All Facts IMO (SIAP)

[GojiraCane]

Iirc, the player who got injured in the FSU game was Duke. We came away healthy besides that. The only “on paper” advantage both UL & VT had was at the QB position.

VT’s leading receivers that game was
Joshua Stanford (2* #269th ranked WR) who went for 7 & 107 w/ a TD, & Willie Byrn (a non-ranked player) who went for 6 and 105.

VT’s leading rusher who all of a sudden had an Al Bundy game against us was OUTSIDE LINEBACKER TREY EDMUNDS, a low 4* kid & #36 LB in the nation coming out!

Losing Duke Johnson hurt big time, although he was replaced by a 4* in Crawford, it wasn’t the same running attack b/c Crawford was more athlete than pure RB. With that said, that’s not why we lost to VT, Duke, or UL. We lost to them b/c we had a **** poor coaching scheme that hammied our talent, particularly on defense. Our blue chip players looked like JAGs on defense b/c of the f’ing scheme. We lost b/c we fielded the 89th ranked Defense that season, despite the guys we had drafted & on paper talent.

Sure. A bad scheme can take away most if not all of the advantages that we would have otherwise had.

I checked and you're right, I guess Duke was the only significant injury. I thought I remembered reading though at the time that we had come out of FSU all banged up, but I might have been conflating that with 2016.

Stephen Morris was also playing with an Achilles injury the entire season.

 

[Brooklyndee]

Can anyone make an argument that UM isn't more talented than everyone on their schedule in 2024?

I'm not asking about winning games. I'm talking about strictly "on paper" talent. As far as I can see, Miami has a more talented roster than every single one of their 2024 opponents. Maybe...maaaaaybe you can make a point for FSU if you want to assume their transfers all pay off. Otherwise if Miami doesn't go 12-1 next year, the idea that just recruiting at an elite level can overcome all coaching failures is proven completely false.

Question. Do kids come straight out of high school playing at their peak or do kids need playing time to develope? With that same argument are you then stating mike Norvell is elite since he went 13-0? Why does everyone wanna think sports lives in strictly black and white. Was our 2001 team as good in 01 as we were in 99? Context goes a long way.

 

[RedSquare]

Question. Do kids come straight out of high school playing at their peak or do kids need playing time to develope? With that same argument are you then stating mike Norvell is elite since he went 13-0? Why does everyone wanna think sports lives in strictly black and white. Was our 2001 team as good in 01 as we were in 99? Context goes a long way.

100%

Of course they need time to develop. As far as I have ever seen. there’s never been a kid in any sport that came out of their high school/teen years playing at their peak. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.

And the same goes for elite or championship caliber teams. Putting aside the injury factor to key players that can affect team performance, no great team starts the season playing better than they finished it. Look at 2001. As badly as they bit(c)hslapped a good Penn State squad on opening day, they still got better as the season went along.

I don’t think it’s ever been any other way.

 

[DTP]

Question. Do kids come straight out of high school playing at their peak or do kids need playing time to develope? With that same argument are you then stating mike Norvell is elite since he went 13-0? Why does everyone wanna think sports lives in strictly black and white. Was our 2001 team as good in 01 as we were in 99? Context goes a long way.

I don’t get your point. I’m not sure where I mentioned kids being elite straight out of high school. Nor is there any mention of Mike Norvell. The topic is that Miami has out recruited a majority of their opponents for years yet consistently loses to “lesser” teams. So that means one of three things:

1) recruiting rankings are wrong and pointless. We’ve all had this discussion. The best teams in college football consistently finish at or near the top in recruiting rankings so there’s proven validity to them.

2) recruiting rankings are accurate for everyone but Miami. I mean, every team has bad evals and busts but it’s almost statistically impossible for Miami to have had such a HUGE percentage of bad evals over such a long period of time. There’s no way they just haven’t had any good players. Or at least enough good players to be better than 7-6 while playing ACC schedules every year.

So that leaves 3) Bums for coaches. These are guys that have at times accumulated enough talent on a roster that they should have been at least capable of winning a division title. Guys who neither develop young players nor put them in the position to succeed. Guys who insist on doing things the way they want instead of the way that works. Miami’s talent should have made this a 9 win program consistently over the last 20 years. Especially considering the fact that they play in a garbage conference with very little competition. Yet Miami has only been a 7 win program for a long time now.

 

[Orig.CaneSawMassacre]

I was saying his charts are showing how our 2024 roster has huge differences on talent of this 2024 team to past years rosters. So whatever the recruiting rank we received it just doesn’t add up.
I’m not disagreeing with you but something is off there on the rankings. I clearly stated we weren’t recruiting well at key positions consistently. We weren’t stacking talent on top of talent. We would have elite players at a couple positions without depth.

All of your concerns are valid and I can see why YOU feel that way.

I see all of our areas of concerns are being seriously addressed. And I just prefer to be in the half glass full group. I’ve said this is the make or break year for Mario. He goes without a major injury at QB, DL, DB that he needs to win 10 games this year. I’m optimistic he can do it because he is cognitively recognizing wholes and addressing them.

