The hope with Mario has always been about the ceiling via recruiting.
I'm not going to sit here and lie and say I ever thought the performance on the field would be this bad, nor will I lie and say I'm not concerned in the least bit. Even the biggest Mario supporter, which I am, has got to have their eyebrows raised by this. It's staggering to play 9 games and not play well in literally any of them.
BUT...I think the ceiling is what we're chasing here. And as far away as we are from this currently, at Miami you hire a coach to make the playoffs and compete for a national championship. You literally cannot do that with Mike Leach, or the vast majority of other coaches who were discussed here. You can only do it by stacking multiple elite recruiting classes. That's literally the only blueprint. Even teams like Notre Dame, who had an excellent football coach combined with pretty good classes and benefits from not playing in a conference, was exposed multiple times on that stage. You literally cannot win at the level of UGA, Taint, Bama, even Clemson, etc without stacking mega classes together. So we went out and got one of the very few guys who could do that, and at that same time, this exact person was the one who could attract the financial backers to make this possible in the NIL area.
Now, this guy might be such a horrible coach that we can't win even with the best talent. I wouldn't have said that 3 months ago, but again, I couldn't have possibly fathomed what I've seen this year. But at the end of the day, we're chasing the top of the mountain. I saw someone earlier say hiring Leach would have us playing meaningful games right now. EL OH EL. You wanna play meaningful games, or you wanna compete for championships? Yes, I would love to be playing meaningful games too, but there is no ceiling with Leach. He can't recruit the way you MUST recruit in order to compete with playoff teams. So as horrendous and eye-opening as this year has been, ask yourself this: If Miami was, say, 8-1 right now....would the recruiting class be any better than it is? Honestly, probably not. So this **** has been beyond brutal to watch, but if he can somehow hold this class together and add some of the pieces we're hearing about, along with some staff shakeups, I think we're still probably on schedule, as odd as that is so say after what's transpired the past 9 games.
I just refuse to believe this guy and Mirabal and Coach Joe and Coach Steele and Charlie Strong etc. have literally completely forgotten how to coach football. Mario was never even close to this bad at Oregon. ****, he wasn't this bad at FIU once he got a year or two under his belt. I have to believe this was just a much bigger rebuild than we'd have ever dreamed of, he whiffed on an OC, and the season went off the rails early and the kids (and probably some of the staff) packed it in like they have for most of the past 20 years.
But, unless something insane happens, this dude is going to assemble an elite roster with guys he has hand-picked and will have been able to coach since Day 1. That is a given, and a fact. So I'm willing to at least let him get to that point and then see if he's truly as awful of a coach as he's been the first 9 weeks. But he needs to surround himself with some better dudes, both as players and coaches. I know the former will happen. He cannot let the latter continue to underperform. If Gattis is employed in a month, I'll be very concerned.
