Bryant McKinnie on Canes: ‘They Need Those Personalities We Had’

Coming off a six-win season thronged with calamity, the Miami Hurricanes lost five players to the first three rounds of the NFL Draft. The future is uncertain but Vegas isn’t optimistic, pegging their over/under next year at 5.5 wins early in the offseason.

Clearly expectations have plummeted radically since the Canes of the early 2000s when the annual expectation was National Championship or bust.
Bryant McKinnie, a key cog at left tackle for those teams who went on to play 12 years in the NFL, thinks although “maybe they’re not being coached properly,” the mentality of the team is lacking compared to the old days.

“See they need those personalities that we had back then,” McKinnie said on the Kup and Crowder Show . “It was a lot of big personalities. We had a lot of people who wanted to take each other’s position. When you came in, you had James Jackson. Clinton Portis was like ‘oh I’m coming to take your position.’ I was coming to take the left tackle’s position. Everybody was coming to take somebody’s position and didn’t care and would battle each week in practice because they wanted their name called. That was the mentality and I feel like now they kind of sit back and say ‘Oh, I’m just happy to be here and go to UM.'”

“It was like alright we go to UM, but we want to play, we want to start so we were battling each other like we didn’t know each other because we wanted to take somebody’s position.”

If Bryant could change one thing with the current football program what would it be?

“I would let it go back to what it was, where you allow people to show their personality,” he said. “Let their personality shine and stop trying to make people become what you want them to be. Let them be who they are and go out there and play how they want to play. That’s how we always were. They never tried to make us conform and be like these good guys.”




(miami.cbslocal.com)