Mario Cristobal provides honest assessment of Miami Hurricanes offense

There are plenty of teams around the country that would trade places with No. 13 Miami, which has gotten off to a 2-0 start and outscored its first two opponents 100-20. But that hasn’t stopped Mario Cristobal from providing an honest assessment of the Miami Hurricanes offense.

If you’re not constantly evaluating, something is probably going to stagnate.

Frankly, Miami’s offense did a little of that in the first half of Saturday’s game against Southern Miss. The Hurricanes led the Golden Eagles just 10-7 at halftime and quarterback Tyler Van Dyke was not at his sharpest.

“I thought we started off sluggish, like we mentioned before,” Cristobal said. “Then toward the end of the first half, I think five of our last six drives, we scored, albeit two of them were field goals and we had one punt. We came up short on a couple drives that were self-inflicted situations, circumstances.”

Sloppy throws into tight windows, penalties and poor execution were too frequent.

“We had a penalty that we could have avoided,” Cristobal said. “We could have called it a little bit better. I could have helped out a little bit better. So there were some things that were strong in a progress type of way, but other things that we felt that, hey, it’s just not good enough.”

No settling for the Miami Hurricanes offense

Despite averaging 50 points per game in the first two weeks, Cristobal sees some things his team still needs to clean up. More importantly, that’s the message he’s sending his guys.

In Year 1 of his tenure he’s trying to set the expectation there is always room for improvement.

On Sunday, Miami focused on that, having what Cristobal described as a ‘big technical and fundamental day.’

“I tell the players and staff all the time, you don’t let a win feel like a loss,” he said. “Look at what you did well, you get better at it. You look at the things you don’t do so well at and you improve them. If it’s not good enough, if you ever lose a game, it shouldn’t be good enough. If it’s not good enough when you do lose a game, it shouldn’t be good enough just because you got the win.

“You’ve got to look at those areas, those issues and you’ve got to correct them. So that’s what we’ve been doing, building off of that.”