Being unemployed, living off savings, eating TV dinners, and wondering if your coaching career ended before it really began. Not everyone would look back and say that’s one of the best things that happened to them. But Miami Executive Director and GM Dennis Smith has a different perspective. 

Fresh off being fired at FIU after the Panthers’ disappointing 3-9 season in 2012, Dennis Smith suddenly had no job, no paycheck, and no clear path forward. The same coach who had spent years recruiting players to FIU was out of work for more than three months. But that, according to him, became a life-changer. 

“I made $8,500 a year for two years with no health insurance,” he told Adam Breneman. “It’s the best job that I’ve ever had. It changed my life.”

That statement sounds ridiculous at first glance because that figure is barely survival money. But Dennis Smith explained that the experience stripped football down to its essentials.

“We got fired at FIU, December 5, 2012,” he said. “I was unemployed for three and a half months. I remember a coach at Itawamba Junior College in Mississippi calling to say, ‘Hey, we’ll hire you.’ I’m thinking I’m not going to do that. I called him back in April, begged him to hire me.”

That reluctance is understandable because, before the firing, Dennis Smith looked like he was climbing steadily through the profession. A 2005 Miami graduate, he started with the Hurricanes as Assistant Director of Football Operations in 2006 before joining FIU in multiple roles, eventually becoming Director of Player Personnel and later TEs Coach and Recruiting Coordinator. Then everything got cut off.

FIU fired head coach Mario Cristobal after the 2012 season, and Dennis Smith was among the staff casualties. Then came the survival reality. Adam Breneman asked him how he coped with $8,500 a year.

“I had campus housing. I blew through all my savings,” he admitted. “I lived in a place with very little cost of living, but you didn’t really get to do much other than coach football and just be around the kids. You would eat a lot of TV dinners in that 10-year period from the time I left coaching to being back.”

The reward wasn’t financial, but it was developmental. Over the next decade, Dennis Smith slowly rebuilt his career, coaching at Itawamba, Florida A&M, McNeese, and Louisiana Tech before eventually reuniting with Mario Cristobal in Coral Gables. That journey explains why he views Miami’s resurgence as something personal.

Dennis Smith’s mission was bigger than football

When Mario Cristobal returned to Miami in 2022, Dennis Smith joined him as Executive Director and GM, looking after roster construction, player acquisition, and retention. Together, they were trying to reconnect the Hurricanes with their community.

“The third week I was here, we had a team from a local park, and I asked them to raise their hands if they grew up Miami Hurricane fans,” Smith said, recalling one of his earliest moments back with the Hurricanes. “And one kid raised his hand, and the coach from the team started knocking the kids on their heads to raise their hands.”

That answer would’ve been unimaginable during Miami’s glory years. But five years later, Dennis Smith sees something different.

“Now fast-forward five years later… to see 200 kids flock to Malachi Toney and to see 200 kids flock to Mark Fletcher and to Rueben Bain and Akheem Mesidor,” he added. “That right there tells the story. That’s the future. Those are future ‘Canes.”

That’s the real victory Dennis Smith and Mario Cristobal have been chasing. For decades, Miami football was woven into South Florida culture, but then the connection faded, and the Hurricanes became irrelevant. Now, with local stars once again choosing Miami, eight of the program’s current commits live within two hours of campus, the energy is returning.

Dennis Smith’s journey mirrors the program’s own story. Both fell hard, had to rediscover their identities, and spent years climbing back. The difference is that he already knows what life looks like at the bottom. After surviving on $8,500 a year, building a championship contender doesn’t seem quite so impossible.