Social Distance: The transcript from Rhett Lashlee's interview

“I think first and foremost, Manny Diaz has done a good job here at Miami defensively and when he brought me in here, he realized what first the athletes in South Florida and the players that we can recruit to Miami is more of a spread, up-tempo offense. I think there has been desire for that to happen here for some time, so I am excited to be here and implement the scheme.

“Once that decision was made [to run that offense], you have to have a trigger man. You need a guy to run the show. I had the opportunity the last two years to play against Houston and D’Eriq King when I was at SMU and I had to remind him that we found a way to beat him. In 2018, they came to play us and they were 7-1 or 8-1 and he was as electrifying as any player in college football. He had a phenomenal season. Last year, even though he only played in four games, what he did against Oklahoma and Washington State, he still was pretty impressive. Lincoln Riley had some impressive things to say about him after the game.

“When he was on the market, we needed a quarterback and I think he was driven to play at a place like Miami that is on the national stage and can be a national type contender and have that spotlight for one year. It worked out pretty good. He needed that opportunity and we needed a guy that had experience and is a pretty good playmaker too, so that worked out.

“We were able to get four spring practices in and we were able to see enough to know that all of our players, when we get back out there, we have a chance.”

“Anytime you come somewhere new and you have only four practices and then don’t see the guys for four months, it is common sense that that is not ideal, but I look at the positives. We got four practices in. They understand the way we want to practice with the tempo and style of play we want to play. Fortunately we are not real complex on offense. Our whole premise is that we want our players to play fast and react and not think a lot and still be complex to the defense. I feel good that we were able to expose our guys to the core values we need to have on offense and the identity and maybe even learn about them. It did carry over to the Zoom meetings. We are going to be in the same boat as everybody else when we get back to playing, so we are going to control what we can control.”

“I kind of used the same mentality that we had back in 2013 when we came back to Auburn. Auburn had come off a really rough year in 2012 and there wasn’t a lot of optimism on the offensive side of the ball at the time. In the spring, there wasn’t a quarterback that everybody felt great about. I told our guys that I didn’t watch a full game from last year. I did have certain cut-ups of individual players made, just to have a feel for what we have, but we wanted our guys to know it is a fresh start and a new day. We are going to be running a completely different style of offense. We want the culture and environment from what we had. We didn’t want to define the guys opportunities based on the previous year. We tried to do the best to separate and not worry about last year here—just like we did in 2013. I think any time you can do that, it helps the players believe you are giving them a fresh start and that is what we wanted to do and have a fresh start.”

“It is going to take, especially when you have a new quarterback and a new offense, three or four games into the season before you truly know the identity. We have an idea and I think we are going to know what we are going to be, but it will be tweaked as the season goes on, but you usually don’t have much time to get that right.

“The good news is that a guy like D’Eriq, more than say Nick Marshall [at Auburn], has played quarterback at the collegiate level at a high level, so there is a lot more evidence of what he is comfortable with and what he does well. Hopefully that will help marry the two up and it is seven years later—hopefully I am a better coach than I was seven years ago.

“The one thing I’ll say too is after getting the individual cut-ups and watching the four practices that we had, we have speed. We have length. We have athleticism. We have some guys where if we can put them in the right position and ask them to do the things they can do and maybe help play to their strengths, maybe we can turn things around quicker than people think in some areas.”

“Manny and I have a relationship from just going against each other over the years while at Auburn and Mississippi State and Auburn and Louisiana Tech. It is like anything else in this business, you develop a certain respect about some of the guys you go up against and he has always been a tough defensive coordinator for us.

“He reached out and said what he wanted to do on offense. Since I left Auburn, we really started to play with a lot of tempo and make that a big part of who we are. A lot of the things I learned in playing and coaching is similar to a lot of the stuff still at Auburn, but we are also very different if you watch us on film and one of the big things is playing fast. We averaged almost 81 plays per game last year.

“As a defensive coordinator, Manny knows that going against Tempo is a problem. Our relationship and experience in the SEC made it a fit. I think it was a pretty easy conversation for us to have. The hardest part for me was just leaving some good kids like Shane Buechele at SMU.

