I didn't like the Diaz hire. To me it's a high ceiling, low floor hire. But to say he's Shannon is just all kinds of dumb. Shannon never had a high ceiling.
Diaz's thinking lends itself to being a coach. His play calling at times can get a little "too cute" on particular plays. But from a macro, overall program standpoint, we need to be "too cute." We aren't Bama. We need to be constantly looking for inefficiencies in the football market place, and trying to exploit them to gain a competitive advantage.
That is Diaz's entire idea. He's an analytic, forward thinking coach. You knew what kind of offense he was going to want to run, without ever needing to hear him say a word about it. Because since you knew "A" about him, you knew "B" had to follow. And you can do that right down the line.
That, in theory, is exactly what we want at this program. Whether it works in practice, I don't know. Shannon, in "theory," was never what we wanted. He was just purely a Miami guy. There's nothing about his approach to the game that would ever lead anybody to think, "He's going to make a really good head coach someday."
This is like saying, "What's the difference between Billy Beane and Hawk Harrelson? Neither really did much as a baseball player. What's the difference between signing one to run your organization compared to the other?"
