Miami football was not ready to play Central Michigan

Manny Diaz made it a point in the fallout from the Miami football team’s 17-12 victory over Central Michigan on Saturday that the Hurricanes need to be ready for every game. It was clear they were not against Central Michigan.

The 2-2 start for the Miami football team can be explained by two tough games away from home to start the season 0-2. The 63-0 demolition against FCS Bethune-Cookman was expected and you do not learn much about a team in a win of that magnitude against an inferior opponent.

The win over Central Michigan was lackluster. Diaz was happy the Miami football team got the win. He told stated on the Joe Rose Show on WQAM the Joe that he would rather be working on fixing what is wrong coming off a win, but that the Hurricanes had 100 things to work on.

After a honeymoon during the 2019 offseason, many Miami fans are disheartened. There was a lot of hope for the Miami offense to improve from 2018 to 2019. The Hurricanes are currently 65th nationally in total offense. That up from 105th last season. Miami is averaging 420 yards in 2019 after averaging 358.8 in 2018.

The fan base has been restless with the Hurricanes inconsistent offense in 2019. Diaz accepted some of the blame on the performance against Central Michigan for himself and his staff. He also was disappointed in the performance from his players and the team as a whole.

Despite a bye this week, the Hurricanes either did not take Central Michigan seriously or were already looking ahead to  Virginia Tech October 5.

"“When you get into a fight that you’re not ready to get into, that’s what it looks like…Again, that doesn’t mean that who you are today means this is how you will play forever — teams grow and teams learn. I think what you saw on Saturday, it’s certainly going to humble some of our guys, and certainly humbled us as a team.But we understand we have to do everything right at every position to give ourselves a chance to play our best. We didn’t run the ball very well…And our tight ends didn’t block very well. What normally happens is it’s never just one guy, it’s a series of ‘My bads.Everybody takes turns saying, ‘My bad,’ and you don’t need very many ‘My bads’ to kill a drive. If you think about the way the game went, the first drive of the game, we walk right down the field and score, get a three-and-out defense. We go right back out on offense and walk them right back down the field again.And we have a hole that’s probably going to be a touchdown on third down and 3 and we bounce the ball outside instead of taking it right up the middle where it should go. Maybe a touchdown, it’s 14-nothing, who knows what goes on. We don’t convert the fourth down.We get the ball the next drive, we got a screen where we’re off to the races again, we’re already (across) midfield and it gets called back for a 15-yarder. That’s when really just sort of the life got sucked out of our offense and we just kind of lost our mojo.”"

The Miami football program was built on hard work on the Greentree practice fields with the intent of preparing to crush every opponent. The Hurricanes have to take every opponent seriously with the intent every game is important.

Miami does not have enough talent or recent success to intimidate opponents. The Hurricanes need more player leadership. During the championship eras, players like Michael Irvin and Ed Reed owned the locker room. The players self-monitored each other. Player mistakes were held accountable by their peers.