Before this week's post, I wanted to talk to people outside the Canes bubble. I spoke to NFL personnel people, college coaches, and others to get an external perspective on our annual collapse. Afterwards, I spoke to Miami to get the inside perspective. This post will summarize their thoughts, along with my own.
Let's start with a disclaimer. Mario is in Year 4. These are his players, his coaches, and his culture. He owns everything that's failing. A rash of injuries would be outside his control, but we've been pretty healthy to this point. So there are no excuses.
I'll provide my own thoughts first. Most of what we're seeing follows Mario's pattern from Oregon. Those teams were tough, strong up front, competed hard, produced NFL players, and won big games. It was a high-floor operation. They also failed to pull away from weaker competition, lost games as double-digit favorites, struggled with penalties, made gameday blunders, and lacked explosiveness in the passing game. The same stuff is happening here, but without the conference titles. We've yet to reach the same ceiling, and that ceiling was already below title caliber.
If I could sum up this year's problem, it's this: We're a down-and-distance offense that commits an extraordinary amount of penalties. That combination will get you beat in close games.
Two things shocked me about this year's team. First, I expected us to push around ACC defensive lines. The conference is thin on NFL bodies and we'd already powered through the tough part of the schedule. I was dead wrong. We're averaging 3.9 yards per carry, good for 84th nationally. The running game that ran for 5+ yards per carry behind TVD and Anthony Brown looks like ancient history now. We're as bad as everyone says we are.
My second big miss comes from a trio of offensive players. Coming out of spring, I thought Elija Lofton, Jordan Lyle and JoJo Trader would be the focal points of our offense. At his current pace, Lofton will go down as an all-time Greentree All American. I'll wear that albatross forever. He's been that bad.
I'll get defensive for a second here, if only to avoid the Baker Act - everybody watching spring practice thought Lofton was going to be a stud. He was running all over our first-team defense and getting more targets than anybody. But a couple of things happened. He hurt his shoulder, which removed any pop he had as a lead blocker. He hurt his leg, which sapped him of explosiveness. And he appears to be in below-average condition. Finally, we didn't add enough game-ready TE bodies from the Portal, so we haven't been able to use Lofton as much in the backfield (where he's most natural). Add it up, and it's my worst call since the Coker era.
I can't tell if Lyle is struggling with our blocking schemes or if he just has poor vision. But he's another practice standout, which is why he's being force-fed reps. Lyle and Trader will get a ton of opportunities due to injury, and they have a chance to raise the ceiling of this offense. But it hasn't happened yet and it may never happen. My big takeaway- don't put too much stock in spring (which is far away from the season) and base expectations on August camp, which is more predictive.
Now onto the external opinions. I found these were pretty consistent. Everybody pointed out the obvious penalty issues. We're 134rd nationally, and we finished 98th in 2024 and 80th in 2023. Raw penalty numbers can be deceptive (man coverage teams get more DPI, for example), but most of our penalties are controllable pre- and post-snap errors. That's an indictment on team discipline.
Not surprisingly, everybody felt we lacked urgency on offense. We slow the game down at weird times and never catch teams napping with tempo. Our pace works fine against better teams, but allows inferior teams to hang around and win. Our passing game is also straightforward, which is not uncommon for the Air Raid (which relies on execution of simple plays). But it's not clicking for us. Other teams are scheming guys wide open. It's hard to find a comparable examples on our team. SMU played 95% Cover 3 against us, and we couldn't make them pay for the single-high look with downfield passing.
On the running game, multiple people told me there's more variety than fans think (at least lately). The bigger issue is short yardage. We have zero creativity in those situations, and it killed us against SMU. We're missing opportunities to hit explosive plays against stacked boxes, and we're no longer good enough to bully teams that know what's coming. We'd be better off stealing plays off YouTube than running into the same brick walls.
Which brings me to their next observation- even accounting for stacked boxes, our run blocking has taken a huge step back. My NFL sources pointed to C and LG as major problem areas, and Anez Cooper has been disappointing as well. Mirabal teaches the double-under block technique, where you strike with your palms facing up and catch movement as opposed to firing off the ball. The benefit is you play with balance and get your hands inside without getting on the ground too much. But it's somewhat of a passive technique that requires brute strength to get movement. We aren't getting that push right now with our current interior personnel. Lastly, as much as we miss Elijah Arroyo, we also miss Cam McCormick and Riley Williams. The blocking at the tight end position has been a problem.
The feedback was better than expected on Carson Beck. He still projects as a mid-round type pick. His biggest issue is that he's the type of guy who runs the play that's called. Not only did Cam Ward change more plays at the line, but he was a perfect fit behind our pass protection (which remains elite). Cam would use the extra time to find angles and rip off explosive throws to Xavier Restrepo. Beck is better getting rid of it quick, and almost looks uncomfortable when he has too much time.
Finally, there is the receiver position. Aside from Malachi Toney and JoJo Trader, our receivers aren't explosive. Recruiting misses on guys like RayRay Joseph, Robbie Washington, Ny Carr, and (maybe) Trader are killing us. We also missed on guys like Zechariah Branch and Eric Singelton in the Portal. Both guys visited and signed elsewhere. The fact that we don't have great route runners is compounding the issue.
I was encouraged talking to folks inside the building because they seemed self-aware. No excuses, even off the record. One guy said flat out, "The fans are right." Penalties are their number one focus- they can't fix everything in November, but cleaning up the penalties would have numerous downstream effects. Nobody said anything about the refs, either. They've raised issues with the league office, but the message to me was about accountability. They know they've failed to this point and lost to less-talented teams.
Now we're going to find out about the culture. My prediction before the season was 10-2. Right now, I'd bet against that. November losses come in bunches and our trajectory has been downhill for a month. The message internally, is "Let it rip." We'll see if that plays out on the field. Go Canes.
