Mario Cristobal reviews progress, pleased with energy

A key point of emphasis for Cristobal and his staff is both sides of the ball is leverage.

“Understanding leverage, where is your help on defense to be able to help leverage the ball. On offense what’s the intent of the play so you can create leverage. Those things, playing football, understanding situational football are two things that really stick out.

“And then just consistency and intensity. There’s no scaling back. It just doesn’t happen. There’s no scaling back for study hall, class attendance for being early, for certain conditioning workings. Miami is good when Miami works its butts off and we’ve got to work, that’s the bottom line. ”

Practice resumes on Tuesday as the team nears the Midway point of the 15-practice spring ball.

NEWS & NOTES

• QB Tyler Van Dyke noted the offense’s improvement from the start of spring until the sixth practice. “I would say the consistency of making plays, reads and stacking plays is on top of each other. Before we’d have a good play, bad play, good play and now it’s good, good, good and every once in a while we’ll have that bad play, but just the consistency of it. ”

• DT Leonard Taylor on the differences between this spring and last: “It’s different this year. We fly around a lot more. The coaches are Harder on us. They push us a lot harder than last year. They make sure we stay in our playbook. They stay on us about the plays, how we dress a certain way, act a certain way. ”

• Taylor is coming off a season where they had 21 tackles, tied for the team-high with 7 ½ for a loss, two sacks and one pass Breakup in nine games. As far as his goals for his second season, he said, “My goals for this year is to play a lot more, make more plays, put my name out there more than what it is now.”

• Taylor did not reveal specifics with his weight room Improvements, but said, being in the weight room trimmed me up a little bit. A lost a lot of fat, turning it to muscle slowly. I feel a lot Stronger. My body fat has changed, but I’m not too sure about the numbers and I feel a complete difference. I don’t feel as heavy as I was last year. I feel a little lighter. I feel faster.

• OL DJ Scaife is back at right tackle (after starting at right guard the last two years) where he has consistently said he prefers since he arrived in 2018.

• Four practices of the spring were focused on installing the playbook while the other two practices have been focused on repetitions with the installs to have a better grasp on the plan. Saturday was one of the ‘repeating days,’ “We felt really comfortable today as an offense,” Van Dyke said. “We’re trying to get physical and keep the consistency going.”

• Miami was 12th in the ACC in rushing last year, last in yards per carry, and it is an area needing improvement, which Cristobal and the new coaches will be focused on being more productive in the run game. “Last year’s team definitely threw the ball more than they ran,” Cristobal said. “When we install, we install everything at a 50-50 clip, 55-45 clip, the RPO skews it one way or the other. We like what we see. We run inside, outside zone, counter, power, stretch, two-surface, three-man surface, four-man surface, pin and pull, speed, Sweep, you name it, we run it. The quarterback runs as well. We also stretch the field, we’ve gone empty, loaded sets, snook sets, we’ve installed a lot in six practices and we’re going to keep throwing more at them. We want to get a good feel for what we’re good at. We want to affect the edges. There’s a lot of good edge players in our conference. We want to be able to affect them with our tackles, our tight ends, our running backs, sometimes with snook set, receiver alignments We want to be able to take advantage of having great quarterbacks and guys that can get down the field and stretch the field a little bit. That tight end has had a Spectacular spring so a lot to do and that’s why these practices go as long as they possibly can because we have a lot to see. ”

• WR Jacolby George had another impressive catch in practice, which he has started to rack up this spring. “Jacolby is looking real good and there’s consistency with him,” Van Dyke said. “He’s making every catch thrown his way. You saw a video of him making that one-handed snag and then one day. He’s making a lot of big catches. ”