loud he and Julio Frenk both felt the need to address it last week.
For the first time since the immediate aftermath of Miami’s 30-28 loss to the Virginia Cavaliers, the coach gave his assessment about the state of the team Monday in an appearance on WQAM. While he argued a five-game stretch shouldn’t “define” the Hurricanes, Diaz made it clear the team is not meeting internal expectations, either.
“This is the University of Miami. That comes with this job,” Diaz told “The Joe Rose Show with Zach Krantz.” “We’ve got high expectations for our program. If we’re not meeting our expectations, that’s disappointing to us. It only makes sense that it doesn’t meet the expectations of those outside our program, so, to me, the pressure externally is no different than the pressure internally. We’ve got to get it right, we’ve got to get it fixed, we’ve got to admit when it doesn’t look the way we want it to look.”
Much of the conversation centered on the offense, which has dropped from 26th in the country in scoring last year to 58th in 2021. On Thursday, Miami scored seven points in the first half and went three-and-out — or worse — on each of its first three drives against Virginia, which has one of the 50 worst scoring defenses in the nation.
Part of it had to do with the quarterback — Tyler Van Dyke was making his first start against an FBS opponent and opened 4 of 11 for 63 yards — but the rest of the unit didn’t do him many favors. The Cavaliers were allowing more than 200 rushing yards per game and a 5.2 yards per carry, and the Hurricanes ran for 31 yards on 17 carries in the first half.
Even when it got on track in the second half, Miami still only finished with 169 rushing yards on 4.3 yards per carry and 372 total yards on 5.5 yards per play — all worse than the season averages against Virginia.
Even after making more changes along the offensive line and elevating three freshman wide receivers into the rotation, Diaz kept open the possibility for even more changes on offense.
“Everybody inside the building, I think, is disappointed and frustrated with our lack of output on offense, but there’s some individual things that we’ve got to improve on,” Diaz said. “We’ve got to look at some different changes, lineup changes, to find our best 11 out there and then also understand where we’re strong and find a way to play the game where we’re strong.”
There’s also no real clarity about when — or even if — D’Eriq King might return. The starting quarterback went down with a shoulder injury in the Hurricanes’ Week 3 loss to the Michigan State Spartans and has now missed two consecutive games, forcing Van Dyke to make the first two starts of his career.
Diaz has typically said King is being evaluated day by day and week by week, but he was asked explicitly Monday whether there’s a chance King may not return in 2021 and he didn’t rule it out.
“D’Eriq is just rehabbing through his shoulder, and kind of taking a real time of where that’s at and what the best treatment for that going forward will be. It’s all kind of in flux,” Diaz said. “We’ve got fingers crossed that this thing continues to improve and we’ll go from there.”
With Diaz’s seat as hot as it has been in his three years as coach, he now has to go about finding solutions without his senior quarterback there to bail out a struggling offense.
It’s part of what made the loss last week such a gut punch. Even with King out and nearly 10 other contributors injured, Miami nearly escaped with a win despite being thoroughly outplayed.
This week, it meant there was no whitewashing what happened in September, though.
“That was the sucker punch from the game the other night. With really a first time quarterback and all the guys that we had out on both sides of the ball, and as bad as it looked for as long as it looked to find the resilience to come back and give yourself a chance to win that game only to have it taken away from you in such a harsh manner — that’s tough on our guys,” Diaz said, “but what it does do is it’s forcing us to look at why were we in that situation to begin with. And that’s something that is on me and everyone in our program has to take that type of accountability at some point, and that’s what this bye week’s giving us the ability to do is say, OK, let’s look back over the first month. It was obviously a disappointing month, but it doesn’t have to be the month that defines us going forward and let’s look at the tape, see what the tape says and try to fix what you don’t like to see, and that’s where the relationship between the coaches and the players have got to get this thing together and figured out.”
This story was originally published October 4, 2021 at 9:19 AM.
