10 wins in year three? AYYYYYYY!!!

When other people do the work for me, it makes an easy post. Part one here, part two here. You want some excitement to build upon before the bowl games goes down? Look no further…

Heather Dinich: Tell me more about what you guys started to do defensively down the stretch.

Randy Shannon: The thing that got us, the beginning of the season, we were lights-out on defense, besides Florida State. Georgia Tech we did a great job, Oklahoma did a great job, and then we started getting these injuries. We lost Ray Ray Armstrong at one point in time, we lost Joe Joseph, Jordan Futch, he was out, that hurt us big time with everything we were doing on special teams. And then we lost Sean Spence, and the defensive line was a rotation. When you keep losing defensive linemen and you’re trying to plug guys in, there’s no continuity. But I think the continuity came around the last four games of the season, it really started coming around. Third down we were getting off the field, maybe 65, 70 percent of the time, and it really started to show. They started to feel each other out a lot more towards the end.

I will always argue injuries are not an excuse. In 10 years the generic fan will not remember Oklahoma was without their Heisman winning QB all year. Injuries may not be an excuse, but they are a reason. They ruin seasons, and Miami’s defense was pretty awesome before all the dominoes went down. If Lovett can get them back to their early season peak for the entire 2010 season, we could all be in for a 2003 treat.

Great read as usual over at Heather Dinich’s ACC blog. She has a two parter on Mark Whipple, here and here.

Whipple doesn’t hit as hard this interview with the great quotes, maybe he was keeping it clean for the ladies. One excerpt:

Heather Dinich: Well, I guess that’s my way of asking how complicated is it? How much are you asking these guys to learn right away?

Mark Whipple: Well, I’m asking them to learn a lot. To me it’s not like if you walk into class and Albert Einstein was your teacher and he has the theory of relativity and you can’t understand it. Then it’s not a very good class. People going into class coming out say I understand that, I get that. That’s what’s more important. I can write a 15-page paper, and while that might be impressive, the five-page paper was a lot better. The systems have worked. They worked at Pittsburgh, they worked in Philadelphia, they worked at the University of Massachusetts, at Brown University. There’s things out of all of them. What I told our guys is, this is the Miami offense. You try things and continue to try different things and hope they work. You plan for them and try to explain why, and we want feedback from the players on certain things. That’s always been beneficial because then they have ownership of what they’re doing.

ACC guru Heather Dinich over at ESPN spoke with starting QB JaScory Harris on the phone today.

OC Whipple improves throwing velocity via hip motion? Genius I tell you! Genius!

Harris apologized to the seniors after the Emerald Bowl for the fumble that was caused by a completely unblocked weak side blitz? Sounds to me like Miami finally has their long lost unquestioned leader on the offensive side of the ball!

Harris loves that he will be under center more this year, because it will prepare him better for the NFL? Finally, we are back to the true desire to play at UM, not the “show up for four years and default yourself to the league” variety of the past 5 years!

Harris indirectly rips on Robert Marve via simple logic? Perfection!

The hits keep rolling in. Countdown. September 7.

Heather Dinich, the resident ACC blogger for ESPN, is good at her job. At the same time, she usually just spits out tidbits from the local papers of each conference team, with a few detailed pieces each day. Today, however, she hit gold. Or, in this case, a PayDay. 

Personally, I would want the Recees Cups. But that’s just me. And you can’t write a nice double meaning piece on delicious peanut butter and chocolate sweetness.

The more you hear about Miami this off-season, especially these WRs, the more you have to get excited. All we wanted these past four years were players who had a natural fire inside them. Hooray!