Miami Eases Into Practice

The coach still wore the suit in which he had arrived in town.

The players wore shorts and T-shirts.

And nobody wore his game face.

The Miami Hurricanes laughed and clowned their way through their first practice Wednesday just hours after landing in Southern California, where they’ll play Nebraska for the national championship in the Jan. 3 Rose Bowl.

Actually, calling Wednesday’s workout at the Coliseum a practice would be stretching it.

It was more a case of stretching their legs and getting out the kinks.

When linemen run pass patterns, it’s a pretty good sign the serious work hasn’t begun.

That will start today.

Sort of.

The players will be put through a full practice until midday, then hop back in their team buses and head for an afternoon at Disneyland.

“We were very relaxed,” said Miami Coach Larry Coker of Wednesday’s workout. “We didn’t feel the need to come out guns to the wall.”

Coker was still wearing his suit because his luggage had not arrived.

“You won’t see me like this again,” he promised reporters. “I don’t normally practice in a suit.”

While Nebraska had chosen to arrive two days earlier, denying their players the opportunity to stay home for Christmas, Coker allowed his players to spend the holiday at home.

If wasn’t as if they needed to be reintroduced to each other. The Hurricanes have continued to work out since their last game, a 26-24 victory over Virginia Tech on Dec. 1, with the exception of a break of just more than a week for finals.

“We wanted to get back in the groove,” said quarterback Ken Dorsey of Wednesday’s workout. “[Thursday] we start working hard.”

No matter how hard they work, the Hurricanes know their hopes of a national championship could be foiled by unforeseen problems.

But if Wednesday’s inaugural practice is any indication, tenseness won’t be one of those problems.

Several of the players stood around gazing at the Olympic torch at the peristyle end of the Coliseum and swapping stories about the history of a stadium most had never seen in person before.

Dorsey, winner of this year’s Maxwell Award and a finalist for the Heisman Trophy, thought about how close he had come to making the Coliseum his home turf. Growing up in the Northern California town of Orinda, he had seriously considered USC.

As a matter of fact, Dorsey narrowed his choice to the Trojans or the Hurricanes.

And why did he ultimately choose Miami?

“I just felt so much more comfortable with the people and the school,” he said.

Offensive lineman Bryant McKinnie, who had arthroscopic surgery on his sprained left knee following the Virginia Tech game, tested the knee for the first time Wednesday by running on the Coliseum grass.

He immediately pronounced himself fit for the Rose Bowl.

There may be controversy around the rest of the country over the choice of Nebraska for a Rose Bowl berth, but there is no lack of enthusiasm for the game in Miami. The school was allotted 20,000 game tickets, and those were gone in six days.

“We know who we’re playing,” Coker said. “We won 11 games and they won 11 games. They just happen to lose one late in the year. We know what type of game Nebraska is capable of playing.”

Or, as McKinnie put it, “We’re just here to play for the national championship. It doesn’t matter who we play.”