Diaz: ‘Good teams improve while winning’
The No. 8 Miami Hurricanes are rolling to start the 2020 season, but coach Manny Diaz is stressing to his players that they can’t settle during this 3-0 start and 52-10 win over rival Florida State on Saturday night.
“Good teams improve while they ’re winning,” Diaz told 560-AM on Monday morning. “They don’t wait until the pain of loss and then have the urgency to want to get better. They do it while things are good and everybody’s patting them on the back.”
That’s the approach UM will take into its idle week before getting a shot at No.1Clemson on Oct. 10.
Even after the Hurricanes scored the most points they ever have on the Seminoles in their most lopsided victory over FSU since 1976’s 47-0 rout, players seemed to be talking as much about what they can do better postgame on Saturday night.
“It’s just the attention to detail,” Diaz said, “and that just comes with the repetition of understanding what we’re trying to get offensively. It’s just the minutiae of staying square on the offensive line, the nuances of running routes better at wide receiver, even [quarterback] D’Eriq [King] sometimes with his eye progression, the running backs trusting the tracks. Defensively, getting lined up, better communication, at times, across the linebackers and secondary.”
Diaz said this Hurricanes team carries a similar “chip-on-ourshoulder mentality that we are the underdog” that he has seen from the Miami Heat in their run to the
NBA Finals as a No. 5 seed, advancing through the Eastern Conference finals over the Boston Celtics on Sunday night.
“They have a great respect for how hard it is to win,” Diaz said. “They talk about it all the time: It’s hard to win, certainly, any game in the playoffs. It’s hard to win the fourth game in the playoffs. And now, to win three consecutive series and earn the right to go to the NBA Finals — selflessness.
“What guy will go off for 30, whether it’s Bam [Adebayo] last night or [Tyler] Herro a couple of nights ago or [Jimmy] Butler? And not caring who gets the credit. That is the pureness of a team.”
UM’s win over FSU on Saturday night continued a run of four consecutive wins over the Seminoles. Diaz remembers arriving at Miami as defensive coordinator under coach Mark Richt after the 2015 season when Florida State had a six-game win streak on the Hurricanes that they turned to seven in the fall of 2016.
Because wins against the rival Seminoles were once so hard to come by, those that remain from those times have imparted the appreciation for beating Florida State to those who only know what it’s like to beat FSU.
“It’s a big deal, and when we got here defensively in 2016, that wasn’t the way it was,” Diaz said. “We had a lot [of players] who had never beaten Florida State, and so to turn that around starting with the Darrell Langham catch in 2017, now we’ve got a locker room of really only — because Zach McCloud was here in 2016, he’s the only one that’s really ever experienced a loss to those guys.
“No matter how it looked, it’s never easy, and it’s always a big deal.”
The Hurricanes swapped starting left tackles on Saturday, with Zion Nelson starting in place of John Campbell, who started wins against UAB and Louisville. Diaz said Campbell was “dinged” against the Cardinals and Nelson, who started 13 games at left tackle as a freshman in 2019, received most of the first-team practice reps throughout the week.
“My suspicion is you’ll see both of those guys play because we think they both can provide a lot of value for us,” Diaz said. “That’s really what we want. We want to have some added depth on our offensive line, be able to roll people. If we’re pushing the tempo and we’re running 85-some-odd plays a game, that just helps us.”