CaneSport Message Board Mania: Miami Hurricanes Path to a Playoff Berth in 2025

As the Miami Hurricanes wind their way through spring practice, which will resume Tuesday, the task at hand is to get both sides of the ball dialed in with development and competition for spots on the two-deep paramount.

Big picture down the road?

The goal is all the work put in this time of year and in the off-season will result in Miami’s first playoff appearance. This is a program that’s suffered enough, right? Since the days of competing for championships – including four straight 11-or-more win seasons from 2000-03 – the program’s had more losing years (four) than 10-win ones (two, including last year).

Miami came oh-so-close to turning the corner a year ago behind the arm of potential No. 1 draft pick Cam Ward but missed the playoffs and dropped three of the final four games.

Which brings us to today’s CaneSport message board mania analysis.

Poster eplanas lists four keys in the thread “Is this a playoff Team? Let’s cut thru Fluff.”

• If Beck stays healthy
• if a couple of the young WRs step up
• If young DTs and DEs are ready to go
• If the secondary steps up BIG

He adds that “If the (answers) to all the above is yes then I agree this is a playoff team. And while I am very hopeful on all the above, not going to anoint anything until I see the results against a top quality team. Been burned too many times.”

So let’s break that down a little bit, starting with those four keys.

First “If Beck stays healthy.” Beck’s recovery off UCL surgery is ongoing, but he’s on track to be throwing by late spring. There should not be any injury concerns about his arm with a full recovery coming, and really we’d say the bigger issue with him is if we’ll see the version that starred two years ago when he had NFL talent at TE and WR at Georgia … or the one that struggled last year leading the SEC with 12 INTs.

As it pertains to “a couple of the young WRs step up,” we’d also take issue with that to some extent. Because while we think JoJo Trader, Ny Carr and Malachi Toney are as explosive and talented as you want, and the team added CJ Daniels in the portal, there’s every expectation that 1-2 more starting level WRs will come in the second portal window. And that could relegate the younger receivers to depth duty.

The “young DTs and DEs ready to go” point also may not be a huge issue. Because the veteran starters will be Rueben Bain, Akheem Mesidor and transfer arrival David Blay, and we’d expect Miami to target another DT in the second portal window. So really you just need a couple of the younger guys to join DT Ahmad Moten and provide some good depth. That should not be an issue at all.

So those first three probably aren’t going to make or break a playoff season.

But his fourth point “If the secondary steps up BIG”? Now that’s something we can get behind. Because Miami has out of necessity targeted the DB deficiencies with five portal additions already, and CB Xavier Lucas and S Zechariah Poyser have looked very good in the first week of drills. After last season’s debacle at DB we think this will be a really good secondary, and that will be key to this team going from ranked No. 70 in the nation in scoring defense to the top 20 (seven of last year’s 12 playoff teams had top 20 scoring defenses, including six ranked in the top eight).

We also totally get the dose of skepticism of needing to see it to believe it. Too many times at this point of the year fans are, in retrospect, delusionally giddy about the team’s prospects. And this year’s schedule is far more difficult than last year’s. But that doesn’t mean that perhaps this won’t be the year the gaudy hopes meet reality, right?

We’ll give the final word to Schnellys stache.

He points to very much a truth when answering if this will be a Miami Hurricanes playoff team.

“If the team is healthy, then yes,” Mr. Stache says in the same right-to-the-point way his namesake would relish.