As part of CanesInSight's loaded 2025 Hurricade guest list, Fox Sports Analyst Bruce Feldman joined the show to break down Miami's 2025 hopes and the CFB landscape as a whole. Here's what he had to say:
On Miami's top 10 expectations & rebuild progress:
I would've expected last year to be a playoff team as good as they were on offense, but obviously the defense didn't hold up its end.
Mario lives and breathes recruiting and obviously o-line development and stuff like that too, but I think the top line stuff was how he's gonna upgrade the roster.
I mean we go back, it's obviously Notre Dame/Miami outta the gate and you think back to how Manny had a good team, a really good defense. They were opportunistic, not very good on offense and they crushed that Irish team. I don't wanna say it felt fluky, but it didn't feel like they have the talent this team does.
And I just think that's a testament to the commitment that whole.athletic department has made towards getting it back and fixing it. Because let's be honest, Miami's been broken for a long time.
On QB Carson Beck:
I'm excited to see what he does this year in this offense.
Going back about a year ago, almost exactly this time, he was the guy that most NFL personnel were intrigued by: Quick release, super smart, got pretty good size, he had played in a bunch of big games. And then last year at Georgia, Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey go to the NFL and Carson had alot of up and downs.
I'm most interested to see like, you had a quarterback in Cam Ward who going into last year, most people were looking at it as a fifth round pick. Well, he went on to be the first pick in the draft.
And a big part of that was what he blossomed into at Miami in that system. I thought it was like Shannon Dawson, the offense coordinator deserves a ton of credit for helping him really elevate.
Dawson knows Todd Monken well and he knew Beck well, so I think Miami kind of knew the potential of what they were getting. You know he's gonna be behind a, a very good offensive line, heard really good things about all three running backs, and you know it's just the receiving core. You have young guys around him, but young guys that everybody's really excited about and they like their makeup and their approach to things.
I think this is a ripe situation for Carson Beck to have a big year.
On Mario Cristobal's coaching philosophy:
He's a football maniac, like he is obsessed with it.
Two people, of all the coaches I've ever been around who were the most obsessed with recruiting and physical football are Mario Cristobal and Ed Ogeron. They're really different. It's almost like they are the far left side of thefootball coach evolution chart, and a lot of those other guys have fall by the wayside 'cause I don't think they can sustain it or they burn out.
I think what also helps him now is that the staffs have gotten a lot larger so you can have more people in more roles. So you're not putting so much on the individual position coaches now, because now there's personnel departments and all the things around it.
On the future of CFB and revenue sharing:
At some point we're gonna get to collective bargaining because I think they're just so worried about the flood of lawsuits that are coming.
That's what I've always heard in the last year or so, is that the only sustainable way they get get through this eventually is to get it to collective bargaining. Now that's gonna have some, a lot of unique challenges to it too, but we seem to be going to more towards an NFL model, and that's obviously where they are already.
So does the model eventually get entirely blown up? It might, because right now the TV networks have a lot more influence than they did 20 years ago.
I don't have a great feel for where that goes and how it plays out. I just would say this: we've had more change in college athletics in like the last five years than we probably did in the previous 50, so nothing would suprise me.