“Manny is really good because not only is he good at defense, he’s also good at assessing situations and knowing what is best for his team and committing to it. He’s been 100 percent onboard with us spreading the field and playing fast ever since we talked.”

“I think he definitely has a great comfort level here, a great name [because his father was the mayor of Miami previously, and that is why he’s a great fit. Honestly, I have been in quarantine most of the time since I have been at Miami, so it is hard for me to tell you what things are like out there in the community.”

“Everybody comes to South Florida to recruit. You referenced back in 1983 when they had the ‘State of Miami’ where the line was drawn pretty much everything south of Tampa and the Space Coast down. A lot of guys stayed home and it turned around quickly.

“I think it is easy from afar—and I am guilty of saying that Miami should get everybody [locally]—but everybody else is coming here to get players too. The entire SEC and the entire country. I do think that is part of the reason why Manny wanted to go to this style of offense. We have to give the kids here a reason to want to stay home. An exciting offense that is similar to what they do in high school—everyone is running the spread and spreading the field with these athletes and playing with some tempo. Most of these kids want to wear ‘The U’ on the side of their helmets, but over the years everybody is good at what they do and they have good programs and there are so many players here that you can’t take them all.

“We have to give them a reason to stay and our staff has done a great job during this quarantine of recruiting. We haven’t been able to have kids come to practices to watch the new offense or have kids come to the camp. I think we are doing really well with targeting the guys that fit what we want to do and having them see our vision.”

“I don’t like putting expectations on players, but he kind of put them on himself with what he did in 2018.

“The thing that is best about D’Eriq King is not that he’s an electric athlete. It is not that he throws the ball a lot better than most people think. He is just a winner and he is a leader. Who he is is going to be more important to us than his ability. Don’t get me wrong, that is pretty cool and it makes those play calls easier and it makes them right a whole lot too. Just from being a leading presence with the quarterback with the way he works, it starts by how he was raised—he was raised the right way and he was taught how to work and compete and handle failure. I think the guys are influenced by him in a positive way—and it also helps when you are really good at football.”

“I think you are always trying to evolve as a coach and get better. That is with life and anything. I am always and forever grateful. Gus was my high school coach. Him and Chris Wood and I learned so much from them. My foundation of football and philosophy comes from those two men. Then the opportunity Gus gave me to get into college football and be an offensive coordinator at Arkansas State and Auburn—I can never thank him enough for those opportunities.”

“We did a lot of good things together, but also offensively, even though we come from the same background, everybody has their own personality. You kind of reach a level where you can only grow so much in the environment that you are in and you need to step into another environment that is more uncomfortable or maybe not what other people expected.

“Randy Edsall and Sonny Dykes giving me those opportunities to grow as a coach and feel out what is my philosophy and what I believe in. I believe in a lot of the stuff that we were doing at Auburn, but I was running a system. Now I can go out and build a system with the staffs I’ve been on the last three or four years. Especially last year at SMU, I feel like I had finally grown into what I feel like what I believe in.

“I believe in balance. You have to run it and throw it. I’ve always believed you have to run the ball to win, but you have to throw the ball to score. That is a fancy way of saying balance. Putting that together has been fun. People always ask me what type of offense I run, whether it is an ‘Air-Raid’ or a no-huddle…I probably couldn’t tell you. It is probably more of a power spread offense.

“I have been blessed to take pieces of the Gus Malzahn system that I grew up in and systems of coaches that I have worked with over the past few years that have some ‘Air-Raid’ principles to them, which is stuff I truly believe in—and some of the stuff they were doing at Baylor over the years. I want us to be fast, aggressive, attacking, and simple for our guys. If we want to play fast, we have to commit to doing that. When you can do that, it gives your players confidence. At a place like Miami, we should be able to recruit good enough players. We don’t have to overthink the room. Let’s put them in a position so they know what they are doing and then their ability will take over.

“I love Auburn and I am always grateful to Gus—but breaking away has been really good for me.”