‘Heart of a Heavyweight’ : It’s No Surprise That the Miami Hurricanes Are Once Again on Verge of a National Title

College football has never seen anything like this before. Not with Notre Dame, not with Oklahoma, not with Alabama, not with Penn State or Texas or Southern California or Nebraska. Dynasties all, of course, but none has carved out its niche with quite the roguish verve and outlandish nerve of the Miami Hurricanes.

Hate them, snarl at them, even laugh with them, but don’t strip them of the recognition they deserve. With four more victories this season, the Hurricanes will accomplish what no other team in college football history can duplicate: five national championships in 10 years. Move over Bear and Knute and Ara and Leahy and Wilkinson, you are about to get a visit from the newest kid on the dynasty block.

And they won’t be entering this dynasty club through any back door. Instead, they will come strutting in through the front gate, with mouths flapping and plenty to brag about.

Ranked No. 1 again in all the major polls, thanks to Arizona’s upset of previously undefeated Washington last Saturday, Miami is on the verge of becoming the first team to win back-to-back titles since Alabama in 1978 and 1979 and the first to put together back-to-back undefeated and untied title seasons since Oklahoma in 1955 and 1956. If they end with a 12-0 record, which would include a victory at 10th-ranked Syracuse November 21 and a potential Sugar Bowl triumph over currently undefeated and second-ranked Alabama, the Hurricanes will have won 30 consecutive games, another resounding achievement.

But unlike the other dynasty cardholders, Miami arrives sporting a different twist. Look back at those earlier names: Bryant, Rockne, Leahy, Wilkinson, Parseghian. Those men are what you remember first in a roll call of the earlier dominant schools: Notre Dame of the 1920s, 1940s and 1960s, Oklahoma of the 1950s and Alabama of the 1960s and 1970s. Penn State? Joe Paterno. Texas? Darryl Royal. Nebraska? Bob Devaney. Even Barry Switzer with the Sooners of the mid-1970s. Each program is forever linked with the coach-god who created and nourished it. To be in their presence made grown men nervous, women blush and children speechless.

But think of Miami and what comes to mind first? Certainly not the trio of coaches--Howard Schnellenberger, Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson--that has directed the team over this decade of excellence. Instead, it is the players who represent the dominance of Miami and made this program so different from its predecessors. If you aren’t sure, just ask the athletes. They’ll tell you. Maybe players from Alabama and Oklahoma felt the same way, but they never had the guts to say it. The Hurricanes do.

“At other places, the coach is on the hot seat,” senior cornerback Ryan McNeil says. “Here, the coach comes along for the ride. That is fine with us. But we are going to win. The older players teach the younger players how it is done--the Hurricane Way.”

To consider this to be Plug-in-the-Coach University would be demeaning to Schnellenberger, Johnson and Erickson. Still, none is a threat to challenge the other dynasty architects in the coaching Hall of Fame. Instead, we have here a program that has adopted a will of its own, built around fiercely independent players with great pride who have used an “us against them” attitude to establish a dominant tradition. It is a program that came from nowhere. The university didn’t know what it should do with football in the late 1970s. Drop it. Scale it back. Ignore it. Home games in the Orange Bowl attracted sparse crowds, and the best athletes in south Florida, especially African-American standouts, were likely to wind up playing for Eastern and Midwestern schools.

But now Miami, in a very short span, has given us a program reflective of a different era in college football, when scholarships are tighter and academic requirements stiffer, when coaches no longer are dictators, when players can ask why instead of always saying, “Yes sir,” when individual personalities can flourish even within a team structure. The Hurricanes have pushed all of this to the max, of course, and sometimes have gone too far with their escapades, demeaning both the sport and themselves in the process. That’s the other side of winning.

“I honestly believe that the rest of the country is waiting to see us go down,” says Art Kehoe, who played on Schnellenberger’s early triumphant teams and has been an assistant coach on all of the school’s national title teams. If anyone personifies the Hurricane Way and Miami pride, it is this enthusiastic offensive-line coach. And when he looks beyond Miami, he sees nothing but disgust.

“They think we have cheated, the kids are scum bags who don’t go to class,” Kehoe says. “Parents are shocked that we are a private school costing $24,000 a year, that we graduate 70% of our kids. They want us to go away, they don’t want us to be Penn State or USC or Texas or Alabama. They don’t want to give us that kind of respect. But we deserve the recognition instead of being considered the Friday the 13th of programs.”

Of course, it is nothing new for winners to be hated. Ask Notre Dame. But feelings about Miami run deeper than just a resentment of their constant triumphs. What some see simply as reaction to unsportsmanlike conduct others view as racism disguised as criticism, because many of the bad actors are African-Americans. What some see as a decision by coaches to let the Hurricanes exercise their individual personalities is viewed by others as a program where the inmates run the asylum.

But to exorcise the program’s maverick traits would be tantamount to cutting out the very heart of its success. Even Erickson, who has spent the past two years refining the roughest edges of his team, recognizes this fact.

“If you don’t let them have their own personality on the field, why let them play?” Erickson says. “I want them to get excited, to do whatever they do after a play. To me that is football. But when it gets to the point where it penalizes your football team, that’s when it goes too far.”

Earlier this season, the Hurricane captains decided to stop shaking hands with rival captains during the pregame coin toss. “We figured after the game was a better time,” linebacker Micheal Barrow says. “This isn’t baseball, you know.” Erickson asked them to reconsider. They refused. Imagine Ohio State players saying no to Woody Hayes? But at Miami, the coach can push only so far.