@Thefranchise

I was saying his charts are showing how our 2024 roster has huge differences on talent of this 2024 team to past years rosters. So whatever the recruiting rank we received it just doesn’t add up.
I’m not disagreeing with you but something is off there on the rankings. I clearly stated we weren’t recruiting well at key positions consistently. We weren’t stacking talent on top of talent. We would have elite players at a couple positions without depth.

All of your concerns are valid and I can see why YOU feel that way.

I see all of our areas of concerns are being seriously addressed. And I just prefer to be in the half glass full group. I’ve said this is the make or break year for Mario. He goes without a major injury at QB, DL, DB that he needs to win 10 games this year. I’m optimistic he can do it because he is cognitively recognizing wholes and addressing them.

@ The Franchise - thanks for bringing some logical insight or perspective to the conversation. Relly and I agreed and disagreed on certain aspects but eventually realized we realized we mostly had the same opinion, but more importantly the same goal for this team. You care to bring anything to the table besides your vomit emoji?

 

[grover]

I don’t get your point. I’m not sure where I mentioned kids being elite straight out of high school. Nor is there any mention of Mike Norvell. The topic is that Miami has out recruited a majority of their opponents for years yet consistently loses to “lesser” teams. So that means one of three things:

1) recruiting rankings are wrong and pointless. We’ve all had this discussion. The best teams in college football consistently finish at or near the top in recruiting rankings so there’s proven validity to them.

2) recruiting rankings are accurate for everyone but Miami. I mean, every team has bad evals and busts but it’s almost statistically impossible for Miami to have had such a HUGE percentage of bad evals over such a long period of time. There’s no way they just haven’t had any good players. Or at least enough good players to be better than 7-6 while playing ACC schedules every year.

So that leaves 3) Bums for coaches. These are guys that have at times accumulated enough talent on a roster that they should have been at least capable of winning a division title. Guys who neither develop young players nor put them in the position to succeed. Guys who insist on doing things the way they want instead of the way that works. Miami’s talent should have made this a 9 win program consistently over the last 20 years. Especially considering the fact that they play in a garbage conference with very little competition. Yet Miami has only been a 7 win program for a long time now.

I appreciate many of your posts. So not attacking. But I think Dee's point is pretty obvious, that building a winning program is more nuanced than just recruiting or just developing or just calling games or just establishing culture or just hiring staff. And within every one of these inputs, there's an element of time involved.

Specific to recruiting, Mario's classes may be talented, but they are still young. His mulligan class starts year 3 this 2024 season. So either juniors or RS sophomores. The rest are second years or haven't even started practicing with the team yet. The vast majority of 4 and 5 stars don't have Bain and Francis type impacts their true freshmen years. Most take 2-3 years to turn into great college players. Coop in year 2 was dramatically better than Coop as a freshman. JW and LT both took major steps in 2023, as did Rivers. You can't count on Patterson, Trader, Lightfoot and Scott to go out there on game 1 and dominate.

Note that I'm on record saying we should win 10 +/- 1. I just think your 3 options above are too extreme.

 

[SWFLHurricane]

Sure. A bad scheme can take away most if not all of the advantages that we would have otherwise had.

I checked and you're right, I guess Duke was the only significant injury. I thought I remembered reading though at the time that we had come out of FSU all banged up, but I might have been conflating that with 2016.

Stephen Morris was also playing with an Achilles injury the entire season.

How'd he hurt his Achilles??....running to grab another Snickers??

 

[MiamiVice7]

I don't think most realize how good ward really is. I'll scream it from the top of the mountains. Cam this past season we win the acc and compete for something relevant. If our defense can give a similar output to last season we are going to be in the playoffs this season especially since it's a top 12.

This is my hope.

Thing is, Cam is objectively pretty **** good. Just in general, in a vacuum. Upgrade for nearly every cfb team and good enough to make a good team a contender.

As Canes fans, though, we get to see him relative to the very long list of average or worse QBs here for quite some time now. So if he balls, it’ll seem particularly amazing to us. It’ll be awesome. Something we won’t have seen since [before I had kids, before I graduated, got married, insert any other it’s-been-forever phrase].

Sure hope it happens, I’ve been all packed and ready to go for a minute.

 

[Glow]

I know it’s not a perfect science but can we agree that the prospects we are getting now are different from the previous regimes? I’m specifically talking Miami, I haven’t seen this caliber of talent as a whole since Butch. Not saying it’s Butch levels but it’s different regardless of rankings in terms of tape, MR AG RS LC and MD we’re not getting kids like this especially up front. Yea sometimes team out perform their ranking make a bowl here and there. But for sustained elite success imo is maximum talent overload (pause). If that makes any sense, we can agree the Pancakes FM Bains Lightfoots Scott’s would never come to UM under those other staffs.

