If you're really asking for critique, glad to give some. I've covered the Canes for 23 years now—starting back at Grassy.com (and eventually CanesTime), I launched allCanesBlog, was UM's featured columnist for BleacherReport for a year and a half and then rolled out my own site (ItsAUThing.com) where i could just cover UM as a passion project, when I felt like it (with no guidelines, parameters or company line to toe.)
Your first two-thirds of the piece says a lot without really saying anything. Too hard to be clever with the onslaught of punchy sentences, yet never really establishing a point and then building off of it. You pose a slew of questions and then do nothing to go back and answer any of them.
Example: "What's so hard about hiring the right AD?" is one of the first things you mention—do nothing to address it—when that question in itself could've been an entire article on its own.
Private school with 10K undergrads, job has traditionally been a stepping-stone gig since the turn of the century, proven by Kirby Hocutt and Shawn Eichorst, who both used Miami to get gigs that were personally more desirable and fulfilling—Texas Tech and Nebraska, respectively.
Small alumni base makes it a challenge for raise money at a private school like UM, versus a bigger state school with a larger alumni base—not to mention the whole, large metropolitan city, pro sports town / events town and non-college town vibe, which narrows your talent pool regarding guys who wanted to be athletic directors in college towns. It's a niche gig in a sports where the landscape has completely changes.
Miami's longest-tenured AD was Paul Dee, who wound up in the position by default, after Dave Maggart split town (going to work for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics committee just as UM was getting hit with probation.) Dee was UM's general counsel, he took over for Maggart and wound up staying in the role for 16 years.
There are reasons Miami has struggled to hire or attract quality candidates for the athletic director position—from UM's limitations as a private school, to incompetence on the BoT, to Donna Shalala reigning the program in for 15 years—focused on the medical department and simply being alright with ACC rev-share money and eventually a check from adidas. As long as the team didn't bring any negative press, she was fine with 7-5 seasons. (Ironically, she was the one who brought a lot of bad press for the Nevin Shapiro scandal—and the image of her holding the check at a booster event became the image of the entire scandal.)
Hiring the right coaches .... recruiting the right players .... these are big questions that need big answers and you ultimately answer none of them. Everyone that is a long time fan of this program can identify what's wrong—so assess the situation, give your take on the "why" and then pick a side and build your case.
You go on to try and make a point around 2001—arguably the greatest team and assembly of talent in the history of the sport; a direct result of Butch Davis' skills-set as a talent evaluator—carefully choosing players as he had limited scholarships, while make sure he was taking character-type guys and leaders who could shoulder a heavy burden.
Davis also did this two decades ago (starting to build that team in the late nineties) with a type of player that hardly exists anymore with this generation of football players. The type of Miami guys who once stayed home that took pride in rebuilding the program; they've been replaced by front-runners who buy into the glitz and glam that Georgia and Alabama are selling; both those programs having the highest annual recruiting budgets in the nation (UGA at $7M annually, Bama in the mid-$6M range.)
Outside of the flawed logic of trying to compare a present-day team to what this thing looked like in 2001, you simplify a much bigger and deeper issue with this "trust broken" premise based on where the program was at in 2003-2004.
The simple answer of what went wrong then; Davis was an feared and respected alpha who built this program and assembled a team so strong and mentally sound, it could literally coach itself—which it ****-near did under Larry Coker.
Coker was a nice guy, but every player to a man from back then has made it clear this was Ed Reed's team and they only saw Coker as a substitute teacher-type. No one feared or respected him—and he was in no way a leader capable of running a high-octane program like UM, at the time. His last head coaching job before UM in 2001 was Claremore High School in 1978. Miami was over a barrel when it couldn't lock Davis in to a contract and the result was promoting a passive assistant type to take over—which UM soon paid a price for.
Where Davis evaluated talent and brought in the right kind of guys to rebuild—Coker was tasked with trying to recruit highly-ranked kids to a national championship caliber program—and wound up with too many front-runner type, 4- and 5-Star athletes who thought they were hot **** and didn't understand what it took to maintain a program at that high-level. Guys like Ryan Moore, Lance Leggett, Tyrone Moss, Kyle Wright, Reggie Youngblood, Charlie Jones, Darnell Jenkins, James Bryant, Anthony Reddick, Willie Williams—guys that had natural talent, but didn't have the head, work ethic or leadership ability to keep the engine rolling.
Had Butch not left, talent evaluation, recruiting, player development, etc.—all would've continued running at a high level. Instead, Coker went 35-3 for three years with Davis' kids and 25-12 with his own—bottoming out with a 40-3 Peach Bowl loss to LSU, a season opening loss to Florida State, a pre-game logo stomp at Louisville before a 31-7 *** beating, an on-field brawl with FIU, a four game losing streak to some average ACC talent and eked out a bowl win in Boise against Nevada (a far cry from where it all started for Coker; a 33-7 rout at Penn State in 2001.)
You eventually admit the "wrong type of players" when you get the the Randy Shannon portion of things—but way too much has been glossed over by this point.
In short, you're trying to take a very in-depth, complex problem and condense it to a slew of posed questions that never get answered, followed by a very toe-in-the-water answer as to why.
Lastly, if you're legitimately trying to write op-eds in this nature—get out of that first-person stuff and away from all the "I" nonsense as it comes off very amateur. The first three paragraphs (from your point of view) setting up the piece—literally serves no purpose. Your premise is "Layers of a Winning Team"— so that's your thesis; start building on it.
Create an outline with that as the intro paragraph and then three or four bullets to support that premise, building on each.
Using a lot of words, ultimately saying nothing—while trying to come off clever and cutesy with punchy sentences or queries—that's not writing.
At the end, your takeaway is that Miami's admin isn't trustworthy, so it doesn't hire trustworthy coaches, who don't recruit / develop trustworthy players and as a result, the fans can't trust the product on the field—yet virtually nothing was done the previous couple hundred words to case-build to that point.
