Kaaya strikes back
Team discipline became an issue in a season that went south at the end.
PINEHURST, N.C. — The most critical day of the Hurricanes’ offseason came in late March, when Brad Kaaya and his teammates stood wearily on the practice field at an ungodly hour of the morning, after they were forced to run through a grueling extra workout as penance for a teammate’s repeated rule-breaking.
In UM’s team code, if a player earns a strike — for a violation like being tardy or absent for a team activity or class — they must report for a 5 a.m. session with strength coach Andreu Swasey. Two strikes, his whole position group does a “Sunrise.” Three strikes, and the whole offense or defense runs.
Four strikes? The entire team gets involved. Kaaya hadn’t seen that before. But he had seen too many players oversleep, or say they had an errand to run, or some other excuse for being late.
So the sophomore quarterback and rest of the team’s emerging leaders decided it was no longer acceptable.
“The last straw is when the whole team went out there,” Kaaya said. “Something clicked for us and we said, ‘We’ve had enough of this. … When is it going to stop? We’ve had enough. It’s football, guys mess up. But we can’t keep having this happen.’ ”
Kaaya revealed that story during an hour-plus sit-down with several writers Monday at the ACC Kickoff in Pinehurst, N.C. In their day at the media’s annual preseason meetings, he and senior linebacker Raphael Kirby were asked numerous times about the team’s failures in 2014, when it lost its final four games and finished 6-7.
Player discipline was an issue, they said, and they believe player-issued discipline will fix things.
Kirby said UM coach Al Golden granted players the ability to make each other run 5 a.m. gassers, an honor system that hadn’t been in place before this year.
“A coach can only do so much,” Kaaya said. “A lot of times it’s on the players to hold guys accountable. That’s what coach Golden has preached to me, to Kirby, to the guys that have been named captains of this team. … We set the standard as leaders, and guys have to follow it. If not, we have to do something about it.”
Last year at this time, Kaaya was in his second month at UM, a 19-year-old who recently graduated from his Los Angeles-area high school. His voracious study of the playbook helped win him the starting job, but it didn’t instantly win his teammates’ respect. That took most of the season.
Kaaya shined, setting UM freshman records for passing yards (3,198) and touchdowns (26), leading the ACC in passer rating (148.2) and winning the ACC’s Rookie of the Year award. However, UM’s sub.500 record has external expec- tations for the Hurricanes as low as they’ve been since perhaps the mid-1990s, when the program was hit with crippling NCAA sanctions under former coach Butch Davis.
So why does Kaaya believe UM will improve after losing six players who became NFL draft picks and seven more who signed free-agent contracts?
“At one point, people didn’t know who Duke Johnson was. People didn’t know who Phillip Dorsett was,” Kaaya said. “They were huge recruits coming out of high school, but no one knew they were going to be NFL draft picks or college superstars. Before that, it was, ‘Olivier Vernon’s leaving, what are you guys going to do?’
“We have good young guys. Our coaches know how to recruit. It’s not like we’re recruiting duds. We’re recruiting world-class athletes. [And] they have gotten better.”
That said, Kaaya is “fine” if outsiders are underestimating Miami. Kirby shook off the idea that one national magazine picked UM to finished seventh — dead last — in the ACC Coastal.
“They don’t really know. Nobody knows,” he said. “Our team is going to be a surprise.”
When the day was done, the two players took an evening flight home.
They wanted to be there for the team’s scheduled workout this morning.