PittsburghCane
Redshirt Freshman
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2017
- Messages
- 2,302
Wrote this as a tryout for a local entity that covers the team. Lemme know what you think.
The Layers of a Winning Team
Originally I wanted to do something clever here to open but unless I’m truly focused on it I’m hardly clever. I like simple ideas that I can understand. I also like to know a lot about something before I argue, debate or simply talk about a topic. Not everything but enough to present discussion at different levels. That way I can’t understand what I here and build off or against what I hear and comprehend.
So when I hear so many thoughts about what people think can and should be done to fix the state of Miami Hurricane football I struggle to not speak up about it. Not because I know without a shadow of a doubt that someone is wrong. But because I know that full perspective isn’t being taken into account.
I know I should have more grace with this, especially on twitter where we only have 280 characters to offer a convincing introductory comment or to respond concisely enough to make 280 characters create understanding. For something that asks me to be simple, something I enjoy, it’s difficult to react simply to Canes Twitter, or as we all do in reacting to the state of Miami Football.
As someone that is tasked on a daily basis to understand hierarchical business structures, motivation points, levels of communication and organization for a major company, what is NEEDED is fairly easy to identify. Finding a simple way to implement it, enforce it, standardize it, scale it and repeat it is something different.
It’s a lot of simple steps put together that inevitably becomes simple to complicate.
But rather than write an entire piece about the process of it all, I’ll simply focus on the customer. Because the customer is always right, right?
Stakeholders
When you are an executive, a stakeholder, a consumer, like most of us fans are, we see and focus on vision, how long we take to complete the vision and how much that vision costs.
What is so hard about hiring the right AD?
Or about hiring the right coaches?
Recruiting the right players?
Running the right playbooks?
Why has it taken so long?
We consume this like food. We don’t care about what factory made it, or how the item is grown, nurtured, packaged or where it’s sold. We are simply consuming we don’t care about these things.
Win. And win now.
But when things take longer, that’s when we become more invested into things we might not know much about.
Why do they need more time?
What did they do in the time we gave them?
Why couldn’t they give us an accurate timeframe for delivery?
Do we have the right amount of people to get this job done?
And when we are made to wait longer than the timeframe proposed or past the time it takes for a competitor to accomplish what we want, it’s only natural to begin comparing the product to everyone else, and thusly becoming frustrated with how far outliers go in such a short time.
This school did it one year!
This team was one player away!
They paid for what they wanted and got it!
Why did we hire this guy over that guy who did A B & C at that school?
And as someone who regularly is on the production side of the house, charting everything from hours spent to filtering a problem down to a single source, it drives me absolutely crazy. On my side of the equation in delivering a product, rarely can I find the grace to be patient with someone that doesn’t invest in understanding a product, its process, its people and the average cost and time of doing business, rather than cherry picking a desired result they saw elsewhere in someone else perfect environment.
So sometimes I get very impatient with the insufferable nature of fandom.
But then I think about it AS a fan, a stakeholder, who has a strong idea of what most others don’t, and I dive into hours of frustrating research and or argument as to what the **** is so hard about putting out a respectable team???
The simple answer to our problem?
Trust.
Or lack thereof.
Without trust at every level of process things fall apart.
Consumer->BOT->AD->Staff->Players
There was a point of pinnacle trust in 2001. The players were such a perfect blend of toughness, pride and talent, the players trusted each other to prepare, motivate, and push themselves to greatness. The coach’s trust of the players allowed them to coach and put the players in the best opportunities to succeed without having to babysit or build in extra guardrails to keep every player on the right path. The AD left the coaches to their business and could simply say yes to most of what the coaches needed, knowing it would be put to good use, similarly at the BOT level.
Lastly and most importantly the consumer could trust that what they were going to see was going to close to perfect.
A major consideration to be aware of is that players are consumers or fans before they become players. They buy into a product they enjoy and believe and trust to be great. But at some point that trust was broken. It might be possible to trace this back to 2003-2004 right around the time Coker was on the way out. Somewhere in there trust was lost between the staff and the players, then to the staff, AD and BOT, and lastly between the fans and the consumers. What happens when trust breaks? We panic. We try so hard to recreate what was so hastily that we fail to identify how we built it in the first place.
Once Coker’s staff lost the players, everything went sideways. The AD and BOT lost faith in Coker, panicked and tried to promote from within to recreate what was recently status quo with Randy Shannon.
Once Shannon realized he was over his head he didn’t trust his players and coaches and ousted half the team seemingly and, rather than taking time to understand how the team should be built, panicked and chased the wrong type of players rather than the type that can’t be trusted to win championships.
By the time the roster was rebuilt with the wrong type of players it was too late and we were left with talented players without much connection to even the teams preceding them.
But the biggest panic of all came when administration panicked following the Nevin Schapiro era that coincided with the Shannon Era. Fear of the NCAA and losing the consumer panicked the administration into hiring unqualified coaches that only trusted themselves and that were similarly fearful of the fan base.
It was this serious of panic, originating from a granular level of distrust that create a culture of haste and fear among the UM leadership. We are left with a lineage of players that are missing enough championship caliber traits, coaches whose distrust of players’ abilities and fear of failure jade their ability to trust and recruit the right kind of players. Without the right players coaches square pegged a round hole, lost the trust of the consumer and have regularly panicked themselves out of jobs.
And out of the trust of the consumer.
