With high confidence it can be predicted here, in the heart of spring practice, that the Miami Hurricanes defense will be better in 2013.
Couldn’t be worse, right? Miami got so thoroughly knocked around in 2012 that opponents averaged 30.5 points per game. That’s not worthy of the U on those helmets. It’s barely even worthy of major-college minimums, as measured by the Hurricanes’ No. 116 ranking out of 120 Football Bowl Subdivision defense last year.
Thirty points per game? The Hurricanes won three national titles in the five-year span that began in 1987 and during that time only two teams reached 30 points against them. One of those games was a 31-30 win at Michigan and the other was a 31-30 loss at Notre Dame.
That’s when the program’s famous swagger was earned. In contrast, the team’s 2012 defensive stats, featuring the loathsome average of 486.8 total yards allowed per game, should be burned.
“We’re not a finished product,” Miami coach Al Golden said Thursday, his spring workout allotment almost half spent. “We’re not even close to that now, but we’re more mature and you can actually have football conversations with a lot of the guys now.”
Sounds like a fairly primitive level of instruction when you put it that way. The point is that Miami had too many newcomers who weren’t ready to play last year, in part because talented defenders like Olivier Vernon and Marcus Forston left early for the NFL and in part because the Hurricanes’ depth has been hurt by self-imposed scholarship restrictions designed to soften the potential blow of NCAA sanctions in the Nevin Shapiro case.
The result is that Mark D’Onofrio, Miami’s defensive coordinator and Golden’s buddy from their Penn State playing days, has been coaching with one arm tied behind his back.
I’ll continue to cut him some slack, knowing that D’Onofrio proved his potential in five years as Golden’s defensive coordinator at Temple. The Owls were all but extinct in the beginning, tossed from the Big East conference for poor play and ranked next to last in major-college defensive statistics. When Golden and D’Onofrio departed for Miami, Temple was a winning program, with a No. 16 national defensive ranking as the foundation.
“You can’t lower your expectations,” D’Onofrio said Thursday, “but you have to understand how we’re trying to get things done as a team.”
Winning shootouts is what worked last year. The Hurricanes muscled up on offense, putting together a 7-5 record that defined them as winners and a 5-3 ACC record that would have been good enough to play in the conference championship game if not for the NCAA cloud that still hangs over the program and the school’s resulting voluntary withdrawal from postseason play.
That got people asking how long it will be before the program is back to its old blustery self. Clearly it’s too soon to say that. Too soon to ask it, even.
Miami won’t be Miami until there’s a dominating defense on the field. Until then, it’s all just play-acting.
“The history of Miami defense is of those guys playing together, period, everybody knowing what they needed to do,” junior linebacker Denzel Perryman said. “Last year, that’s kind of where we struggled. … I feel like now we pretty much know. We’ve got that concept. Everybody do their job and we’ll pretty much be off the field on third down.”
An expected large crowd at Naples High School will get a look at that advertised progress in a special road scrimmage tonight. Then, on April 13 at Sun Life, the Hurricanes play their spring game with live coverage scheduled on ESPN3.
“You’ve got to continue to really focus on the details and be relentless with that,” D’Onofrio said. “We’ll continue to do that, limit the package based on what we can and cannot do. Right now we’re throwing a lot at the guys and they’re doing a good job of it.”
Better, that’s the goal, and it shouldn’t be that daunting. In the ACC, a league without real bullies, a little bit better production by this frequently flimsy Miami defense would go a long way.
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