CFB Most Influential Programs
#13 Miami Hurricanes
School: Miami Hurricanes
First Game: October 23rd, 1926
Winning Percentage: .625 (18th)
Appearances in AP/Rank: 518 (17th)
Average AP Ranking: 9.2
National Titles: 5
Claim to Fame: Too many to count honestly and depending on who you are they’re either famous or infamous. Some of the Miami teams of the 80s and early 2000s were amongst the most talented collections of players of all time.
Perhaps a kind of funny claim to fame, Miami’s celebrations became so over the top that the NCAA instituted rules against excessive celebration, overtly aimed at quelling “The U”.
Why I have them in my Collection: If you want a crude crash course in the history of Miami football, ESPN’s 30 for 30s, “The U” and “The U Part 2”, do an excellent job of hitting the major points of Miami’s football rise, fall, and then rise again. There’s excellent player and coach interviews that really highlight the kind of talent the school was pulling in during those times.
Miami may sound like it was a program that came out of nothing, and I guess it technically did. Prior to 1980 they were average at best, and the school was even considering dropping the program. Then by hiring coach Howard Schellenberger, “The U” was born and Miami crashed the party that was mainstream college football.
Much like their FSU counterparts they did so by tapping into the high school pipelines that had been feeding Florida’s original college football superpower, Florida A&M. They even hired coaches off of FAMU’s staff. One could even say that from the 70s and a little more blatantly in the 80s and beyond that Miami’s colors looked a lot closer to FAMU’s than previous iterations of the Miami uniforms.
This takes nothing away from the coaches and players though. Just because you can recruit the same players doesn’t mean results followed, and results certainly did follow for Miami. Schellenberger won the first national title in 1983, and Jimmy Johnson went on to win one as well. While Johnson would also go on to have a successful professional career, these coaches are as synonymous with college football as the school they coached at.
Miami has been a program of tumult as well. While football was bringing them national prominence, the school wanted to be known for academics. Miami has had more public scandals than your average “blue blood” but that might also be because there was no good ole boy network in South Beach to keep the reporting on shenanigans in check. The bad boys of college football would be putting it lightly, and to be fair some of the criticism was deserved. But Notre Dame fans referring to the entire team as convicts and distributing merch as such pretty much captures how some people REALLY felt about The U running over college football for the better part of a decade.
There’s been multiple documentaries for a reason. I could write an entire book on just the last 40 plus years of Miami football. In the spirit of brevity, I will leave the notes here. But I think it goes without saying that you’re lying to yourself if you think you can talk about college football without talking about the influence of The U.
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