Miami has always recruited well enough to win ACC games but I think re: talent rankings fans overestimate the talent-related margin for error with those older canes teams that recruited 11th-15th and had bad evals and didn't dominate the line of scrimmage, that isn't the level of talent that is gonna automatically run through Power 5 conference opponents, especially not with sus coaching and QB play, the gap between that type of roster and some team at 40th isn't always as big as that number gap sounds, it's more like a "B/B+ vs C/C+" type of gap. Miami is getting closer to the A/A+ talent level that more clearly separates from the pack.

I am keeping an eye on how good they are at developing OL because OL has a high bust rate and can be a tricky position to figure out, Ohio State recruits top 3 every year and their fans are not happy with how their line has been looking and they have been losing the LOS against Michigan, if the canes OL is gonna be strong most years under Mario + Mirabal then that is a real comparative advantage that past regimes did not have.

The weakness of this HC was expected to be conservative plodding pistol condensed offense and bad QB recruiting. They got a much better QB than I was expecting, let's see how the offense looks now.

 

[Dwinstitles]

Miami has always recruited well enough to win ACC games but I think re: talent rankings fans overestimate the talent-related margin for error with those older canes teams that recruited 11th-15th and had bad evals and didn't dominate the line of scrimmage, that isn't the level of talent that is gonna automatically run through Power 5 conference opponents, especially not with sus coaching and QB play, the gap between that type of roster and some team at 40th isn't always as big as that number gap sounds, it's more like a "B/B+ vs C/C+" type of gap. Miami is getting closer to the A/A+ talent level that more clearly separates from the pack.

I am keeping an eye on how good they are at developing OL because OL has a high bust rate and can be a tricky position to figure out, Ohio State recruits top 3 every year and their fans are not happy with how their line has been looking and they have been losing the LOS against Michigan, if the canes OL is gonna be strong most years under Mario + Mirabal then that is a real comparative advantage that past regimes did not have.

The weakness of this HC was expected to be conservative plodding pistol condensed offense and bad QB recruiting. They got a much better QB than I was expecting, let's see how the offense looks now.

First paragraph is something I wanted to explain but didn’t have the right words or how to. That’s exactly how I see it. Post is on point the whole post, pause

 

[DTP]

I appreciate many of your posts. So not attacking. But I think Dee's point is pretty obvious, that building a winning program is more nuanced than just recruiting or just developing or just calling games or just establishing culture or just hiring staff. And within every one of these inputs, there's an element of time involved.

Specific to recruiting, Mario's classes may be talented, but they are still young. His mulligan class starts year 3 this 2024 season. So either juniors or RS sophomores. The rest are second years or haven't even started practicing with the team yet. The vast majority of 4 and 5 stars don't have Bain and Francis type impacts their true freshmen years. Most take 2-3 years to turn into great college players. Coop in year 2 was dramatically better than Coop as a freshman. JW and LT both took major steps in 2023, as did Rivers. You can't count on Patterson, Trader, Lightfoot and Scott to go out there on game 1 and dominate.

Note that I'm on record saying we should win 10 +/- 1. I just think your 3 options above are too extreme.

I’m not just talking about the current roster. Which, by the way, is still way more talented than pretty much everyone on our schedule’s rosters. I’m going back 20 years of having more talent than 90% of our opponents yet only winning 60% of the games.

 

[DTP]

How'd he hurt his Achilles??....running to grab another Snickers??

Playing way too late in a game that Miami won by 70.

 

[grover]

I’m not just talking about the current roster. Which, by the way, is still way more talented than pretty much everyone on our schedule’s rosters. I’m going back 20 years of having more talent than 90% of our opponents yet only winning 60% of the games.

One of these things is not like the other: Coker (w/o Butch's kids), Shannon, Richt, Manny and Mario.

The pre-Mario coaches may have had more highly rated talent on average than their opponents. But they had swiss-cheese holes across their starting 22 and 2-deep. So we'd have Olsen and Beason, while having to start a Romeo Davis and rotate in a 240 lb Vegas Franklin at DT. We had Javaris James and Craig Cooper as our RBs. We started Earl Moore and Corey King at DT, or more recently Flagg and Jennings at LB. Our OL was hot garbage throughout the Richt/Diaz years.

Mario took 3 off-seasons to get there. But his talent, while lacking in difference makers, is Top P4 quality across both the starting 22 and most of the 2-deep. Yeah, we have a few holes. But nothing like those previous rosters which had big gaping holes through which opposing coordinators could drive a Mack Truck. Also, Mario's roster gets better every year. His rosters are just different.

I won't even start in on culture. Pata, Willie Cooper getting shot in the ***, Aldarius Johnson never putting in the work, Shannon's doghouse, the Shapiro debacle, Eddie Johnson, Malik goofing off and not studying the playbook, Jarrid Williams playing high vs FIU...

I'm not saying there haven't been some head scratchers. That 2010 team was stacked. But they really had no depth behind the starters in key spots. Like QB, for example. When Jacory went down and Whipple threw 2 interceptions in 6 passes, they lost to UVA and Golden had to burn Stephen Morris' redshirt. That hurt. ... But they should have won double digit games for sure.

By and large, though, IMO this is a totally different team, with a totally different attitude. I am bought in. I hope they prove me right.