The results are in on Enos and Barry and they tell the same old story.
Donaldson is the latest example. High School All-American. Freshman All-American. Now, unplayable. Another talent wasted.
Duke's OL provides a good comparison. They struggled, predictably, with two freshmen tackles. But they still finished almost thirty spots ahead of us in sack percentage. Barry and Enos make young players look even less experienced.
It's a similar story with our old, bad coach. North Carolina was 4th in sack percentage when Searels got there. Now, they're 110th. We have witnessed some of the worst OL coaching in America.
This is a strawman. Nobody thinks our talent is perfect. That's why there are almost a million posts on the Recruiting Board. Some of us even provide specific criticisms of OL recruiting with specific suggestions on players and philosophy.
This discussion arises because we believe, with reams of evidence in support, that Miami wastes more talent than any program in the country. That includes OL, as the NFL numbers and recruiting rankings show.
If your point is our coaching stinks, great, no argument. Do we waste talent as well as anyone does? Surely! That’s what crap coaches do, and our coaches are crap. But this repetitive ‘hey guys we sent a kid to the nfl‘ mantra really should stop. It’s silly. Clemson has had good lines without sending kids to the nfl. Just maybe, there’s a flaw in your premise. Isn’t it at least worth you wondering about that? It’s not just a theoretical issue — if we don’t properly understand what is wrong, we will be less likely to fix it.
Maybe a good line requires more than a random talented kid, and part of our problem has been our overall unit talent, depth and experience is part of the issue. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, it’s easy to see why our OL have stunk. By that reasoning, saying we’ve had more talent by reference to a few nfl kids just misses the important question of what makes for an effective college OL unit.
Maybe the nfl is looking for different things in an OL from what we need in college, to have an effective line. Flowers was a first round pick. It surely wasnt based on his technique or decision-making at UM. It was based on his physical potential. But the NFL can bet that with time and effort as a pro, a kid can gain some things that he didn’t have in college. Based on that, maybe looking at NFL picks is a misleading way to judge what we need and should look for in OL.
What’s clear is our coaching has stunk, our lines have stunk, and for the few nfl kids you reference, we’ve also run some really bad pieces out there on our lines. My point is it’s all of it. Poor talent and depth because of bad evals and development and unbalanced recruiting, along with terrible coaching and schemes. Better coaching and schemes will surely help, but when Mahoney, gauthier and jahair jones are in our top 6, we have talent issues, full stop. When we roll with a 2* true frosh project (who had no other P5 offers) at LT in our opening game because there is no one else on our roster capable of playing the spot, we have a talent issue, full stop. We also had to play another true frosh who surely wasn’t recruited to be a true frosh starter in Clark. You may come back in a decade and say this line had talent because Nelson and Clark turned out to be NFL kids. That’s the problem. It’s a mistaken view of what talent means. Talent IMO means the right collection of kids to be an effective line right now, at UM. If another staff could get Clemson results from our kids, then we have a 100% coaching issue. I don’t think for a nanosecond that Clemson’s coaches would trade their OL kids for ours. So I don’t think it’s all coaching. It’s obviously both. All of the above.
