Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
About face
Hurricanes’ new coach as stunned as anyone
After being hired as Temple’s head coach, Manny Diaz agreed to take over at UM a day after Mark Richt announces his retirement.
CORAL GABLES — The news, he said, was delivered to him by his wife.
And like so many associated with the Hurricanes’ football program — even if from somewhat of a distance at that point — Manny Diaz said he was stunned to learn his former boss Mark Richt was retiring.
More stunning for Diaz, Miami and the Hurricanes’ fan base was how quickly Diaz — UM’s former defensive coordinator who on Dec. 12 agreed to become Temple’s head coach — found himself occupying Richt’s old office as UM head coach.
“It’s been wild. There’s no other way to explain it. It’s something that when everybody woke up [Sunday] morning, no one could have predicted. They don’t write scripts for these things. If they did, they would get thrown in the trash because nobody would believe it,” Diaz told WQAM-560’s Joe Rose and the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Dave Hyde during a radio appearance Monday morning. “But once the chain of events got set in motion, it all just started happening and it’s something, when you wake up again a day later, you’re like, ‘Did that really happen?’ You almost have to turn on the computer and check the Internet to make sure it was real.”
It is, in fact, very real.
Miami officially named Diaz the 25th head coach in program history late Sunday night, hours after Richt informed Hurricanes athletic director Blake James of his decision to retire.
And though Diaz had already agreed to take over as Temple’s coach and had been formally in-
troduced as such in Philadelphia, James moved quickly to keep the architect of the Hurricanes’ topnotch defense in Coral Gables before Diaz — who was still home in South Florida after coaching UM’s defense in the Pinstripe Bowl— truly headed north.
On Monday, Diaz acknowledged his decision to take over as Hurricanes coach job put Temple, its athletic administration and its players in a tough position, but he said the opportunity to stay in Miami and coach his hometown team was something he couldn’t pass up, as bad as he felt about leaving the Owls in a lurch.
“It’s something that still, I don’t feel right about. I think it’s an issue we have with our calendar, where these jobs change hands right in the middle of the recruiting cycle and they have to be filled. This is something that, for them to reach out to me and give me my first opportunity to be a head coach, you can’t repay someone for that. The way you want to repay them is you want to do a great job,” Diaz said.
“What a series of events that could have caused this to happen . ... The players at Temple, I feel for them because it’s wrong that they had to go through this. But this is the University of Miami. This is the one way this could have happened.”
While Diaz’s defense was a force at Miami, finishing the regular season ranked second in the nation in total defense and first in several other categories including passing defense, the coach understands there are issues he must address with the Hurricanes’ anemic offense.
This season, Miami endured quarterback questions as Richt was never able to truly settle on either veteran Malik Rosier or redshirt freshman N’Kosi Perry. The Hurricanes closed the year out with an embarrassing 35-3 loss to Wisconsin in the Pinstripe Bowl and had a combined 100 passing yards in their last two games — a 24-3 win over Pittsburgh in which Diaz’s defense dominated and Thursday’s loss at Yankee Stadium.
Although Diaz did not get into specifics about either who his offensive coordinator might be or how sees the quarterback situation evolving, especially with Rosier exhausting his eligibility and moving on, he did say he wants to make sure Miami’s offense takes on some of the characteristics its defense has shown over the course of the last three years.
He wants his players on that side of the ball to adopt the same identity the Hurricanes’ defenders have embraced during his time in Coral Gables.
“It’s important to find the right fit and the person that fits our staff, the person that fits the University of Miami. That’s really going to be the key thing moving forward,” Diaz said. “But just to that point, you create a defense that’s designed to give an offense problems, things that offenses don’t like, that’s what we pride ourselves on defense. By the same token then, what we want to be on offense should be an offense that does things that defenses don’t like, that creates situations that makes defensive players uncomfortable. It just makes sense when you have a philosophy that now, that philosophy should extend to our entire football team. What we have been and what we have tried to create on defense will now spread through our entire football team.”
And while in the coming days and weeks he will focus on assembling his staff, Diaz on Monday expressed gratitude — again — for Richt’s hand in bringing him to Miami from Mississippi State, where he worked under current Florida coach Dan Mullen.
Interestingly enough, in his first game as a head coach, Diaz will face Mullen when Miami takes on Florida in the Camping World Kickoff in Orlando on Aug. 31. Diaz jokingly noted that game is exactly 243 days away — after he praised Richt for his work at Miami over the the course of the last three years.
“There’s a lot of things that happened the last three years, whether it was turning around the Florida State streak and now, beating them two times in a row, winning the first bowl game in 10 years, the Notre Dame game and those two backto-back weekends [against Notre Dame and Virginia Tech in 201]. And shoot, just allowing me to come here and giving us the things you have to have to play great defense. That doesn’t occur in a vacuum. What we were able to accomplish, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum,” he said.
“And then, there’s no indoor facility without Mark Richt. His ability to get people together, to galvanize people – along with our administration – those are no small things. And all of the details that basically had to go through him in putting together this facility, that’s massive. That’s massive. And that’s something that’s going to stand there for a long time in Coral Gables that had not been done. … In my mind, the university will always be indebted to him.”