The secret behind Miami's explosive offense? A Louisiana country boy who almost walked away from football

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — The wallpaper of Shannon Dawson’s office is a tapestry of a football coach’s first language: Xs and Os.

Scribbled in black marker, scrawled across three of four walls in the Miami offensive coordinator’s digs are play designs, route concepts and offensive formations. You can barely make them out. A film junkie, Dawson’s office is often dimly lit as a television glows from across the room.

But as the lights flicker on, the walls come alive. There’s a surprise here too: a fourth wall — a window looking out to the team’s indoor practice facility — is also covered in play designs.

Window or wall, no surface can escape Dawson’s felted weapon.

“We call it ‘The Think Tank,'” Dawson says of the window, which, unlike the three walls, holds concepts to be used at a later date instead of the current game week.

A country boy at heart, his accent dripping with those south Louisiana and Mississippi roots, the 49-year-old Dawson helps steer the nation’s most explosive offense for the country’s top-ranked team.

Miami deploys college football’s most efficient and productive quarterback (Darian Mensah completes 80% of his passes and throws for the sixth-most yards in the sport); its most electrifying receiver (Malachi Toney has caught the second-most touchdowns); and two bruising backs (Mark Fletcher and Javian Mallory combine for 16 scores).

As the unbeaten Hurricanes barrel toward perhaps the most anticipated regular game in college football this year — No. 1 Miami vs. No. 11 Notre Dame in South Bend — Dawson’s unit is humming at a breakneck pace: no team averages more points a game (46.7); no one has gained more first downs (224); and only one other program gains more yards per snap (7.7).

How?

The short answer is that coach Mario Cristobal has stockpiled talent; created a hotly competitive team environment; developed athletes into fierce football players; and, four years ago, took a giant leap: He hired Houston’s offensive coordinator, then a somewhat unknown disciple of the Air Raid offense who, in his biggest job (Kentucky in 2015) lasted one season.

You can find that someone within that dimly lit room, his language sprinkled across wall and window, a man who’s blended the pass-heavy concepts of Hal Mumme and Mike Leach with Cristobal’s intensely physical running game to produce something altogether scary for opposing defenses.

“Adapt or die,” Cristobal says from his office on hiring Dawson, perhaps not dissimilar to Nick Saban plucking Lane Kiffin in 2014 to reinvent his offense.

“Shannon has been able to morph the principles of the Air Raid with the power running game and screen game. He feels like we’re just starting to hit our stride.”

Keeping the game small

Now living near Jackson, Mississippi and, at least for now, out of coaching, Hal Mumme has watched the Hurricanes enough to recognize his system, as well as the country-talk’n Louisiana man who paces the sideline and who he hired in 2003.

Upon taking the job to revive the Southeastern Louisiana football program, Mumme met with a school donor and former player who’d shown up to his office solely to tell the coach that he should hire his son, a 20-something former Mississippi College quarterback.

Great! Mumme thought after the meeting. Another helicopter dad!

Mumme met with Ricky Dawson’s son and, wishing not to hire a booster’s boy, intentionally described to him the single-most awful job on his staff: a do-anything-for-almost-nothing gig that included chauffeuring Mumme to and from fundraising events when the coach drank.

“I painted the worst picture you could paint for this guy,” recalls Mumme, “and he goes, ‘When do I start?'”

Months later, late in a tight rivalry game, Shannon dipped his head into the huddle and suggested Mumme run a play called Fox, where the quarterback fakes a screen and goes deep. Mumme began to berate the low-level staff member for injecting himself — until he realized Shannon was right.

He called Fox and the Lions scored the game-winning touchdown.

“I’ve been a Shannon Dawson fan ever since,” Mumme said with a laugh.

Perhaps that was Ricky Dawson’s best sales job — helping land his son the gig in Hammond, Louisiana.

A businessman and motivational speaker for most of his life, Ricky, with wife Carlette, raised two boys on several acres of family land in the bayous and backwoods community of Bluff Creek, an unincorporated settlement some 35 miles northeast of Baton Rouge — a place with no red light and one that even Shannon acknowledges is “very Louisiana country.”

Ricky Dawson was an ideas man. And he could sell an idea to just about anyone. But many of his business ventures failed miserably, and at times, the family found itself broke. He never quit selling, though, never stopped thinking or believing. And he never brought the failures home to his family.

He always preached to his sons the power of positive thinking. “Attitude is a choice,” he’d tell them. He’d find a way to make anything work for his boys, “even if I’ve got to get a wooden bill and pick shit with the chickens,” he’d tell them.

Shannon Dawson lives life like that now.

The glass is always half full. There is always light at the end of the tunnel.

He coaches that way, too: positive, calm, confident. He calls it “keeping the game small” — a recognition that it is still only a game.

