Reality check: Losing to ‘little brother’ hurts
UM FOOTBALL
So much for all that momentum coach Manny Diaz and the Miami Hurricanes had going with a three-game winning streak.
The impressive wins against Pittsburgh, FSU and Louisville all boomeranged back at the Hurricanes and hit them in the face.
Losing to FIU, 30-24, is right up there with, 48-0, against Virginia in the last game at the Orange Bowl, 58-0, to Clemson in 2015 or losing to USF at home in 2010. The last two of those had coaches Al Golden and Randy Shannon, respectively, fired in the immediate aftermath.
How does Miami recover from a loss to an intra-city “little brother” football program?
Diaz offered his initial thoughts in looking forward in his postgame comments Saturday night at Marlins Park.
“The first thing we can do is get in the film room. Go in there and watch what’s real, what are the things that got us [Saturday],” Diaz said. “We have to focus on what’s real, and we have to work on getting it fixed. The noise is deserved. We need to get this fixed, but the key is that it’s fixable.”
With the regular-season finale at Duke this Saturday, Diaz’s message to his players in the locker room after the game was that other college football powers have recovered from such losses before.
“What I did tell the guys in there is two years ago, Troy went to Baton Rouge and beat LSU, who right now is the No. 1 team in the country,” Diaz said. “Things can change, but it needs to change. It can happen, but it’s got to happen within, and it’s got to start with myself and start with the coaching.”
Where coaching let down the Hurricanes was in how, once again, Miami came out flat and was not prepared coming off a bye week. Following UM’s two previous byes, it started behind, 17-0, at North Carolina and, 28-0, at home against Virginia. Both resulted in tight losses. On Saturday, it was, 16-0, to an FIU team that, two weeks earlier, lost, 37-7, to FAU.
“It was a challenge in this week’s practices. We were aware of it. We talked about it like it was the elephant in the room,” Diaz said. “We did different things. We didn’t practice the same way this bye than we did last bye, and again, just to start the game in the manner that we did was very disappointing.”
Jarren Williams showed how quickly he can go back to looking like the quarterback that threw three interceptions on three drives against Virginia Tech. He was picked off three times by the Panthers, and it could’ve been more had it not been for drops from FIU defenders and one would-be interception that was nullified due to defensive holding.
This performance came after Williams’ best two weeks earlier, setting a school-record with six touchdown passes. FIU played him aggressively, jumped routes, and he never adjusted until the late stages as UM was running out of time.
“I’m going to go back and watch the film,” Williams said. “I know there’s answers all over the field, so I just have to be able to understand what they’re giving me and find the open guy.”
Miami it appears will now finish the season without junior running back and team leader DeeJay Dallas after he exited with a gruesome elbow injury on Saturday.
“DeeJay is a huge loss,” Diaz said. “Not just what he does as a player, but he is as important from a leadership aspect of anybody we have on our offense and in our entire program.”
Since the loss, UM lost two commitments in its top-ranked 2021 recruiting class. A pair of South Florida wide receivers in Plantation’s Jacolby George and Miami Northwestern’s Romello Brinson backed off their pledges. Defensive lineman Tre’Von Riggins, from St. Petersburg, announced he decommitted from Miami’s 2020 class immediately after the loss, although he had been rumored to have been previously dropped from the class.
The Hurricanes have reason to believe they can recover. There’s Diaz’s LSU example, for one, and they did rebound from the Georgia Tech loss to win the three straight. Miami was an 181⁄2-point favorite in that overtime loss to the Yellow Jackets and 201⁄2-point favorite on Saturday against FIU.
“I’m not trying to rationalize what happened, but it does happen. It does happen. It is fixable. The solution is in our locker room,” Diaz said. “We’ve seen the signs this year when it’s gone right and what can be, and we have to make sure we build on that. But we have to look very hard at why what happened [Saturday night] happened.”