And until we have a trustworthy administration to identify trustworthy coaches, who trust the players they have, the consumer won’t be able to trust anything on a football field again.
The Layers of a Winning Team
Originally I wanted to do something clever here to open but unless I’m truly focused on it I’m hardly clever. I like simple ideas that I can understand. I also like to know a lot about something before I argue, debate or simply talk about a topic. Not everything but enough to present discussion at different levels. That way I can’t understand what I here and build off or against what I hear and comprehend.
So when I hear so many thoughts about what people think can and should be done to fix the state of Miami Hurricane football I struggle to not speak up about it. Not because I know without a shadow of a doubt that someone is wrong. But because I know that full perspective isn’t being taken into account.
I know I should have more grace with this, especially on twitter where we only have 280 characters to offer a convincing introductory comment or to respond concisely enough to make 280 characters create understanding. For something that asks me to be simple, something I enjoy, it’s difficult to react simply to Canes Twitter, or as we all do in reacting to the state of Miami Football.
As someone that is tasked on a daily basis to understand hierarchical business structures, motivation points, levels of communication and organization for a major company, what is NEEDED is fairly easy to identify. Finding a simple way to implement it, enforce it, standardize it, scale it and repeat it is something different.
It’s a lot of simple steps put together that inevitably becomes simple to complicate.
But rather than write an entire piece about the process of it all, I’ll simply focus on the customer. Because the customer is always right, right?
Stakeholders
When you are an executive, a stakeholder, a consumer, like most of us fans are, we see and focus on vision, how long we take to complete the vision and how much that vision costs.
What is so hard about hiring the right AD?
Or about hiring the right coaches?
Recruiting the right players?
Running the right playbooks?
Why has it taken so long?
We consume this like food. We don’t care about what factory made it, or how the item is grown, nurtured, packaged or where it’s sold. We are simply consuming we don’t care about these things.
Win. And win now.
But when things take longer, that’s when we become more invested into things we might not know much about.
Why do they need more time?
What did they do in the time we gave them?
Why couldn’t they give us an accurate timeframe for delivery?
Do we have the right amount of people to get this job done?
And when we are made to wait longer than the timeframe proposed or past the time it takes for a competitor to accomplish what we want, it’s only natural to begin comparing the product to everyone else, and thusly becoming frustrated with how far outliers go in such a short time.
This school did it one year!
This team was one player away!
They paid for what they wanted and got it!
Why did we hire this guy over that guy who did A B & C at that school?
And as someone who regularly is on the production side of the house, charting everything from hours spent to filtering a problem down to a single source, it drives me absolutely crazy. On my side of the equation in delivering a product, rarely can I find the grace to be patient with someone that doesn’t invest in understanding a product, its process, its people and the average cost and time of doing business, rather than cherry picking a desired result they saw elsewhere in someone else perfect environment.
So sometimes I get very impatient with the insufferable nature of fandom.
But then I think about it AS a fan, a stakeholder, who has a strong idea of what most others don’t, and I dive into hours of frustrating research and or argument as to what the **** is so hard about putting out a respectable team???
The simple answer to our problem?
Trust.
Or lack thereof.
Without trust at every level of process things fall apart.
Consumer->BOT->AD->Staff->Players
There was a point of pinnacle trust in 2001. The players were such a perfect blend of toughness, pride and talent, the players trusted each other to prepare, motivate, and push themselves to greatness. The coach’s trust of the players allowed them to coach and put the players in the best opportunities to succeed without having to babysit or build in extra guardrails to keep every player on the right path. The AD left the coaches to their business and could simply say yes to most of what the coaches needed, knowing it would be put to good use, similarly at the BOT level.
Lastly and most importantly the consumer could trust that what they were going to see was going to close to perfect.
A major consideration to be aware of is that players are consumers or fans before they become players. They buy into a product they enjoy and believe and trust to be great. But at some point that trust was broken. It might be possible to trace this back to 2003-2004 right around the time Coker was on the way out. Somewhere in there trust was lost between the staff and the players, then to the staff, AD and BOT, and lastly between the fans and the consumers. What happens when trust breaks? We panic. We try so hard to recreate what was so hastily that we fail to identify how we built it in the first place.
Once Coker’s staff lost the players, everything went sideways. The AD and BOT lost faith in Coker, panicked and tried to promote from within to recreate what was recently status quo with Randy Shannon.
Once Shannon realized he was over his head he didn’t trust his players and coaches and ousted half the team seemingly and, rather than taking time to understand how the team should be built, panicked and chased the wrong type of players rather than the type that can’t be trusted to win championships.
By the time the roster was rebuilt with the wrong type of players it was too late and we were left with talented players without much connection to even the teams preceding them.
But the biggest panic of all came when administration panicked following the Nevin Schapiro era that coincided with the Shannon Era. Fear of the NCAA and losing the consumer panicked the administration into hiring unqualified coaches that only trusted themselves and that were similarly fearful of the fan base.
It was this serious of panic, originating from a granular level of distrust that create a culture of haste and fear among the UM leadership. We are left with a lineage of players that are missing enough championship caliber traits, coaches whose distrust of players’ abilities and fear of failure jade their ability to trust and recruit the right kind of players. Without the right players coaches square pegged a round hole, lost the trust of the consumer and have regularly panicked themselves out of jobs.
And out of the trust of the consumer.
And until we have a trustworthy administration to identify trustworthy coaches, who trust the players they have, the consumer won’t be able to trust anything on a football field again.
hholky****:
