Three points. Nearly as many turnovers (five) as first downs (six). A seemingly hopeless deficit four minutes into the game. Every bowl season has a few blowouts and egg-layings, but Miami’s 35-3 loss to Wisconsin in the Pinstripe Bowl quickly became the most formulaic.
Mark Richt must now be willing to un-Richt Miami’s offense
To solve Miami’s 2018 issues, Richt will have to initiate a massive offensive overhaul. Is he capable?
Rich Barnes-USA TODAY Sports
If the Hurricanes got off to a rocky offensive start, we knew they’d have a hard time overcoming it. And they threw an interception on their first snap. Wisconsin scored two touchdowns in 26 seconds, and that was that. Miami’s defense, as it had all year, fought to keep things close, forcing a couple of missed field goals and keeping the Badgers scoreless for the next 38 minutes.
It was only a matter of time until the dam burst, though. And in a battle of two teams that had begun the year with Playoff aspirations and finished unranked, only one put its best foot forward in New York.
There’s good news, however: the season’s finally officially over, and the most important offseason of Mark Richt’s career can finally begin.
Back in November, with the Canes nursing a three-game losing streak and an intensely disappointing 5-4 record (about to become 5-5), I wrote about the offseason ahead. It was clear which personally difficult changes Richt needed to prepare for, and it was unclear whether he would make them.
Bobby Bowden, Richt’s former mentor at Florida State, became the standard bearer for consistently elite play when he took the Noles to 14 consecutive top-five finishes. But there was clear regression over his last nine seasons, caused in part by an over-reliance on son Jeff Bowden, who spent six years as FSU offensive coordinator after Richt himself took the Georgia job in 2001. Years later, Richt brought son Jon in as QBs coach despite Jon’s inexperience (he was 25 when he was hired and is 28 now).
Loyalty and a struggle to innovate held Bowden back dramatically. He remained at FSU for nearly a decade after the top-five streak ended, in part because of the legacy he had created.
Richt doesn’t have nearly that much of a leash. [...]
If he doesn’t feel coordinator Thomas Brown is ready for play-calling duties, or if Brown’s philosophy is identical to Richt’s, then Richt needs to replace himself with someone else as play-caller. And that change should probably expand to include the QBs coach.
With this defense, The U will remain close to a breakthrough. But with this offense, it’s not far from further collapse.
The Canes did rally in November. After falling to 5-5, they slapped around Virginia Tech and Pitt, rallying back to 22nd in S&P+ and ever so briefly looking like the ACC Coastal favorite they were supposed to be all year.
But since that post, Miami’s off-field developments were less than positive. First, Jeff Thomas was dismissed.
A former East St. Louis blue-chipper and Miami’s leading receiver in Ahmmon Richards’ injury-plagued absence, Thomas left late in the regular season, eventually announcing his transfer to Illinois. In his two-game absence, Miami quarterbacks completed a combined 12 of 41 passes. Not that they were doing so hot before his absence.
Manny Diaz left.
Richt’s defensive coordinator was a massive success. He inherited a unit that ranked 52nd in Def. S&P+ in Al Golden’s final season, fielded top-25 units in 2016-17, then ratcheted things up to seventh this fall. They gave up 17 or fewer points in six games, quite a feat considering the favors the offense wasn’t doing.
In December, Temple announced Diaz would replace Geoff Collins, who had just taken the Georgia Tech job. It was a long time coming for Diaz, a one-time wunderkind who battled his way back up the ladder after a strange stint as Mack Brown’s DC at Texas.
But it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Miami.
Richt promoted safeties coach Ephraim Banda and OLBs coach Jonathan Patke to co-coordinators, a move that could pay off. The Canes could lose defensive stars to graduation and/or the NFL draft, but young stars like end Jonathan Garvin and corner Trajan Bandy should assure that the defense retains plenty of upside.
Early Signing Period didn’t go particularly well.
Recruiting is a fickle creature. A year ago, with a recent 15-game winning streak, Richt inked an outstanding class, eighth in the country and second in the ACC, per the 247Sports Composite. The haul featured 15 four- or five-star prospects, all still listed on the roster. It could still end up a program-changing class.
2019’s class, however, came in as Miami was getting ready to lose its ninth game in 16 tries. It has six four-stars. It ranks outside of 247’s top 30, behind schools with far less fertile bases, like Purdue and the team that just destroyed the Canes in The Bronx. A class of only Miami de-commits would rank about as high as Miami’s actual signees.
Luckily, recruiting is fickle. Plus, if the 2018 class lives up to hype, you can survive a rickety year. But nothing reinforces negative narratives like a paltry haul, and those narratives are now screaming.
The QB situation somehow got even muddier.
Heading into 2018, it was easy to boil Miami’s prospects down into a simple sentence: if the Canes have a QB, they could be great.
Spoiler: Miami didn’t.
- Against power conference defenses in the regular season, senior Malik Rosier completed 51 percent of his passes with a ghastly 99.6 passer rating.
- That offered redshirt freshman N’Kosi Perry a massive opportunity; he completed 48 percent of his passes against P5 teams, with a 103.4 rating.
- Despite newly liberal redshirting rules, Richt elected not to give true freshman Jarren Williams much of a shot — the top-100 prospect from Georgia threw just three passes. Another redshirt freshman, Cade Weldon, also threw three.
Rosier started the bowl, had his first pass picked, and ended up 5-for-12 with three interceptions. (He also had a 62-yard run that set up Miami’s only points.) Perry, at one point thought to be suspended for this game, went 1-for-5 with another pick.
Even with a thin receiving corps, the QB position was inexcusably bad. That goes for Thursday night and the entire season.
If there’s a positive spin at this point, it’s that Miami’s problems are spelled out in towering font.
After the Pinstripe Bowl loss, Miami athletic director Blake James released a statement.
Our football team’s performance tonight — and at other times this season — is simply unacceptable to all of us who love The U. I am committed to getting UM Football back to national prominence and that process is underway. We will compete for ACC and national championships and I know that Coach Richt is alongside me in that commitment to excellence.
The task ahead is no different than when I was writing about it in November, but with the departures of Diaz and Thomas and the shaky recruiting, the urgency has grown.
No matter how you define it, a “commitment to excellence” will require an overhaul of Richt’s offensive staff.
- Richt needs a proven quarterbacks coach to replace his son.
- He needs a new play-caller to replace himself.
- He might need a transfer stopgap at quarterback, too. There are certainly some options out there.
In a lot of cases, we scream for drastic infusions right before what’s already there ends up working. This is not one of those cases.
Miami will still have a high-upside defense in 2019, not to mention a nice crop of second-year blue-chippers. But to fix the Canes’ primary issue, Richt will have to make the kind of changes he hasn’t had to make for most of his career.
Can he?
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