The past few days, Miami Hurricanes offensive coordinator Dan Enos sat back and watched the film of UM’s 24-20 loss to the Florida Gators over the weekend, paying particular attention to how his freshman QB Jarren Williams acquainted himself in his first career start.
His verdict? Not good enough.
“The first thing is I grade the guys on they either played well enough for us to win or did not,” Enos said. “He did not play well enough for us to win the game. We left a lot of plays on the field, Jarren left a lot of plays on the field. I was very disappointed from that standpoint. He did some good things but very inconsistent with his pocket posture, with his eyes, missing throws. It was very uncharacteristic of how he had practiced leading up to that.”
Although Williams was in his first career start against probably the toughest defense he will see all season, Enos didn’t want to hear any excuses.
“I have always been a guy where it didn’t matter if it was your first game or your 40th game, there is a standard of excellence,” Enos said. “If we coach and teach you how to do it, we expect you to do it every play, every rep, and every day. That is a coach’s job. We are striving for perfection. We are never going to reach perfection, but I think the standard is excellence and perfection, and the closer we can get to that, the better our football team is going to be.
“In order to have championship-level quarterback play, you have to hold him to that standard every day. You can’t say ‘Hey it’s ok, this is your first game’. We understand there are going to be mistakes and growing pains, but you can’t settle and make a soft bed for them because that is going to lead to them not pushing as hard as they can on their own… I don’t see Jarren as he is. I see him how he can be.”
Another point of contention about the offenses’ performance was the offensive line giving up 10 sacks and 16 TFL. However, Enos viewed some of those sacks as being on Williams.
“I had it down five of the sacks were his fault, 100 percent on the quarterback,” Enos said. “Two times he was out of the pocket, stepped out of bounds. He has to learn to throw the ball away. He had very, very poor ball security as well. Two fumbles where he doesn’t have both hands on the ball. One he should have thrown the ball away and the other he has the check down wide open and doesn’t throw it, holds it too long.
“Again, did some good things but a lot of room for improvement as far as that goes… Just throw the ball away when it is applicable. Throw the ball away and we don’t lose that yardage. We didn’t protect well enough, but some of those things are on the quarterback.”
What did Williams do well in the game against UF?
“I thought some things Jarren did do well is compete and show some toughness,” Enos said. “He showed competitiveness. We certainly have to be way more consistent at that position if we want to beat good teams… There were some good moments where he had good pocket posture and his eyes were downfield and he made good throws. There is a correlation there and we have to get him to do that on a consistent basis. It was frustrating from an offensive standpoint because I felt like we played well enough to win as a team, but we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain.
“There’ll be mistakes, growing pains along the way,” Enos said. “But don’t lower their expectation level. … Maybe we are too demanding, but our football team is going to benefit from being around a bunch of coaches like that.”
With sophomore ATH Tate Martell seeing the 4th most snaps on the team at wideout, it meant that sophomore WR’s such as Mark Pope, Dee Wiggins, and Brian Hightower saw less playing time on Saturday.
“Tate had more snaps because of the packages that we were doing,” Enos said. “The other guys are going to play as we feel we want to put our best guys on the field that can make plays.”
In terms of the gameplan that was put in place for the Gators, Enos felt confident that it was something Miami could have won with and he didn’t see anything from UF he didn’t expect.
“From a schematic standpoint, we felt very good - there wasn’t one thing Florida did we weren’t prepared for,” Enos said. “All that stuff was what we saw on tape. Actually, they played softer in the secondary than we thought. It starts with me, but we weren’t prepared enough to win the game, have to do a better job.”
When asked about the perception that he called a “vanilla” game with too many low-risk throws that did not challenge UF deep, Enos fought back against that notion.
“We were very aggressive,” Enos said. “On our first sack of the game, Jeff Thomas was wide open for a touchdown. Turn the tape on. He spins the guy around and is wide open for a touchdown. On the third play of the game, he is wide open on a corner route, but the right tackle doesn’t touch the four-technique… second play of the second drive we have him wide open on a deep crossing route, tackle got beat. We have KJ (Osborn) open in the third quarter on a big crossing route, left tackle got beat again.
“We were very aggressive in how we called the game. There were a lot of plays out there we did not make that were out there for us to make.”
Although there wasn’t much praise from Enos going around, he found the performances of the running backs in DeeJay Dallas and Cam Harris exceptional.
“We didn’t have a lot of winning performances on a whole, but both those were a winning performance for us,” Enos said.
As the team now moves on and begins preparations for UNC, Enos is hopeful that Williams will be able to improve on his mistakes these next two weeks.
“Hopefully this week we can get a lot of work in and he can regroup and we will do our best to get him better next week,” Enos said.
**In rewatching Miami’s opening game loss to UF, defensive coordinator Blake Baker has already identified areas of improvement he wants to focus on during UM’s bye week coming up.
“Yesterday was ‘Tell The Truth Sunday’ - we tell the truth and let them know exactly what they’re supposed to do properly,” Baker said. “They get it. There were a bunch of mad guys working around here, not necessarily sad. That means they took it to heart.”
The key issue he identified? Tackling.
“The biggest thing is tackling, we did a poor job tackling at all three levels,” Baker said. “The 66-yard touchdown, three missed tackles - should have been a first down… Schematically, they did a good job and had done something that we hadn’t necessarily seen or prepared for, but we got to tackle the catch.
“The number 2 thing is we have to be able to communicate better across the board. There were some breakdowns from a lack of communication that cost us. But we got to eliminate the big play and a lot of that comes from tackling.”
Baker admitted that the staff was concerned about the tackling aspect of the defense heading into the game.
“It’s always a worry going into the season opener. You tackle maybe twice, maybe three times max going into the season opener and that’s the first time you’ve tackled really since spring ball, which you only tackle two or three times," Baker said. "It’s become more of a challenge and there’s got to be some give and take on the offensive and defensive side of the ball. But that is always one of your concerns going into the first game of the year.
"We do tackle circuit every day. We probably need to do a better job as coaches, you know, emphasizing strike zones and getting low. And then angles. We took some really poor angles so we have a pursuit drill that we do and that’s what we’ve done the last two days tackling and pursuing.”
Baker saw a big communication breakdown in the 65-yard catch by UF receiver Josh Hammond over striker Gilbert Frierson in the fourth quarter that led to the game-winning score for UF.
“It wasn’t just Gilbert - Gilbert is the one everyone on TV sees chasing the guy down, but we have to have a safety playing the middle of the field,” Baker said. “I know Gilbert is the one that gets pointed out, but there’s a safety that needs to be over the top - that ball should never be thrown. We didn’t do that and paid the price for it.”
What did he see as the positives being shown by the defense?
“We did some really, really good things,” Baker said. “There are a lot of positives, and it’s about Miami, not necessarily who we’re playing… Overall, I thought there was some good push in the pocket. It forced two interceptions even though it doesn’t necessarily go down as a sack.”
Baker pointed to three senior backups in S Robert Knowles, DT Chigozie Nnoruka, and DE Trevon Hill as those that he saw as deserving of more reps.
“Rob Knowles is the first guy that comes to mind,” Baker said. “He did a great job. We have to do a better job of getting him on the field more, and I told him that… I think we have to probably play some more guys - overall I think guys will push for more playing time off last week’s performance.”
As he is also Miami’s linebackers coach, Baker was asked to evaluate the linebacker’s performance, specifically Shaq Quarterman and Mike Pinckney.
"I thought they played average," Baker said. "They know they didn't play their best game. I thought maybe they tried to press too much, do too much. They get it. They'll bounce back."
