Three-time Broyles Award nominee, Geoff Collins, joined the show break down Miami–Notre Dame from a coordinator's chair.
DMoney: You spent a year in Miami at FIU, won the conference championship, and had an insane staff: Coach Satterfield, Mario, Mirabal, a lot of powerful future head coaches. What do you remember from that year?
Geoff Collins: It was awesome. I'd never been to Miami a day in my life until I interviewed. I went down to Calle Ocho, interviewed with Mario Cristobal and Alex Mirabal, and just fell in love with the place. They were coming off a pretty bad year, and we needed to win. When we did, it was a conference championship and the first-ever bowl win for FIU.
DMoney: Let's get to Miami–Notre Dame, because you've broken this game down on your channel and you've been close with both staffs. We have to start, unfortunately, with the Malachi Toney injury, which just broke yesterday. As a defensive coordinator and head coach, when a player who's at the center of everything goes down in the middle of the week, how does that affect both staffs?
Geoff Collins: I'll start with Notre Dame, and I've talked to them this week. You go into Sunday prep, you turn on the film, and Malachi Toney is just absolutely ridiculous. You're trying to figure out how to stop the myriad of ways he can attack you. Then you go through Monday prep and Tuesday practice against the scout team, and there's some poor Notre Dame kid wearing a Malachi Toney jersey, trying his best to replicate him, which is impossible.
Then the Wednesday afternoon news hits. You've spent the better part of game-planning week with most of your focus on that kid. Where he's lined up, how you're going to get doubles on him, how you're going to roll the coverage to him. And all of a sudden it's gone. Now it's a more balanced approach you have to deal with. You start looking at all the other weapons Miami has, and Darian Mensah. He had the best player in college football to throw to, but the other guys aren't bad. So your mind wakes up to, oh crap, all these guys are pretty good too. But all your focus has been on Malachi.
For Miami's staff, what Coach Dawson has to deal with is losing the easy outlet. When you get stuck in a predicament, you just throw it to Malachi. A screen to Malachi, a jet sweep to Malachi, a fade into double coverage and he still wins. You don't have that anymore. So now the dilemma is how you spread the wealth without the easy 15-yard gain you can always pull out of your back pocket.
DMoney: I want to talk about Corey Hetherman, because you've lived this life. Awesome defenses all the way up, a great defense last year, everybody throwing roses at his feet.
Now the narrative is that he's getting too predictable and people are seeing the pressures coming. You've been the same coach through the highs and the lows with different results. How does he look back and self-analyze? Is he doing something wrong, or is it execution?
Geoff Collins: That's an interesting question, because you have to take into account that there were two first-round defensive linemen on Miami's defense last year who are no longer there. When you don't have that, you have to shift and adjust. And I've read there have been a bunch of injuries in the secondary too, so that compounds it.
Corey Hetherman is a great coach. I've done the breakdowns through the lens of a defensive coordinator and a head coach: how he calls the game, how he sequences the blitzes and coverages. Corey does a great job. But without two first-round defensive linemen, you have to find other ways to generate pressure. And when you generate pressure, you put kids on islands. On islands, they have to win one-on-one matchups, and they don't always win them.
I always described my career as moving stress around. On every single defensive call, there's stress on somebody. Somebody is in a one-on-one, or even a two-on-one negative matchup, and you have to keep moving that stress around. So the corner who replaced your All-American corner isn't always the one under stress. But when you take stress away from him, who does that put stress on, and can they handle it? Figuring that out isn't as easy as fans think it is.
In this seat I'm in now, I see social media all the time. I used to turn it off. Now I see the armchair people talking, and I'm just like, you have no clue. You have no clue what Corey Hetherman is going through, how great a coach he is, or the situation he's trying to fix and make right and stay elite in. Miami has a big fan base and a lot of eyeballs on him. The pressure and stress are real.
DMoney: One thing he focused on in his press conference after the UNC game was the strain and the swarm. You saw a lot of plays in space where guys weren't showing the usual strain to the ball. Someone misses a tackle and nobody's coming behind him. Your thing as a coach was aggression. You preached it, and your teams represented that culture. When the effort and swarm don't look right on film, how do you get it right in one week, especially with Notre Dame next?
Geoff Collins: I was the defensive coordinator at Albright College, Division III. Then I was at Western Carolina with Matt Rhule, who was my linebackers coach. He's now the head coach at Nebraska and coached the Carolina Panthers. We came up with a loaf policy. You can say play hard and play fast, but what's the metric you judge it by? So Matt and I built a loaf policy and painstakingly graded it every single week.
