Even soaking wet, the Miami Hurricanes didn’t weigh nearly as much as the 11th-best team in the nation really should on Saturday night.
Virginia Tech knocked UM flat, or at least flatter, with a 42-24 pounding delivered in a perfect storm of rain and wind and horrendous Hurricane turnovers.
Truth is, Florida State pretty much pancaked the Hurricanes one week earlier, winning big and taking Miami’s star running back Duke Johnson out for the year in the process.
All that remains is the satisfaction of knowing that the NCAA didn’t nuke Miami’s season like everybody thought it might. Good old-fashioned football settled the matter instead, with two strong ACC rivals doing to the Hurricanes what North Carolina and Wake Forest couldn’t in a couple of earlier close calls.
“I don’t want to hear anything about last week’s game affecting this week’s game,” Miami coach Al Golden said. “We were ready to play.”
If he means that the Hurricanes were dressed and present on time for kickoff, I’ll buy that. After watching Virginia Tech’s Logan Thomas complete 25 of 31 passes, however, and many of them to receivers running wide open underneath Miami’s cushy coverage zones, all other measures of readiness were unreached.
This is more than a stumble from 7-0 to 7-2, remember. It’s whiffing on the ACC Coastal title again after a decade of trying. The Hokies, 4-2 in conference play, will have to slip up against either Maryland or Virginia down the stretch to let the Hurricanes back in on that seemingly impossible dream.
Actually, there are four teams with two losses in the Coastal, with Miami among them, but let’s not try to figure out all the tiebreakers right now. This loss to Virginia Tech, a rival that’s never been particularly moved by the Hurricanes’ mystic history, is a back-breaker, as any in the announced crowd of 49,267 can tell you.
They stood strong in the monsoon, screaming and hoping for the best, even as the Hurricanes defense was caving under the force of 549 yards in Hokies offense. Not until late in the fourth quarter did most Miami fans turn and trudge to the dry havens of their cars out in the Sun Life Stadium parking lots.
Until then, there was a chance that Stephen Morris would make up for a mountain of Hurricane mistakes by completing a long scoring pass, as he did earlier in the game on touchdown bombs of 81 yards to Stacy Coley and 80 yards to Allen Hurns.
That’s the way everybody wants it to be for Miami, a crazy comeback from mediocrity delivered in a flash. There is still more work for Golden to do, however, before the Hurricanes are worth of a BCS bowl invite, and training his tacklers to wrap up whoever’s carrying the ball, slippery or not, is once again job one.
“There were too many egregious third-downs that they converted,” said Golden, adding the perfect description to Virginia Tech’s 8-of-14 success rate in that category. “We didn’t deserve to win.
“There’s no excuse. It wasn’t good enough and it’s my responsibility to get it fixed.”
For openers, he’ll have to get his players to care about a trip to Duke next Saturday. Otherwise, this special season will completely slip away, and a ton of momentum with it.
Golden will still land a stellar recruiting class, of course, and there’s that September win over Florida to cling to for a lifetime or so. What do you do with stats like this, though, in a game so vital in the here and now?
Miami, for instance, rushed for 28 yards. The Hokies had three players who ran for more individually, including the quarterback.
Virginia Tech scored four touchdowns, too, on its first four trips into the red zone. Color that crummy for the Miami defense.
Also, the Hokies kept the ball for just less than 40 minutes, nearly doubling Miami’s possession time.
“I thought we did a great job of keeping it mixed up,” said Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer, the winningest active coach in major college ball. “We kept motioning. We kept changing formations and I think we got them on their heels a little bit.”
Miami defensive coordinator Mark D’Onofrio doesn’t like that posture. It feels a little too much like the last season, when his unit allowed 486 yards per game and was viewed as the Hurricanes’ weakest link.
“I think we’ve done a lot of good things throughout the year,” D’Onofrio said. “We won seven straight games. We won a lot of games in the fourth quarter and came back on the road. Our problem tonight was missed tackles and cutting someone loose.”
That story really can be told in one play, because it exemplified the sloppy tackling that plagued Miami all night. In the second quarter, wide receiver Joshua Stanford caught a short pass and bounced off three Hurricanes on the way to the end zone, a journey of 32 yards in all.
Plays like that made Thomas look great, and he’s the same quarterback who took monstrous heat for throwing four interceptions in a home loss to Duke a couple of weeks ago.
“Those colors bring out the best in the player,” Thomas said in reference to the green and orange and white of Miami.
That cue didn’t work for the Hurricanes themselves on Saturday night, though. Consequently, they’ll find something else to watch now when the BCS rankings show rolls out the order of college football’s true monsters.
Miami is back in the middle of things in this state, better than Florida and well short of FSU. The goal of being in the middle of the national title chase, that’s going to take a little more patience.
That’s the truth, and Golden, to his undying credit, has never run from that.
About the Author
