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UM’s Matt Lee, who could interest Dolphins at NFL combine, has no problem answering for viral outburst

david furones, south florida sun-sentinel
·6 min read

AVENTURA — Miami Hurricanes center Matt Lee already knows one thing he’ll get asked by teams at the NFL scouting combine this week in Indianapolis.

In fact, the prospect who could interest the Miami Dolphins in the late April draft has already been asked it earlier in the process since declaring Dec. 9, at the East-West Shrine Bowl about a month back.

What was he doing when he was captured by cameras on the sideline at the end of Miami’s stunning Oct. 7 loss to Georgia Tech mouthing those same words to the team at large with an expletive in between: “What the f— are we doing?”

The video went viral in college football circles and beyond last fall. For as good of a center prospect as Lee is in this draft, he’s just as much — if not more — known for this reaction, which followed UM’s inexplicable decision against the Yellow Jackets not to kneel at the end of the game. Miami running back Don Chaney Jr. fumbled. Georgia Tech recovered and scored a touchdown two plays later to win, 23-20.

His choice of words were probably justified, especially since they were likely uttered — just as angrily — by many Hurricanes fans that Saturday night. For any NFL team scouts that want to get an idea of whether Lee’s a bad apple on the sideline off a seconds-long clip, he had a trial run at answering for himself in a recent interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel while training for the combine locally at Bommarito Performance Systems.

“It’s just a passion thing,” Lee explained. “The way I was looking at it, the college side of it, you go all year, you got 12 guaranteed opportunities. And that’s all the offseason, that’s all the working out, all the ways that you treat your body and nutrition, this and that, the team-building and all of camp, day in and day out. The whole organization is centered around 12 games that are guaranteed, 12 days, 12 Saturdays.

“So, when you kind of know you have it in the bag and something like that happens, to me, it triggered a response like that because it’s like, ‘Damn, man. We got only 12 of these guaranteed. And we had it. And we let it go. How does this happen?’

“There’s a bunch of emotions. It was just from a care of we’re all doing this together. We’re all grinding every single day, from the players, to the coaches, to the equipment, to the medical staff, to the personnel, to the recruiting. Everyone’s working, everyone’s grinding all around the country, and you just want to come away with that one.”

Many believe coach Mario Cristobal wanted to get Chaney over the 100-rushing-yard mark for the game by giving him another carry. It didn’t seem like Lee ever really got an answer to his rhetorical question, but he didn’t push it any further either because he moved on fairly quickly.

“I don’t know the whole story, and I was upset — and visibly, as you can see online and Twitter and this and that — but you know what you do?” Lee said. “You wake up the next day, and you’re like, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ Because Saturday, six days later, we got a football game to play.

“I wake up Sunday morning, and I’m like, ‘Well, we got to play a football game.’ I didn’t have to try to get it out of my head. I move on. (Stuff) happens. It’s not the craziest thing ever, and worse things have happened. And you just move on. You got to go the next week. You got to have a short memory of that.”

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One of the teams that Lee already spoke with at the Shrine Bowl was the Dolphins, who have Connor Williams, their starting center of the past two years, entering free agency and coming off a torn knee ligament.

“I like the Dolphins,” he said. “I’m from Florida. I’m from Orlando. And I spent a year in Miami. I got a lot of family in Miami. … It’s the Dolphins. That would be really cool. I think very highly of the Dolphins.”

For the Dolphins to draft any offensive lineman under coach Mike McDaniel, he has to be a fit in the wide-zone run-blocking scheme. Lee, although more versed in tight zone concepts, has comfort in it and just about any scheme after doing it all under three different offensive systems — from Cristobal at Miami to Josh Heupel and Gus Malzahn between his four seasons at UCF.

It probably wouldn’t be smart to question Lee’s leadership off the one sideline incident. He was a captain in his one season with the Hurricanes.

“It starts with how you carry yourself, how you’re playing football and practicing,” he said. “It starts with that and then your ability to go kill it every day. And then, it’s to know everything. Everyone can look at me on the offensive line and the tight ends and say, ‘Matt, what are we doing?’ I’m going to tell them.”

And Lee added some of those leadership traits in his one season at UM, something he attributes to his position coach, Alex Mirabal. Mirabal has the distinction of likely being the nation’s smallest offensive line coach, but leading the biggest players on the field at 5 foot 4, he commands and earns the respect of the giants.

“From the outside looking in, you might think, well, he’s so short, this and that, but when you know him, when he’s your coach, he might as well be 6-5,” Lee said. “He’ll scream at you. He’ll yell at you. He’ll cuss. He’ll do this. He’ll do that. But it’s all out of ‘we got to do this to get you to where you want to be, to get us to where we want to be.’ It’s always out of love. It’s always out of coaching. It’s always a point that he’s trying to get across.”

Now, Lee is getting to where he wants to be in the NFL as a center whom ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. tabs as the draft’s No. 6 center. Training with Pete Bommarito at his north Miami-Dade facility, Lee feels he’ll prove he has elite athleticism and explosiveness with his 6-foot-4, 295-pound frame at the combine.

And he enters the draft with experience against ACC competition after transferring for a final collegiate season at Miami.

“It was a great experience,” he said. “The city, the people, the team, the coaches, the players, the school as a whole. It was awesome. I wouldn’t change a thing about it. I’m a ‘Cane for life.”