Fast forward to this age of NIL and the transfer portal. I've seen more lack-of-effort plays, multiple in a game. It's an epidemic of guys giving up on plays, not finishing plays, no strain to the football, on both sides of the ball. That's why you see this ebb and flow of performance week to week. One week you drop 50 on somebody, and the next week you lose to a lesser opponent. It doesn't make sense. I think part of it is the portal era: teams not being together long, and coaches not having three or four years with a group to build the culture and the standards.
DMoney: Let me ask about the nickel, a very important position in Hetherman's defense. Last year you had Keionte Scott, who's an NFL starter right now, a complete difference-maker. This year you've seen different types of nickels. Omar Thornton is more physical and a great blitzer, but there's some tightness there. Bryce Fitzgerald is a looser coverage guy, but not as physical. Against Notre Dame, without speaking specifically about anyone if you don't want to, what kind of player fits better at nickel against that attack?
Geoff Collins: Such a great question. In all of these binders and playbooks behind me, at every single point of my coaching career, the entire defensive structure is built around who your nickel is. Who your Sam linebacker or your nickel is, everything you do defensively is predicated on that. When I was the defensive coordinator at Mississippi State, we had top-10 defenses, and my nickel was more of an outside linebacker. When I went to Florida, it was DBU, so my nickel was more like a corner. What you'd do schematically is completely different.
I actually have the Notre Dame tape rolling right now. They do so much 12 personnel, and there's so much of a downhill run game. My point would be to play a bigger, more run-stopping, better-blitzing nickel, because you're going to have to pressure this guy. Against Notre Dame, a bigger, better blitzer is what you need.
DMoney: CJ Carr killed Miami last year with his legs. He's not a guy who's going to run for 100 yards, but it's his lateral quickness. BYU seemed like they were getting to him, and he'd still make a guy miss. How do you deal with that? Is it a coaching point for the rushers, or something you do differently schematically?
Geoff Collins: I spent a week up at Notre Dame in the spring. When you look at CJ, he's a clean-cut, polished golden helmet. He looks like he just walked out of the country club with a 4.0 in business. Then he steps on the field, and he's got some dog in him. He really does. Same with Mike Denbrock, the offensive coordinator. He's wearing the quarter zip with his legs crossed, drinking his coffee, and then he goes out there and he's a freaking menace.
With CJ, it's almost death by a thousand cuts. He gets the run game exactly where it needs to be and checks it as needed. He flips the protections, and he does it all the time. He sees the pressure, changes the protection, still gets the number of receivers he wants into the route, and makes sure he's protected. Then he can make every throw imaginable. And if you have answers to all of that, he's just going to run on you. He's a problem.
DMoney: You've seen these guys and visited both staffs, but nobody knows what happens once the ball's kicked off. As Coach Collins, what are you watching for early that gives you a tell?
Geoff Collins: First, I'm going to enjoy the pageantry and the pomp and circumstance. My childhood was that late-'80s, early-'90s Miami–Notre Dame matchup. I was in high school and college for all of that, so I'm going to soak in this environment.
But I think it's whoever gets off to the fastest start. If Miami comes out and shows, we love Malachi, he's not here, and we're going to play for our brother, and they do really well, that bodes well for confidence.
If Notre Dame gets off to a fast start, with CJ and Mike Denbrock getting into the perfect play, seeing what's coming, attacking it and it working, it's going to be a long day. But if Miami shows very early that it's up to the challenge, I think it's going to be a great game in Miami's favor.
DMoney: Last thing. In your video on Notre Dame's offense, you focused on the running game. They lost two first-round backs, but you like their running game maybe even better as a unit this year. Miami has the No. 1 run defense in the country. What do you see in that matchup?
Geoff Collins: Strength on strength. Miami will line up in four-down and get physical, with some extra safeties coming down into the box. It's going to be a physical, downhill run game. What Miami has is quickness, and it does some stunts and movement. If it can create penetration and tackles for loss early, that'll be huge. If it's five-yard gains, six-yard gains, 20-yard gains, that's going to be tough to deal with.
But if there can be a tackle for loss or a caused fumble, and creating turnovers is a staple of a Corey Hetherman defense, getting some turnovers early builds confidence. Notre Dame Stadium isn't loud until you let them be. If Miami doesn't let them be, just keep the crowd quiet, go express yourselves and throw up the U's.
Collins said it best: That place isn't loud until you let it be.
Win the first quarter, take the ball away and keep it quiet.