It’s hard to quarrel with the results. Since the 1983 season, when Schnellenberger’s Hurricanes beat Nebraska in the Orange Bowl to celebrate their first national title, Miami has compiled a 104-13 record. Since 1986, the numbers are even more remarkable: 75-5, including seasons of 11-1, 12-0, 11-1, 11-1, 12-0 and presently, 8-0, with the possibility of four No. 1 finishes in the past six seasons. Johnson won his only title in 1987 but came within a couple of heartbeats of two more, losing to Penn State, 14-10, in the Fiesta Bowl after the 1986 season with their best-ever team and 31-30 to Notre Dame in 1988. They were Miami’s only losses those years; otherwise, we would be talking about a program on the verge of its seventh championship in 10 years.

Erickson, who left Washington State to move to Miami, finished No. 1 in 1989, his first season, and now has not lost a game since falling to Notre Dame on October 20, 1990, in South Bend. The Hurricanes haven’t lost at home since Florida beat them, 35-23, in September 1985. Their streak of 50 consecutive victories in the Orange Bowl already is the second best in college history and is eight short of breaking the all-time record held by Alabama. In nearly eight years, the only opponents to beat them anywhere have been Notre Dame (twice), Florida, Florida State, Tennessee, Brigham Young and Penn State. That’s it.

Erickson has proven to be an inspirational hire, a solid technical coach whose soft-glove handling of his charges at least has advanced the Hurricanes from their camouflage outfit days of the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. The turning point came after the 1991 Cotton Bowl against Texas, in which the taunting, out-of-control team was penalized 202 yards. Erickson thought about quitting; instead, he told his players they better start behaving or they would be gone.

“We were this close to the precipice, to the edge,” says Miami Athletic Director Dave Maggard, who replaced San Jankovich in 1991. “We had to get into a different mode without taking away from the ferociousness of the play. We told them to continue to play smash-mouth football, but the other stuff, leave it alone. Dennis deserves the credit for the change.” Maggard rewarded Erickson after last season with a new five-year contract worth $400,000 annually.

Still, Miami hardly is sedate. Forty former or current players were involved in an on-going Pell Grant scandal, in which a former athletic department employee purposely filled out financial-aid applications incorrectly to obtain extra funds. An NCAA investigation is pending, once a Department of Education inquiry is finished.

The Hurricanes also continue to irritate opponents intentionally during pregame preparations, one reason assistant coaches hang around the edge, ready to move in to stop any confrontations. But these remain free-spirited players. Wide receiver Lamar Thomas, one of the top jokesters, showed up one day at practice this season wearing a bag of potato chips on his belt. The offensive line had been struggling, and Thomas figured if he could bribe them with food, the linemen would try harder.

If you play for Miami, you can’t have an ego. Every Monday, the players publish a flier--its title is unfitting for a family publication--revealing what Barrow says is “everything stupid that anyone did during the past week, whether it’s at practice or in class or socially. Nothing is sacred.”

“We are all still kids,” Thomas says. “This is not a life-threatening situation. If you can’t have fun in college, where can you?”

But this season, despite the ecstasy of winning, hasn’t always been fun. Hurricane Andrew destroyed the homes of many of the coaches and players’ families and forced the team to move its preseason practices out of Miami. “No one will ever understand how devastating the hurricane was to this team,” says Erickson, who is living in a rented home near campus. Former players Jerome Brown and Shane Curry died over the summer. Florida State missed a 39-yard field goal that would have tied the Hurricanes; Arizona missed a 51-yarder that would have beaten them.

With 15 starters returning from last season’s No. 1 team, this should be a stronger squad. But injuries disrupted the offensive line and left Miami without a running attack. Early opponents battered Torretta and put Erickson’s game plans on the defensive, something that never happens to the Hurricanes. He became conservative, so much so that in a 17-14 victory at Penn State, Miami actually was less flashy than Paterno’s Nittany Lions. But that triumph, coupled with the escape against Florida State the previous week, established Miami’s credibility and gave the line time to heal.

This still remains the poorest rushing team produced during past decade, which puts even more pressure on an exceptional defense and on Torretta, who is making a late run for the Heisman Trophy. Erickson added a shotgun formation for Torretta, better to take advantage of Miami’s deep, rangy and gifted receiving corps. And better to showcase Torretta’s exceptional knowledge of Erickson’s offense.

“Gino doesn’t make mistakes,” Erickson says. “He doesn’t worry about making the big plays himself. He will throw it away rather than going into a crowd. People underestimate his ability, but he will play on the next level.” Torretta has thrown only four interceptions in 301 attempts, and Miami has a mere nine turnovers. These Hurricanes simply do not hand away games on mistakes.

Torretta already holds all of Miami’s major passing and total-offense records but falls short in athletic comparisons with Kelly, Kosar and Testaverde. “I stopped worrying about that stuff a long time ago,” he says. “I just want to leave here as the leading winner.” So far, he is 23-1 as a starter, best yet at the school.

If Miami is to win another national title, Torretta and the defense will have to excel. Linebackers Barrow, Jessie Armstead and Darrin Smith are the most-talented trio to play at the school, a major reason the Hurricanes are in the top 10 nationally in points allowed and turnover ratio.

Miami should crush Temple on Saturday and San Diego State on November 28, but matchups in the Carrier Dome against Syracuse and then in a bowl against either Alabama (Sugar) or Texas A&M; (Cotton) aren’t gimmes. Still, put Miami in a big game and don’t bet on the Hurricanes losing.

“They’ve got the heart of a heavyweight champion,” TCU Coach Pat Sullivan says.

If you are a True Hurricane, that comes as no surprise. “Challenge us,” Barrow says, “and you better get ready for the best from us. Anyone who thinks they are going to beat us in the fourth quarter is fooling themselves, and they know it. This is Miami. We just don’t lose.”