Hyde: Diaz trying to toughen team
Diaz brings out ‘The Big ’Cane Drill’ and hopes it’ll be tough act to follow
CORAL GABLES — All offseason sounded like a funfest at The New Miami. Manny Mania. Transfer portals. Prowrestling entrances. Alumni greats coaching the summer’s Camp Paradise. Changes. Laughs. Fun, fun, fun. Whoop-de-do.
This is what the New Miami better be about, what coach Manny Diaz knows it must be. Midway through Monday’s Hurricanes practice. Players ring midfield in cheers. Diaz calls out two names.
And quarterbacks N’Kosi Perry and Tate Martell fight it out, one on one, mano a mano ,in a way you rarely see quarterbacks do. Rarely? Try never at Miami for decades.
“Why not the quarterbacks?” Diaz said. “What better way to show their teammates how tough they are?”
Diaz stands at the front of the line about Miami’s lack of toughness last year.
“We weren’t a tough team,’’
Diaz said.
And the effort wasn’t here.
“We didn’t have enough,’’ he said.
The proof wasn’t just the final game, the numbing 35-3 bowl loss to Wisconsin. It started right at the start. The opener against Louisiana State.
“It’s 3-3 after the first quarter,” he said. “We’ve got more yards than them, and we missed a field goal to go up 6-3. But they score on a touchdown, and it was a completely non-competitive football game after that.”
Diaz has spent his first offseason changing the public narrative about this team in a smart manner.
The bigger, more difficult job is changing the product on the field. He knows where to start.
“We’ve got to fight more,” he said.
There are so many questions on this Miami team. Who’s the quarterback? Why must a true freshman, Xion Nelson, start at left tackle from Day One? Why is only one five-star recruit (freshman running back Lorenzo Lingard) on the roster? How will they handle a likely top-10 Florida team in the Aug. 24 opener? How will Miami’s unsettled-yet-overhyped fan base respond on Aug. 25?
But let’s get back to Monday, to midfield, to the quarterbacks in what was traditionally called the Oklahoma drill, which Diaz re-named, “The Big ’Cane
Drill.” This is part of Diaz’s overhaul, one more part of the plan to toughen a weak team.
“There are things we can easily fix that take no talent,’’ Diaz said. “Every coach can say that, right? There’s no coach who says he wants a team that isn’t tough or doesn’t have enough effort.
“The secret sauce is in how you demand it every day. That’s the difference.”
Diaz has some background at this. He arrived as Miami’s defensive coordinator in 2016 to an underachieving unit. They began the jump that made Miami a statistically great defense the past two years.
“We changed the value of what it meant to play defense at Miami from 2015 to 2016,’’ Diaz said. “How do you do that? You bring
in demands. One thing we said was we’re not going to play defensive backs that don’t tackle. You heard, ‘Aw, coach is just saying that …”
“You can go a whole training camp — crazy to think — where a cornerback may not have to make a hard tackle. You can get into a game without really seeing if that guy will fight or not. A very easy way, and a safe way, to see it one-onone drills.”
The Big ’Cane Drill, for instance. A small thing. But it’s with such small things Diaz hopes to make this team tougher. They started running 110-yard sprint in the summer — and rerunning them if times weren’t met. More weight work. More demands.
“If you don’t turn up the heat, you don’t know what you have,’’ Diaz said. “So we
applied more pressure on our team. We need to find out how tough we are or callous us up so we can withstand more. That’s what we did a poor job of in the past. We weren’t very mentally tough.”
This is really what the New Miami is about in Diaz’s first year. Attitude. Mindset. Toughness. It’s what every football coach says, especially in taking over a team.
Interim Dolphins coach Dan Campbell was the last local coach to run the Oklahoma drill. He wanted a tougher team. He won his first two games on that renewed energy in 2012. He then lost seven of the next 10 on talent.
Drills, you see, only take you so far.
Martell, if it matters, put Perry on his back.