Find Coach Collins on YouTube at The Coach Collins Show. The full interview is up on the CanesInsight YouTube channel.
DMoney: You spent a year in Miami at FIU, won the conference championship, and had an insane staff: Coach Satterfield, Mario, Mirabal, a lot of powerful future head coaches. What do you remember from that year?
Geoff Collins: It was awesome. I'd never been to Miami a day in my life until I interviewed. I went down to Calle Ocho, interviewed with Mario Cristobal and Alex Mirabal, and just fell in love with the place. They were coming off a pretty bad year, and we needed to win. When we did, it was a conference championship and the first-ever bowl win for FIU.
DMoney: Let's get to Miami–Notre Dame, because you've broken this game down on your channel and you've been close with both staffs. We have to start, unfortunately, with the Malachi Toney injury, which just broke yesterday. As a defensive coordinator and head coach, when a player who's at the center of everything goes down in the middle of the week, how does that affect both staffs?
Geoff Collins: I'll start with Notre Dame, and I've talked to them this week. You go into Sunday prep, you turn on the film, and Malachi Toney is just absolutely ridiculous. You're trying to figure out how to stop the myriad of ways he can attack you. Then you go through Monday prep and Tuesday practice against the scout team, and there's some poor Notre Dame kid wearing a Malachi Toney jersey, trying his best to replicate him, which is impossible.
Then the Wednesday afternoon news hits. You've spent the better part of game-planning week with most of your focus on that kid. Where he's lined up, how you're going to get doubles on him, how you're going to roll the coverage to him. And all of a sudden it's gone. Now it's a more balanced approach you have to deal with. You start looking at all the other weapons Miami has, and Darian Mensah. He had the best player in college football to throw to, but the other guys aren't bad. So your mind wakes up to, oh crap, all these guys are pretty good too. But all your focus has been on Malachi.
For Miami's staff, what Coach Dawson has to deal with is losing the easy outlet. When you get stuck in a predicament, you just throw it to Malachi. A screen to Malachi, a jet sweep to Malachi, a fade into double coverage and he still wins. You don't have that anymore. So now the dilemma is how you spread the wealth without the easy 15-yard gain you can always pull out of your back pocket.
DMoney: I want to talk about Corey Hetherman, because you've lived this life. Awesome defenses all the way up, a great defense last year, everybody throwing roses at his feet.
Now the narrative is that he's getting too predictable and people are seeing the pressures coming. You've been the same coach through the highs and the lows with different results. How does he look back and self-analyze? Is he doing something wrong, or is it execution?
Geoff Collins: That's an interesting question, because you have to take into account that there were two first-round defensive linemen on Miami's defense last year who are no longer there. When you don't have that, you have to shift and adjust. And I've read there have been a bunch of injuries in the secondary too, so that compounds it.
Corey Hetherman is a great coach. I've done the breakdowns through the lens of a defensive coordinator and a head coach: how he calls the game, how he sequences the blitzes and coverages. Corey does a great job. But without two first-round defensive linemen, you have to find other ways to generate pressure. And when you generate pressure, you put kids on islands. On islands, they have to win one-on-one matchups, and they don't always win them.
I always described my career as moving stress around. On every single defensive call, there's stress on somebody. Somebody is in a one-on-one, or even a two-on-one negative matchup, and you have to keep moving that stress around. So the corner who replaced your All-American corner isn't always the one under stress. But when you take stress away from him, who does that put stress on, and can they handle it? Figuring that out isn't as easy as fans think it is.
In this seat I'm in now, I see social media all the time. I used to turn it off. Now I see the armchair people talking, and I'm just like, you have no clue. You have no clue what Corey Hetherman is going through, how great a coach he is, or the situation he's trying to fix and make right and stay elite in. Miami has a big fan base and a lot of eyeballs on him. The pressure and stress are real.
DMoney: One thing he focused on in his press conference after the UNC game was the strain and the swarm. You saw a lot of plays in space where guys weren't showing the usual strain to the ball. Someone misses a tackle and nobody's coming behind him. Your thing as a coach was aggression. You preached it, and your teams represented that culture. When the effort and swarm don't look right on film, how do you get it right in one week, especially with Notre Dame next?
Geoff Collins: I was the defensive coordinator at Albright College, Division III. Then I was at Western Carolina with Matt Rhule, who was my linebackers coach. He's now the head coach at Nebraska and coached the Carolina Panthers. We came up with a loaf policy. You can say play hard and play fast, but what's the metric you judge it by? So Matt and I built a loaf policy and painstakingly graded it every single week.
