Manny Diaz, And The Unending Allure Of "The U"
Two decades removed from greatness, Miami is still chasing ghosts.
In his 2004 book Cane Mutiny, Bruce Feldman details the rise, fall and resurrection of Miami football through the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s. Throughout the book, Feldman presents two themes, both of which are inextricably tied to Miami’s program.
Firstly, Miami is obsessed with being the cool, bad boys of college football. That was the identity that sparked the rise of the program in the 80s, and it’s an identity that closely matches the reputation of the city. Secondly and more importantly, Miami – more than maybe any other program in America – is in a constant, unstoppable identity crisis.
It’s strange, given how defined Miami’s “correct” identity is. The Hurricanes, when they’re truly “the U” are the embodiment of swagger, the hard-hitting, fumble-forcing villains that crush their opponents and then dance in the end zone.
Even when the Canes were winning, though, not doing it the correct way was often a sin far worse than losing. Under the terminally uncool Dennis Erickson from 1989-1994, Miami went 63-9, won two national titles, and everyone absolutely hated it. Fans wanted more wins, the administration wanted a less edgy program (as did Erickson), and former players wanted the swagger of the Jimmy Johnson era back.
According to Feldman’s reporting, former Cane wideout Michael Irvin called current (at the time) Cane wideout Lamar Thomas in 1990 after a loss to BYU, complaining about the lack of celebrations after big plays. Miami won 10 of its next 11 games, but did so without swagger, so the discomfort continued.
If there was angst in and around the program when things were going so well, it’s easy to understand why the situation at Miami has become so dire in the last two decades. Once Larry Coker’s recruiting fell off in the early 2000s and the wins went away, Miami tried to chase the magic by hiring someone who definitely “got” the program by bringing in Randy Shannon, who played under Johnson in 80s.
Shannon claimed roughly seven wins a season, and was pushed out of the door after four seasons. After Shannon, Al Golden notched similar totals, and met the same fate.
Both coaches suffered from a lot of the same issues, because neither of them were able to get to the core of what actually defined Miami when it was rolling. The swagger is great, as is the cool-factor, but those teams were excellent because of elite talent and elite coaching. Without both of those things, being cool and having swagger is only good for seven wins and an angry fanbase.
Of the post-Coker coaches, the closest that Miami has gotten to reaching those heights was under Mark Richt, who captured the feeling of old Miami for about three weeks in 2017, only for it to all fall apart at the end of the season.
Unlike any of the other attempts to recapture the energy of prime Miami, Richt understood the need for great coaching and talent. He wasn’t able to sustain it, but that 2017 team (on defense, at least) wasn’t a fluke, as some considered it to be. The design was correct, it just wasn’t structurally sound.
It was a roster that had plenty of talent and an elite defensive scheme led by coordinator and now head coach Manny Diaz. The Canes operated in chaos by design, looking to force as many turnovers and mistakes as possible by confusing the offense at every point.
Even in 2018 and 2019 as the overall record dropped, Diaz’s defense actually improved from 2017, moving from 21.0 points allowed per game in 2017 to 19.5 in 2018 and 20.2 in 2019. The issue is obviously still on offense, but defensively, Miami is there. It has captured the scheme that it needs to have success with the players it has.
A lot of it comes back to that idea of creating chaos, which Diaz has spoken about at length. To do that, Diaz employs a ton of fire zone blitzing, a very simple, very basic zone blitz concept that can be dressed up to look quite a bit more complex than it actually is.
Fire zone is a five-man rush, with two three-man zones behind it, essentially like a cover 3 with one guy taken out of the backfield of the defense. The magic in fire zone is the fact that you can bring that fifth rusher from anywhere, and Miami under Diaz is more than happy to oblige.
The 2017 Canes defense, easily the most disruptive of the Diaz era, understood this very well. They seemed unbeatable against Virginia Tech, Notre Dame and Virginia in consecutive weeks nearing the end of the season, rising as high as No. 2 in the nation, thanks largely to this concept.
