Manny Diaz’s first seven months as Miami’s head coach have been a whirlwind. He had left to become head coach at Temple, then days later changed course when Mark Richt retired and he was offered the big job with the Hurricanes. He then overhauled the roster, bringing in a half-dozen high-profile transfers. He’s worked to convince a fan base that, this time, Miami really is headed back to its heyday, an era when Diaz used to go to games with his dad and cheer on his hometown team. Now, as Miami opens its first fall camp with Diaz as head coach, he’s looking to find a quarterback, integrate a wealth of new faces and reinvigorate one of college football’s best rivalries.
David Hale: You brought in a lot of transfers this offseason (eight in all since Dec. 1), which feels as close to embracing free agency as college football gets. You’ve yet to practice with all of them, but was there a concern about how so many transfers would fit in?
Manny Diaz: What helped us was, because we’re trying to redefine who we are, no one had any status. The guys we’re bringing in, there wasn’t older guys saying, ‘This is the way we do it.’ Everyone was being challenged. Everyone was looked at the same way. There was no new guys and old guys. There was guys that could live up to what we asked them to do and guys that couldn’t. That’s really how we defined it. If you look back to 2016 when we came in as a defensive staff, that’s how we ended up with three freshman linebackers starting. There were players that were either going to do what we wanted to do and uphold the standard or guys that weren’t.
Hale: I’m guessing you wouldn’t have wanted so many transfers in an ideal world, but it was needed to shore up the roster. But if it goes well, is it something that could be a regular part of the plan moving forward?
Diaz: It just fit us at the time we needed it. First off, the portal is just a fancy name for something that’s always existed. We just took off the coach’s ability to restrict it, and there’s a place for the names to go. It doesn’t change the fact that kids can transfer. I think when the data’s all in, the amount of transfers will be — it will not be as big a story as it’s seemed. For us, we had a very young team. We only had seven seniors. Then we had more scholarships left to give for the second signing day — more than the number of high school kids we were really after. So it was a good timing for us to use it to fill some holes on our roster.
Hale: A lot of other coaches are wringing their hands and saying they don’t want to jump into the transfer portal. Does it feel like you’re a little bit of a canary in the coal mine for how schools might handle transfers in the future?
Diaz: People on the outside may be looking at it like that, but I also go back to, we’ve had a history of this going back to 2014 at Louisiana Tech and our three years at Miami, we brought in Adrian Colbert and Dee Delaney and Tito Odenigbo and all three were really big, helped us and helped the young men, as well. But we did our homework on why they were transferring. That’s the issue. You have to decide why are they transferring, why is it not working out at their current school? For some, it’s a cultural thing. For some, it’s schematic. It’s easy to think it’s just a kid who didn’t get his way and wants a new place to take his ball and go play. I think it was about doing the research and bringing in guys who can help us have success.
Hale: What’s your thoughts on loosening the restraints on transfers? Should they be immediately eligible?
Diaz: Before we get the transfer house in order, we have to figure out how to replace the initial scholarships. What happens is, you can use three or four guys at one position, but because we made a rule to stop over-signing, that rule is now ironically hurting player movement. Let’s say we give them free access and be immediately eligible. There’s nowhere for them to go because we’re bound by only bringing in 25 initials each year. You have to put something in place where, if a player’s in good standing at your school academically, and opts to transfer, that you can replace that number. Because otherwise, none of us will be at your 85 [allowed scholarships], which hurts our depth but also offers less opportunity for them to move.
The coaches I speak to, I think what everybody wants is some sort of uniformity. What I’ve seen firsthand is everyone wants to weigh in in the court of public opinion about the waiver process and it’s really hard to know why some guys get waivers and some don’t. It’s easy to judge from the outside. It’s unfair on certain kids because it puts them in the crosshairs. I think whatever we decide, we have to make it uniform — everybody gets a waiver, nobody does, you have to sit but you can get a year back — so when people go that route, they know what they’re getting into.
Hale: Speaking of transfers, you accepted the Temple head coach job in December, but then changed course and returned to Miami after Mark Richt retired. What was that situation like for you?
Diaz: The crazy part about the process was that it happened so fast. I was interviewing an offensive coordinator candidate in my hotel in Coral Gables. It was 12:30 p.m. when I found out Mark Richt had retired, and that was a meteor out of nowhere. By the time the sun went down that night, the deal was basically in place for me to be the coach at Miami. I don’t know there’s a precedent for something like that to happen so fast. And it was important to me that, if anything was going to happen, it’d happen fast. I told the people at Miami that it wasn’t fair to Temple for me to be involved in a long, drawn-out process. So, to me, they’re the stars of the show.
Hale: When you took the defensive coordinator job, you talked about how you’d always dreamed of getting back to Miami, but you never knew if the opportunity would come around, so when it did, you had to take it. Is that the same mentality you had with the head coach job?
Diaz: Even before this happened, I’d accepted the Temple job and was back coaching the bowl game for Miami, and fans and well-wishers would pat me on the back and always say, ‘We know you’ll be back.’ Mark would have a great career and somehow it would all magically work out that I’d come back. You’d smile when someone would tell you that, but I never believed it. You can’t ever predict those things. And I couldn’t take the Temple job with the hope of keeping one leg back in Miami. You won’t be fair to Temple doing that. We were going. We were fully invested in being there, and when the car was packed up to leave Miami, you assumed it’d be the last time you’d live there.
Hale: There’s been a lot of talk for a long time about getting Miami “back.” What does that mean to you?
Diaz: I have immense pride in my community and where I’m from, and what’s always made Miami special is the idea that this was us, this was our most natural resource was the people we put on a football field. We focused on South Florida recruiting and then take on the rest of the nation. College football programs don’t just crash the party. Miami became a dominant force. That’s why the program connects so well with the community is that it’s just us vs. everybody. For me to be a part of getting it back to that point, every day, you can’t call it work because it’s such a passion for me.
Hale: Miami has a lot of pieces in place, but most fans would point to quarterback as your biggest question mark as you open fall camp. So, where does the QB room stand?
Diaz: What was fun for me was sitting in the quarterback meetings Day 1 of spring practice and seeing where those guys were all the way to the spring game in Orlando. This is an offense where there’s always an answer for where the quarterback goes with the ball, so we can judge them on three things: Do they avoid the critical errors, can they make decisions, and can they be accurate with the ball? We’ve got guys who can do things after they get the ball in their hands, so we don’t need a guy to put on a cape. We need a guy that can play point guard and get the ball to the open guy. We feel like we have an offense that can create open guys. So where we were Jan. 1 where we weren’t sure we had a quarterback on campus ready for that job to April 30 where we thought all three guys have a shot. Now we’ll find out who had the mentality this summer to be compelled to be the quarterback at Miami. You can’t want to be the quarterback at UM. You’ve got to have to have it. It’s something you can’t live without, like oxygen. That’s what I want to see in camp.
Hale: You get Florida in the opener. As a kid who grew up watching some of those historic showdowns with the Gators, what does this game mean to you?
Diaz: The only thing that matters to me right now is that the Miami Hurricanes play like the Miami Hurricanes. Those arguments, people say what they want to say. We’re usually basing it all off super small sample size. But I was raised on the big three, and when Miami, Florida and Florida State play each other, they’re on track for or deciding who wins the national championship. And I’m sure Willie Taggart and Dan Mullen are no different. We want to get that back. I have immense pride in football in the state of Florida and I think when our teams get together, it should showcase our state. I want to get it to where it used to be, where if you win the state championship in Florida, you’ve got a good shot to win the national championship.