“You get older and you find out that nothing is perfect. When I took a deep dive with Dad through the years, through high school and college, it gave me an unbelievable appreciation for him,” Shannon says. “Looking back on it, I appreciate the fact … there are very few people who can compartmentalize the negativity and have this outpouring of positivity. In his mind, it was all about the journey.”

AP Photo/David Santiago

Dawson’s own journey is typical of most career-long assistant coaches: ups, downs, big breaks, unceremonial firings and, at some point, a dejected man doubting his dream.

A few years after Mumme gave him that low-level gig, he reunited with his college coach, Dana Holgorsen, at West Virginia. There, he met wife Chelsea, now the mother of his two girls, while coordinating Holgorsen’s Air Raid scheme with a (running) twist.

Then, things began declining. A “bad fit” in Lexington led to his firing (he holds no hard feelings and still communicates with then-coach Mark Stoops) and that gave way to a three-year grind as coordinator at Southern Miss that had him rethinking his coaching career.

He called his dad and brother back home in south Louisiana.

Is there anything there for me to do?

“Everybody has that point in their life in our profession,” Dawson says. “I listened to [New Mexico coach] Jason Eck talk about that in an interview recently. I started thinking about mine and that Southern Miss deal beat me down. I hated football. I hated everything about it. It wasn’t fun. I could see myself changing as a husband and dad.”

A tough job in Hattiesburg was made more difficult by family trauma. While coordinating Southern Miss, his mother fought what would eventually be a losing battle against cancer. Thankfully, he could commute the 90 minutes to Bluff Creek to spend time with her in her final years.

Ricky and Carlette were college sweethearts. The two met while attending Southeastern Louisiana — the same place where Mumme gave Dawson his (little) break. Toward the end of Carlette’s illness, she pulled her two boys aside and told them that Ricky had been acting funny and that, after she passed, they needed to get a doctor’s evaluation.

They listened to Momma.

Ricky was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not longer afterward.

Parallel with quarterbacks

There are few questions that Cooper Barkate can’t answer.

The Miami receiver is as sharp of a player as you’ll meet — educated at Duke and then Harvard before that.

But this question is a head-scratcher.

How has Miami integrated three straight transfer quarterbacks -—Cam Ward, Carson Beck and Darian Mensah — so seamlessly?

“That’s a good question,” he says, pausing to dig up an answer. “I don’t know. I was talking to Darian [Mensah] when he came in and the coaches talked to Darian about what he likes and doesn’t. It’s not like they confined him to the same box as Carson Beck.”

Cristobal and Dennis Smith, executive director of the program and one of the coach’s chief recruiters, brought in some of the nation’s most talented passers. It was Dawson’s job to use them appropriately.

But he didn’t plug each of them into his system. He molded his system to them — perhaps his greatest strength.

“That’s the most fun part,” says Mensah. “He calls plays that his players want to run. He doesn’t fit players into his system — his system is the players.”

At Miami, Dawson has refined this system of his — a marriage of the Air Raid passing concepts with more traditional NFL-style formations and run game. While Mumme sees his famous receiver route patterns when watching the Hurricanes — Y-Cross, Y-Sail, Stick, Mesh, Fox and all of the famous Air Raid screens — he also sees a team that aligns tightly using multiple backs and tight ends.

The Air Raid is more of a philosophy, Mumme says, rather than a scheme. Sure, there are the route concepts that he and Leach introduced to the mainstream while at Kentucky in the late 1990s. But the three principles of the mission are most important: (1) throw it short to someone who knows how to score; (2) throw it deep if they take away the short pass; and (3) run it if they take away the first two.

The short, crossing screen plays have been Miami’s most potent weapon.

Quips Mumme: “Yeah, they’re awesome at it. Mostly because they are throwing to Malachi Toney.”

Dawson’s ability to get his most slippery and electric weapon the ball is perhaps his best gift. Toney averages more catches a game (9.1) than all but one player in the nation. This week against Notre Dame, the offensive coordinator may need to do it without him. Toney sustained an ankle injury in practice that may keep him out of Saturday’s game, those with knowledge told Yahoo Sports.

AP Photo/Chris Seward

Meanwhile, Mensah and Barkate, each on their third school, say they’ve never had more control of an offense to change plays or routes before the snap. Barkate often adjusts his route just before or even after the snap based on the defense’s formation.

“It’s an NFL pro-style offense,” he says.

Part of Dawson’s refining of the system included shortening play-calls by making “smaller words mean more” — an act of simplifying the offense for new quarterbacks. He describes his role as working “parallel with quarterbacks” as opposed to dictating to them — a luxury, perhaps, afforded to him by Cristobal’s acquisition of the last three veteran passers.

“A lot of people make offensive football hard. And the reason is they put too much in the quarterback’s brain. I’m trying to take s*** out of your brain,” Dawson says.

