Canes Back to Work Ahead of Home Opener
By David Villavicencio
HurricaneSports.com
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – It’s Tuesday and the Miami Hurricanes are back to work.
Sunday’s season opener against LSU did not go the way the Canes would have liked, but there is no time to sit around and mope or point fingers or make excuses. The season continues Saturday with the home opener against Savannah State.
“I guarantee you nobody is more upset than the people who are out here every day practicing,” offensive coordinator Thomas Brown said. “I know the feeling to get upset about stuff, but we’re going to fix it, we will get better and we started that today.”
The Hurricanes are not shying away from Sunday’s result. They know their performance wasn’t good enough and know they need to correct things ahead of this week’s game. But quarterback Malik Rosier believes the team will learn from Sunday’s opener and fix the issues that prevented their success in Texas.
“I talked to the team and told them that we still have a whole ACC Championship to play for,” Rosier said. “Obviously, no one wants to lose. It’s a bummer. The first game of the year, you come out and we are 0-1, but we are still in it. I don’t think anyone’s head is out of it, because we’re not. LSU is a great team, but we have other great teams coming up. We’ve got Florida State, Virginia Tech, Clemson probably in the ACC Championship, so we got great teams to look forward to. We can’t let this one loss versus LSU just drag throughout the whole season.”
Head coach Mark Richt credits Savannah State head coach Erik Raeburn for building up a Tigers’ program that had five all-conference players a year ago. Richt knows Savannah State will come ready to play and will have the Canes ready when the game kicks off Saturday at 6 p.m. in Hard Rock Stadium.
“Their record is the same as our record,” Richt said. “We both lost. We have two teams trying to win. All I can tell you is our goal is to get our guys to do the right assignment, with energy and attitude and physicality and all that. That’s all they should focus on. What’s my job and how am I going to accomplish that job? You have to know what to do, you have to have the right technique and you have to add energy to it. If everybody does that every play, then we’ll have success and we’ll win a bunch of games.”
Tape doesn’t lie and the Hurricanes have been watching a lot of it as they look to dissect what caused them to struggle against LSU on Sunday.
“We went back and watched the film and there were a lot of missed executions,” Rosier said. “Some of them started with me; a lot of it started with me. They were small things that we missed that we never miss. Coach [Thomas] Brown said it perfect, ‘If there was no one in the stadium and we were going against our scouts, every blitz that they brought, we should have picked up everything they did.’ They did a great job executing and that is something that we didn’t do from the quarterback position to the receivers to the offensive line. It was a full team unit and it is something that personally I am going to take blame for. We got to go ahead and get better and we’ve got a team in Savannah State that brings a lot of different blitzes, so we’ve got to be prepared for it.”
Miami’s offense has been working on improving its communication and protections on the offensive line. Senior center Tyler Gauthier expects great improvement from the offensive line going forward.
“We are all our hardest judges,” Gauthier said. “I haven’t slept very good in the past two days just because I don’t think we did the best that we can. I think we’ve played better in camp than what we did that night. Whether it is nerves or something like that, I don’t know what it was for everybody, but it is something we need to gel on. Like I said, they did do good things. We came out of that with a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. The good thing about those bad things is that you learn from them. We can come out here and execute it now.”
One of the things Miami has focused on early this week is getting Gauthier back to making the calls upfront. The Rimington Trophy candidate already sees an improvement in communication and believes the line play will get better in a hurry.
“It actually went really well,” Gauthier said. “It’s a little change in the cadence to keep my head up so I can make calls for blitzes. We are doing it for the full game now, but especially for one-minute situations where they are going to be sending a lot of blitzes when they know we are going to pass. It went really well today; I was actually very impressed. I think it is going to help us a lot.”
Rosier, who went 15-for-35 for 259 passing yards and threw one touchdown and two interceptions against LSU, has been shouldering a lot of the blame from outside critics. But Brown knows the Hurricanes need to be better in all phases of the game going forward and he is confident they will be.
“We all struggled. It wasn’t just him,” Brown said. “It’s natural, like I’ve said before, ‘when things go well, it’s always the media trying to find one person to pinpoint, to say this is this guy.’ When we lose, it is the same thought process. Like, ‘who can we blame?’ Blame all of us. We all play together. And yeah, he did struggle at times, other guys struggled at times. Some of the inaccuracy can be obviously put on him at times. But also we had too many issues when it came to pressure. And when you get down by that kind of deficit, they [LSU] understand that you have to pass the ball to get back into the game. So those guys are going to pin their ears back and rush the quarterback. It kind of changes our game plan, changes theirs some, too. We just have to get better. Time to move on.”
