Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Already-busy Baker now tackling duties as a dad
CORAL GABLES — Blake Baker coached his first game as Miami Hurricanes defensive coordinator on Saturday in Orlando. Then he analyzed film, broke it down for players and coached another practice on Sunday.
With the team idle this week, he’d get a nice little break to come back refreshed for preparation against North Carolina in the ACC opener on Sept. 7, right?
Nope.
At 4:30 a.m. on Monday morning, Baker got up from a six-hour layover to head to the hospital as he and his wife, Roslyn, welcomed their third child, a baby boy named Brady William Baker. He was born at 8: 17 a.m. at 20 inches, eight pounds and eight ounces.
“It’s been an experience. It’s been awesome. God is great,” Blake Baker said on Tuesday. “Besides being very uncomfortable on the hospital bed, everything else is going really well.”
Now Baker shuffles additional daddy duties with his duty of building on what went right for the Miami defense in Saturday’s 24-20 loss to the Florida Gators and correcting what went awry.
First on his list, the tackling needs to improve. The one firsthalf Florida touchdown, a screen to Kadarius Toney that went for 66 yards, had three missed tackles,
and there were several other examples on Saturday where better tackling could’ve contained UF or resulted in negative yardage.
“We do a tackle circuit every day,” Baker said. “We probably
need to do a better job, as coaches, emphasizing strike zones and getting low, and then angles. We took some really poor angles. So we have a pursuit drill that we do, and that’s what we’ve done the last two days — tackling, pursuit.”
Defensive players were receptive to the feedback, according to Baker. He described them as “mad, took it to heart” after “Tell the Truth Sunday,” what Baker called the film session following the Florida loss.
“There’s a good, bad and ugly tape,” said Baker of how he conducts the film session. “We don’t make stuff up. We praise what we did a good job of. That’s like anything in life. If you just beat someone down all the time, they’re not going to want to come to work.”
Among the positives, UM had four takeaways defensively, bringing out the new “305” Turnover Chain plenty, and held the Gators to 52 yards rushing and 1.9 yards per attempt. Baker noted the defense needs to communicate better, and the unit only had one sack and six tackles for loss — compared to UF’s 10 and 16, respectively.
“I thought Florida did a great job game planning, getting the ball out quick, a lot of seven-man max protections to protect their offensive line. Some things out of empty [sets] that they had not necessarily shown,” Baker said. “Overall, I thought there was some good push in the pocket. Forced two interceptions, even though it doesn’t necessarily go down as a sack. There’s some room to improve, but they also did a nice job, I thought, up front.”
About half of Florida quarterback Feleipe Franks’ 254 passing yards came on two plays — the screen to Toney and a deep ball to Josh Hammond in the fourth quarter that set up the winning touchdown. On the latter play, striker Gilbert Frierson got beat in single coverage, but Baker noted that safety Amari Carter should’ve been there to prevent it.
It was a matchup coach and former defensive coordinator Manny Diaz also backed up when questioned after the game by a reporter who mistook Frierson for a linebacker.
“We led the nation in pass defense last year doing the same thing, so we have an idea of what we’re doing,” Diaz said.
Baker mentioned safety Robert Knowles, defensive tackle Chigozie Nnoruka and defensive end Trevon Hill as second-string players who may have earned more playing time based on what they did with their limited snaps on Saturday.