Forget the five national championships, the parade of signature coaches, the battalion of first-round NFL draft picks, the incalculable amount of swagger—the Miami Hurricanes' single greatest achievement was the ripple effect they had on the rest of college football, and how they tugged programs familiar and foreign into their orbit.Close to home, the late 80s Florida State Seminoles cobbled together what was, at the time, an edgy rap video in a feeble attempt to keep pace with the South Florida Joneses. Their signature player, Deion Sanders, was identifiable for his talent, yes, but also for a brashness that parroted how a Hurricane's genuine toughness.
Outside the Sunshine State, Miami was a singular axis for a small nebula of ideological rivalries. If it wasn't Notre Dame, then Penn State played the role of the cold-weather salt-of-the-earth school standing up to the irreverent bully from sweltering Coral Gables. When PSU wasn't up to task, Nebraska stood in. Each rivalry had its particular beat, but the specific foe only mattered to a point, because they were an interchangeable part opposing an irreplaceable monolith. The Hurricanes weren't the only kingmaker, but they were by far the one most comfortable looming over college football's throne room. Whether you were emulating them or taking them, everything was done in relation to Miami.On Saturday, the Hurricanes will square off with one of their famous foes when the Nebraska Cornhuskers come to town. You do not want to watch this game. It's a matchup of tedious properties, each one anchored by a scuffling traditional offense and a straight-laced head coach, learning to live without last year's signature running backs. Neither team is especially bad—which, 14 years after these two duked it out for the BCS National Championship, is the sort of dim praise that makes both fan bases blanch—but it's hard for the stakes to be more minimal. A win won't mean a ton for Nebraska, which is playing the long game in Mike Riley's probably doomed quest to restore the Huskers to their apex. As for Miami, a victory might add an inch of slack to the noose snaking around Al Golden's neck, but it's a matter of when, not if, the floor drops out from beneath the 46-year-old's slacks.
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Make no mistake: there is plenty of on-field cause for Golden's removal. He's 30-22 as the Hurricanes head coach, with zero bowl wins, and just 18-20 against power conference opposition. He has not beaten a single team that finished the season ranked in the top 25. Fans were getting antsy after a 9-4 campaign in 2013. Now, after a 2014 season that saw Golden go 6-7 despite having the nation's 14th-ranked defense and seven future NFL draft picks, including all-time leading rusher Duke Johnson, they're downright testy.
Believe it or not, Al Golden isn't a great fit at his alma mater's arch-nemesis. Photo via Robert Duyos-USA TODAY Sports
His most damning failure, however, is that the Hurricanes have become indistinguishable from one of their greatest foils. That the Nebraska team could be labeled "boring," for instance, is not really a cause for concern: it is, after all, a school mired on the prairie, far away from blue chip talent, and whose defining motif is that its defense wears plain black jerseys. The Cornhuskers have often been able to transcend those realities, but no one looks down on them when they relapse.Boring, however, is a mortal sin in Cane country, where the university sits among the lushest recruiting ground in the country, with a football team that thrives on being lively almost to its own detriment. The city of Miami screams vibrancy, and so it is one rung short of depressing when its defining athletic institution is this enervated. These Hurricanes are what a vanquished bully looks like in the epilogue of a fairy tale, so abjectly listless that one begins to feel sorry they were deposed in the first place.Granted, Golden's eventual successor will share the same unenviable task of toeing the line between outlaw and order. It is no simple mandate to authentically channel the "give absolutely no fucks" spirit that once fueled the U, not when there is exponentially more pressure to punish student athlete's criminal activities, on the one hand, and to blow up harmless grievances against sportsmanship on the other. There's no way for the old Miami to truly exist in the world of college athletics today. Big picture, that's probably for the best.Yet there is room for far more than what the Hurricanes show under Golden. It was always too reductive to assume that Golden would be a poor fit simply because of his Penn State background, but it has been just as uncomfortable a marriage as feared.There is, at least, a silver lining: whoever replaces him will be better suited to the place almost by default. With it once archaic facilities now finally up to outsized college football standards, the last great hurdle to success has been removed. Results will, and should, be expected. What remains to be seen is whether the next Hurricanes coach will be up to the challenge of winning—and do so in a way that makes Miami feel significant again.
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