- Joined
- Feb 3, 2018
- Messages
- 30,823
From his press conference today:
On Diaz's return to Miami:
"There's a great saying that 'no man crosses the same river twice before he's not the same man and it's not the same river' and that's really the way I look at it. I've grown. I'm different as a coach, as a head coach and as a man than when I was at Miami. Certainly, the program is in a different place, by every metric, from when I was there. So I'm at peace, I've moved on. We still go down there a lot. We have a place not far from there and we're down there all the time. So, there are still people in the program, on the staff and players, who I know and have a lot of respect for but no different than playing SMU last week with all the familiar faces. This is just right now. This is just trying to get our football team to play a better game than we played against a top team that we played a week ago."
On facing Miami's Cam Ward:
"He's having one of the best seasons of any quarterback and if you just look at what they do on third down, it's remarkable. I think they have 60 percent conversions on third downs. I think the worst game they had was five out of 10. So we've got to defend two plays, the first is that he has great anticipation, very quick release, very accurate and then he's a hard guy to get on the ground. He runs around and can make plays, even scrambling on the throw and scrambling to run. So any quarterback like that puts a high amount of stress on the defense. We saw something similar last week but not to the level of this guy. I'm sure everyone has gone into the game saying, 'Hey, we've got to try to contain this guy', and they're 0-8 in trying to execute that. So how you want to do it and actually being able to pull it off are two different things."
On Diaz's return to Miami:
"There's a great saying that 'no man crosses the same river twice before he's not the same man and it's not the same river' and that's really the way I look at it. I've grown. I'm different as a coach, as a head coach and as a man than when I was at Miami. Certainly, the program is in a different place, by every metric, from when I was there. So I'm at peace, I've moved on. We still go down there a lot. We have a place not far from there and we're down there all the time. So, there are still people in the program, on the staff and players, who I know and have a lot of respect for but no different than playing SMU last week with all the familiar faces. This is just right now. This is just trying to get our football team to play a better game than we played against a top team that we played a week ago."
On facing Miami's Cam Ward:
"He's having one of the best seasons of any quarterback and if you just look at what they do on third down, it's remarkable. I think they have 60 percent conversions on third downs. I think the worst game they had was five out of 10. So we've got to defend two plays, the first is that he has great anticipation, very quick release, very accurate and then he's a hard guy to get on the ground. He runs around and can make plays, even scrambling on the throw and scrambling to run. So any quarterback like that puts a high amount of stress on the defense. We saw something similar last week but not to the level of this guy. I'm sure everyone has gone into the game saying, 'Hey, we've got to try to contain this guy', and they're 0-8 in trying to execute that. So how you want to do it and actually being able to pull it off are two different things."
