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The safety position

I can't think of one recent egregious example of favoritism. The closest I get is Coley playing Yearby over Gus. I can think of several examples I wished the coaches would ramp up snap counts more quickly, most recently Couch. But those are judgment calls, not favoritism.

Coaches want to win, so they're going to optimize the play on the field, and they often can't trust the young guy to play assignment football. They tried Huff at LB and Restrepo at returns. Outcomes were not good.

If a guy is not starting, 99% of the time it means he doesn't play consistently as well as the starter. For some (Rousseau, Bolden) it's injury, for others (Couch, Harrison-Hunte) it's experience and S&C. If you're going to blame anything, blame it on a failure of talent, roster management and development, not on favoritism.
 
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Miami’s defense this year should be really interesting csz of our personnel do u run Gilbert,Stevenson,blades,bolden,hall do u run Stevenson,blades,couch, bolden,hall etc a lot of options I hope we explore
 
TheOriginalCane said:
It has been discussed earlier, that Rousseau was COMING OFF of an injury. Maybe he was ready on Day 1, maybe not, but that's the reason he was not a pre-season starter, and NOT because he was young and Patchan was older.

A lot of our fans just tend to look at the end result, and work backwards (and incorrectly so).

Coaches are NOT trying to commit professional suicide by playing less-talented seniors over more-talented freshmen.
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Once a narrative is established, the truth is irrelevant. The seniority argument got established with Rich playing Rosier over the others, so now it's an established Miami fact.
 
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DMoney said:
I get the feeling this is going to be the most debated position all season.

You have two starting seniors (Bolden and Hall) with NFL aspirations who want to play every snap. You have a super-senior (Carter) who has played since he got here. Then you have two freak shows (Avantae and JW) who are going to demand playing time and likely won't react well if they are sitting behind underperforming players. Finally, you've got two guys (Kam and Balom) who should be coach's favorites and will be practicing in spring.

Very interested to see how this plays out.
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I can’t wait for the “play our 5star threads”
 
JD08 said:
Once a narrative is established, the truth is irrelevant. The seniority argument got established with Rich playing Rosier over the others, so now it's an established Miami fact.
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You are absolutely correct.

I also try to argue for the truth, as if I was hocking a loogie into a hurricane.
 
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Carter has no business seeing the field other than special teams. Not at Safety, Striker and definitely not at LB
 
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Lance Roffers said:
Moving to a defense that employs three safeties is the smartest approach. We have the players with the diverse skill-sets to make the defense work (with the striker being a fourth big S essentially).
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having 4 safeties on the field at the same time... is there another team in the country that does that?
 
grover said:
I can't think of one recent egregious example of favoritism. The closest I get is Coley playing Yearby over Gus. I can think of several examples I wished the coaches would ramp up snap counts more quickly, most recently Couch. But those are judgment calls, not favoritism.

Coaches want to win, so they're going to optimize the play on the field, and they often can't trust the young guy to play assignment football. They tried Huff at LB and Restrepo at returns. Outcomes were not good.

If a guy is not starting, 99% of the time it means he doesn't play consistently as well as the starter. For some (Rousseau, Bolden) it's injury, for others (Couch, Harrison-Hunte) it's experience and S&C. If you're going to blame anything, blame it on a failure of talent, roster management and development, not on favoritism.
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I don't agree with this. You're defining favoritism down to nothing by trying to contend it's some emotional bias against a kid or for another kid. That, IMO, misses the point.

Your underlined comment basically takes an easy assumption (coaches want to win) and uses it to attempt to contend that everything they do is because of that, and so rational. That really shuts down any inquiry into coaching biases.

The issue we've seen is coaching staffs that coach scared. They do bias towards experience and seniority. It's pretty clear to me and many others here that that's been a consistent trend around this program for a long time. It's easy to hypothesize that they're doing so for good and valid reasons, and I suspect they think they are. But then many other effective programs manage to get young kids more opportunities earlier. So I don't really care whether our staff is doing what it does because it thinks its right -- I mean, I hope they do. But the discussion here is really whether it's just one more area where they're doing it poorly or wrong.

Personally, I think it's a combination of factors. Part of it is our staffs have been coaching scared for ages. That's natural when you have coaches getting fired every 4 years. The first year is 'prove you can do it.' The second year is 'fix it/don't **** it up.' The third year is 'warming seat.' The fourth year is fight for your career. So we have had scared coaches and they've done something predictable - avoid upside and development to bias towards current year and lower risk.

In addition, our lack of depth, experience and leadership hurts in terms of getting young guys prepared. Our cultural softness doesn't help, either. And we haven't recruited that many kids who are physically and skill-wise ready for gameday as true frosh.

All of those are reasons we've been underwhelmed with the ability of our staffs to get young guys into action faster. It's a mix of objective and subjective.
 
JD08 said:
Once a narrative is established, the truth is irrelevant. The seniority argument got established with Rich playing Rosier over the others, so now it's an established Miami fact.
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This discussion on Cane boards goes back to the days of Shannon playing Glen Cook and Romeo Davis over younger guys. It didn't begin with Rosier.
 
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