On this play, Miami brings the five rushers by rushing two linebackers on either side of the center, who doesn’t have a lineman to deal with but is easily overwhelmed by the flood of linebackers. Miami drops an edge rusher into a short zone across the middle, and with five defensive backs on the field, the zone is strong enough to make things tough on quarterback Josh Jackson, giving the blitz time to get home.
With help from the linebackers up the middle, Amari Cooper’s outside-in stunt gets him past the distracted center without any trouble, and he has a free shot at the quarterback. Even though Virginia Tech has five linemen to account for the five-man rush, the fire zone allows Miami to overload that center and create a numbers advantage. It takes very good defensive linemen and linebackers to pull this off, but it’s essentially unstoppable with just five blockers when done well.
The fire zone blitz also does well to wreck a quarterback’s internal rush clock. When the Canes bring just four rushers while dropping into a more traditional coverage in the back seven, Jackson is still thinking about getting the ball out quickly to avoid the rush. When none of the quick options are open, he panics and Miami has another sack.
This is one of the big benefits of building a defense around chaos: when done well, you don’t have to dedicate extra rushers to ruin a quarterback’s timing. The threat of the rush is enough to make a college passer overly conservative.
When a quarterback gets finicky like this, it’s essentially a guarantee that he’ll make mistakes, which is what Miami’s defense was built to create. After being tormented by the fire zone all game, Miami dropping seven into coverage and rushing just four throws Jackson for a loop again.
He has extra time, but he’s still not really reading the defense, because he doesn’t think that he has the time to do so. Miami drops into the zone, Jackson misses the read badly, and Sheldrick Redwine just has to jump a wobbly pass for a game ending interception.
Against Notre Dame a week later, Miami followed the same gameplan. It rushed five frequently to open the game, giving Brandon Wimbush trouble, only to drop into more traditional coverage looks as soon as Wimbush’s clock was sped up by the rush.
Here, Miami shows a traditional four-man rush, but drops Cooper into a shallow spy zone to keep Wimbush in place, with a basic cover 3 look in the back seven. Wimbush doesn’t pick it up, and rushes into a truly terrible pass, directly into Jaquon Johnson’s hands.
It worked against Wimbush’s backup, Ian Book, too. The Canes drop eight into coverage, Book thinks he sees an opening and forces a quick pass that Trajan Bandy jumps with ease as he’s moving into his flat zone. Miami’s massive turnover rate in 2017 certainly had something to do with turnover luck, but a lot of these turnovers were a direct result of meticulous game planning. Turnovers can’t be created, but chaos absolutely can be, and Miami under Diaz does it as well as anybody in college football.
The “just create chaos” approach works against the run, too, though it’s less a result of scheme and more about letting athletes be athletes. Because Miami is so frequently in zone, a lot of its run defense is based on how quickly defenders can react to what they’re seeing. With talent all over the defense, that usually makes the Canes very hard to run on.
Here, the defensive line and middle linebacker stuff the middle of the defense, forcing Wimbush to pull the ball and move onto the second read of this option. Johnson, coming down from the safety spot after a rotation, sets a strong edge and forces a pitch, before moving outside and making an excellent play in the open field.
Just like with the fire zone, this approach really doesn’t work if you don’t have elite athletes all over the field.
When you do, however, putting those players into a system that allows them to make elite individual plays is an easy call. Diaz’s defense works because he understands that elite athletes can thrive in chaos, whereas even the best offenses will always have trouble with it. Those defenders obviously still need assignments and rules to follow within that defense, but allowing playmakers to make plays was, above everything else, the thing that actually defined those Miami teams of old.
The swagger and the cool factor is tied directly into grabbing the best players that Florida has to offer and setting them loose in a defense that encourages them to make plays in space. That sort of energy can’t be created with gimmicks or by putting former players on the sidelines, it has to come from recruiting and coaching.
Defensively, Diaz understands that. Offensively? Well, that’s a different story.
Up Next: Oklahoma’s Wishbone.
Graphic by Kristen Lillemoen.