Miami Football: 3 takeaways from Week 8 win over Syracuse

1. Miami needs an offensive identity

The Miami Hurricanes need to find an offensive identity already. Six games into the 2017 football season, the Hurricanes haven’t found their identity.

At times, they run buck sweep, where the guards or a guard and the center pull and the running back looks to cut underneath those pulling lineman and get tough yardage just outside of the offensive tackle. Then they run inside zone read and split zone. They run a stalk/bubble combination as a run pass option or RPO. They tried to run the double-slant run pass option off of inside zone, which luckily led to a Syracuse penalty because it was a terrible read by Rosier.

The Hurricanes go with many personnel groups, sometimes utilizing a tight end in Christopher Herndon IV, sometimes going with empty sets, and at times running with a blocking fullback.

However, I don’t feel like Malik Rosier ever looks comfortable and settled in his read and the play calling scheme. In order to find success on offense you need a scheme and you need the quarterback comfortable and settled where he knows the rules of the offense and can find open receivers or make run pass option reads easily. Mixing up between systems, reads, and schemes doesn’t help a quarterback find rhythm or learn the reads.

Next: Latest 2018 NFL Mock Draft entering Week 8

I have talked about the offensive gurus struggling at times over this season and Mark Richt isn’t infallible, but the Miami defense is strong enough to allow the offense to find itself.