To Win the Future, Miami Football Must Embrace the Past

The University of Miami, having fallen to Clemson, 58-0, this weekend in the worst loss in school history, finally stopped delaying the inevitable and fired football coach Al Golden on Sunday night. The writing had been on the wall: in just over four seasons, Golden never managed to pull the Hurricanes out of mediocrity, and nearly everyone around the program, from former players to those with airplane banners, wanted him gone.

As the Clemson defeat demonstrated, this hasn't been Miami's year. In fact, it hasn't been Miami's decade. And so the Hurricanes are yet again shopping for a new coach, someone who can recapture the national relevance that has vanished from the program since the early 2000s.

This will be a fascinating coaching search, in part because Miami is possibly the nation's most fascinating program. On one hand, Miami is a good private school that prides itself on academic excellence; on the other, it's "the U"—a swaggering, sometimes dirty football power that seemingly embodies every stereotype, good and bad, of its city. Miami has an administration that wants to be Stanford, but football-mad alumni who want to be a campus version of the Dallas Cowboys.

Miami is at a crossroads, and before it hires a new coach the administration and the alumni have to come together and figure out what they want their school and their football team to be.

The university clearly wants to disassociate itself from some of its past. That's understandable: the last time Miami was a powerhouse, back in the early 2000s, former booster Nevin Shapiro was taking players out on yachts, giving them wads of cash, and sometimes paying for "extra benefits" like an abortion. Shapiro is now in jail for leading a Ponzi scheme, and the school ended up with a tarnished reputation and in trouble with the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Still, in an effort to rid itself of an outlaw persona, the university has gone too far in the opposite direction, squelching everything that made Miami the U. Miami superfan Luther Campbell—yes, that Uncle Luke—is kept far away from the program, yet he best summed up the problem with this approach in an interview with SB Nation's Steven Godfrey:

"The thing is, the administration is so far from that. They're so hypocritical. Swag is something they did not want, ever. Dancing, partying, all the antics? No. Now they want to market that, but they tell the players, 'No, no, don't do that.' Kids come here for that! The kids come in thinking it's the T-shirts. Then they get here and it's, 'Oh no, no. We're not that anymore.' You're making them conform to something they aren't."

Miami doesn't embrace Miami. There are the rare times the Hurricanes do embrace the local culture that makes Miami unique, like when they unveiled new uniforms in a nightclub. Mostly however, the U is stifled by a stale, sanitary atmosphere at Sun Life Stadium and an administration that refuses to embrace all the free recruiting help that could come from having die-hard fans who also happen to lead the city's thriving pop culture scene.

Look, some Miami alumni and boosters—people such as Campbell and Warren Sapp—can sound delusional when they push for everything to be as it once was, a kind of 1980s and 1990s Hurricanes restoration. After the Shapiro scandal, school leaders are never going to give boosters unchecked power again. Moreover, those lobbying for the return of coaches from the glory days, such as Butch Davis or Larry Coker, are just alienating themselves from the administration even more. After all, Davis was at North Carolina during a massive academic scandal, and Coker is struggling at Texas-San Antonio.

Still, Miami's administration and its fans should be able to meet in the middle. Given the sizable egos in higher education and among celebrities, that may prove easier said than done, but if the two groups work together, the school can find a way to balance a winning football program and a unique campus culture, all while staying out of the NCAA's cross hairs.

Some modest suggestions? Let the boosters walk the sidelines at games, but make sure they work with NCAA compliance. Embrace the Miami scene and bring it to Sun Life Stadium, making games a party without sending a message that anything goes. This may sound contradictory, but with the resources and the history the Hurricanes have, it's possible. It just takes administration commitment and, most important, the right hire.

Miami can't rehire a Butch Davis and expect to go back in time. Nor should it hire a complete outsider like Golden and expect to start an entirely new era, utterly removed from the school's tradition and star-studded teams of the 1990s and early 2000s. The Hurricanes need an insider with the ability to see the bigger picture, someone such Mario Cristobal, a current Alabama assistant who played at Miami, knows how to recruit Florida, and turned around the U's smaller neighbor, Florida International.

If not Cristobal, then whoever does get the job will need to be a product of Miami's culture. The key to success is right under Miami's nose. School administrators just have to embrace it.