But for all the strategic Xs and Os, one thing remains even more important and that’s something Dawson got from his old man.

“Attitude is just as important as the scheme — 50% of it or maybe more,” he says.

A man known for his bruising style and relentless competitiveness, Cristobal left Oregon to return to his home to resurrect one of college football’s most storied brands. He’s got a locker room mostly full of “alphas,” he calls them.

They have attitude. They have swagger. And they hold one another accountable.

Barkate has never seen anything like a Miami practice. Anyone slouching is immediately lambasted by a fellow player. “I’ve never been in that culture where it corrects itself,” he says.

That’s why integrating a quarterback isn’t the difficult part, says Cristobal. “To me, the challenge is more selecting the right fit,” he says. “The rest naturally takes off. It’s an environment where iron sharpens iron.”

After arriving in Miami this spring, Mensah began intentionally showing up at the facility as early as possible and stayed as long as possible. “You want people to see you and say ‘This dude is always working,'” he says.

He wanted to be the first one into the facility. He learned that meant arriving at 5 a.m. if he wanted to beat Toney.

“When you have alphas get together, alphas need to respect each other,” Cristobal says. “You can’t respect someone unless you get to know them and you can’t know them unless you invest time. Those two, they are an awesome match.”

A defining moment

Back in Dawson’s office more than just play designs are scribbled on his walls and window.

An inscription appears above his desk: Capacity for boredom.

He stole that phrase from Mumme and Leach and consistently preaches it to his staff and players. In short, it means “don’t get tired of doing the same s*** over and over again,” he says.

If the play works, keep running it.

Don’t like running the same route? Too bad, it’s working.

Don’t like blocking the same way? Suck it up, it’s for the better.

Now on a multi-million dollar contract and presiding over the nation’s top-ranked offense, Dawson acknowledges that he often pinches himself.

How did a Louisiana country boy who nearly quit the profession just seven years ago end up here?

“I’m overly blessed for what I got,” he says. “It gives me the mentality of ‘Enjoy it and do the best you can do.'”

He attributes the rejuvenation of his career to Cristobal and Holgorsen, who upon taking the Houston job in 2019 hired Dawson as his tight ends coach in a move that convinced him to remain in coaching. Over four years, Holgorsen promoted him to quarterbacks coach, pass-game coordinator and, finally, offensive coordinator.

And then came what Shannon calls today a “life-changing deal to me”: an interview with Cristobal for the coordinator position at a place rich with talent.

“That interview was a defining moment,” he says. “I never went into a game with a sense of urgency as I did that interview. I knew who I was up against. I got interviewed late. I knew I had to kill that interview. I didn’t know if I would get that opportunity again.”

Cristobal took the risk. He fired Josh Gattis after his first season in Coral Gables and hired a little-known Air Raid disciple to help him rebuild the Hurricanes.

As the Notre Dame-Miami game arrives this week, the two programs have returned to the glory years that marked one of the sport’s nastiest and most intense rivalries — the “Convicts vs. Catholics” era of the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s. Last year, the Hurricanes beat the Irish to open the season in a result that ultimately kept Notre Dame out of the College Football Playoff and ushered Miami into a postseason where it won three games and reached, like the Irish in 2024, the national championship game.

The U is, indeed, back — and at a critical time in an evolving landscape where the Hurricanes are positioning themselves for a promotion.

“When I was playing [at Miami], we’d go to the parks with these little kids and ask, ‘Who wants to be a Hurricane?’ And every kid would raise their hands,” Cristobal says. “We get back here in 2022 and go to the park and ask, ‘Who wants to be a Hurricane?’ One or two kids raised their hands. I look over at our people and go, ‘That’s what has gone wrong. The community has been lost.’

“Now, we show up and it looks like a scene from the Beatles,” he says laughing.

On Saturday night, in Notre Dame Stadium, two programs meet with playoff implications on the line in a rivalry steeped in history and drama. A Louisiana boy will pace the sideline and call plays with much of his family watching back home.

Shannon still speaks to his father almost every day. Ricky is not well enough to attend games, but he remains active on Facebook. Ricky’s page is littered with weekly posts reminding friends and family about his son’s next big outing.

“Shannon’s game ABC 6:30 channel 2,” he wrote on Tuesday.

Mumme will be watching too, perhaps a split screen with Miami-Notre Dame and Kentucky-Tennessee, he says. He wouldn’t be surprised if Shannon runs Fox, or any of the other Air Raid pass concepts scribbled along the coach’s walls and window.

After all, this is a big one. It’s time to pull out all the tricks.

Better yet, just keep feeding the talent, says Mumme.

“They are loaded and it makes you jealous,” he says. “They’re fun to watch and the one thing Shannon Dawson understands is put the ball in your playmakers’ hands.”