Fast forward to this age of NIL and the transfer portal. I've seen more lack-of-effort plays, multiple in a game. It's an epidemic of guys giving up on plays, not finishing plays, no strain to the football, on both sides of the ball. That's why you see this ebb and flow of performance week to week. One week you drop 50 on somebody, and the next week you lose to a lesser opponent. It doesn't make sense. I think part of it is the portal era: teams not being together long, and coaches not having three or four years with a group to build the culture and the standards.
DMoney: Let me ask about the nickel, a very important position in Hetherman's defense. Last year you had Keionte Scott, who's an NFL starter right now, a complete difference-maker. This year you've seen different types of nickels. Omar Thornton is more physical and a great blitzer, but there's some tightness there. Bryce Fitzgerald is a looser coverage guy, but not as physical. Against Notre Dame, without speaking specifically about anyone if you don't want to, what kind of player fits better at nickel against that attack?
Geoff Collins: Such a great question. In all of these binders and playbooks behind me, at every single point of my coaching career, the entire defensive structure is built around who your nickel is. Who your Sam linebacker or your nickel is, everything you do defensively is predicated on that. When I was the defensive coordinator at Mississippi State, we had top-10 defenses, and my nickel was more of an outside linebacker. When I went to Florida, it was DBU, so my nickel was more like a corner. What you'd do schematically is completely different.
I actually have the Notre Dame tape rolling right now. They do so much 12 personnel, and there's so much of a downhill run game. My point would be to play a bigger, more run-stopping, better-blitzing nickel, because you're going to have to pressure this guy. Against Notre Dame, a bigger, better blitzer is what you need.
DMoney: CJ Carr killed Miami last year with his legs. He's not a guy who's going to run for 100 yards, but it's his lateral quickness. BYU seemed like they were getting to him, and he'd still make a guy miss. How do you deal with that? Is it a coaching point for the rushers, or something you do differently schematically?
Geoff Collins: I spent a week up at Notre Dame in the spring. When you look at CJ, he's a clean-cut, polished golden helmet. He looks like he just walked out of the country club with a 4.0 in business. Then he steps on the field, and he's got some dog in him. He really does. Same with Mike Denbrock, the offensive coordinator. He's wearing the quarter zip with his legs crossed, drinking his coffee, and then he goes out there and he's a freaking menace.
With CJ, it's almost death by a thousand cuts. He gets the run game exactly where it needs to be and checks it as needed. He flips the protections, and he does it all the time. He sees the pressure, changes the protection, still gets the number of receivers he wants into the route, and makes sure he's protected. Then he can make every throw imaginable. And if you have answers to all of that, he's just going to run on you. He's a problem.
DMoney: You've seen these guys and visited both staffs, but nobody knows what happens once the ball's kicked off. As Coach Collins, what are you watching for early that gives you a tell?
Geoff Collins: First, I'm going to enjoy the pageantry and the pomp and circumstance. My childhood was that late-'80s, early-'90s Miami–Notre Dame matchup. I was in high school and college for all of that, so I'm going to soak in this environment.
But I think it's whoever gets off to the fastest start. If Miami comes out and shows, we love Malachi, he's not here, and we're going to play for our brother, and they do really well, that bodes well for confidence.
If Notre Dame gets off to a fast start, with CJ and Mike Denbrock getting into the perfect play, seeing what's coming, attacking it and it working, it's going to be a long day. But if Miami shows very early that it's up to the challenge, I think it's going to be a great game in Miami's favor.
DMoney: Last thing. In your video on Notre Dame's offense, you focused on the running game. They lost two first-round backs, but you like their running game maybe even better as a unit this year. Miami has the No. 1 run defense in the country. What do you see in that matchup?
Geoff Collins: Strength on strength. Miami will line up in four-down and get physical, with some extra safeties coming down into the box. It's going to be a physical, downhill run game. What Miami has is quickness, and it does some stunts and movement. If it can create penetration and tackles for loss early, that'll be huge. If it's five-yard gains, six-yard gains, 20-yard gains, that's going to be tough to deal with.
But if there can be a tackle for loss or a caused fumble, and creating turnovers is a staple of a Corey Hetherman defense, getting some turnovers early builds confidence. Notre Dame Stadium isn't loud until you let them be. If Miami doesn't let them be, just keep the crowd quiet, go express yourselves and throw up the U's.
Collins said it best: That place isn't loud until you let it be.
Win the first quarter, take the ball away and keep it quiet.
Find Coach Collins on YouTube at The Coach Collins Show. The full interview is up on the CanesInsight YouTube channel.
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