South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Staff ‘found out a lot’ in scrimmage
It is crunch time in fall camp for the Hurricanes, and Mario Cristobal and his coaching staff entered their second scrimmage of the fall on Saturday looking to separate this season’s key players from those who need to improve.
“We want to find out who’s for real,” Cristobal said Friday. “We want to test guys and see who stands up to the challenge and who needs more work. We’ll always work with a guy, but it’s time to really find out who steps up.”
Cristobal said Friday he had a laundry list of qualities he wanted to see from his team during the scrimmage.
“Looking for our entire organization to take ownership of our processes and our system and also an opportunity to test our players and challenge our players and put them in situations where we can assess and train their competitive responses,” Cristobal said Friday. “I learned that a little while back by great mentors. When you’re a coach, you want to train great, elite competitive responses. We want to see that.
“We want to continue to improve our levels of conditioning, communication, alignment, our physicality, our ability to finish plays, finish drives, stop drives, knock the line of scrimmage back,
anything related to playing good football. We want to show more maturity and making good decisions during plays. We want to make sure our technique and our fundamentals take another step. We want to make sure that we mix and match a couple of more personnel combinations on both sides of the ball.”
Cristobal said in a video provided by the athletic program that the Hurricanes ran about 120 plays in the scrimmage.
“I think today we found out a lot about our team,” Cristobal said. “A lot of positive stuff. Some other stuff, we’ve got to get better at.”
The first-year UM head coach said there are several position battles still open heading into the penultimate week of preseason practice.
“I think what really stood out is the competitive nature of our team is starting to show more and more,” Cristobal said. “There’s several battles for significant roles and other roles that are still up in the air that will carry on into next week.”
Cristobal said the offense had a mix of positive and negative plays in the scrimmage, saying the offense had some “big plays and some big drops.” But he did praise how the defense performed.
“We’re striking better,” Cristobal said. “We’re coming out of our hips better. We’re striking. We’re holding the point a little bit. I think in pass rush, we’re working edges better. We’re getting rid of blockers.”