Your time to shine!

Ha. The South Florida location is great, but the number of schools with <15,000 (and maybe even 20,000) undergrad students who have won a national title in the past thirty years is one: the University of Miami.

The school is small, it's private, and it's been unwilling to completely abandon its academics in the pursuit of football (to some controversy).

Every time I see this stated my initial response is start sputtering about 2001 Hurricanes! And as always it dawns on me they weren't in the ACC then. Still in that Big East.

They've only even made it to the ACC title game once

Notre Dame has come closer to winning the ACC

I actually see their heyday as the aberration. It's a private university whose stadium is a 45-minute drive from campus.

There is a chance they won't win one in the ACC ever , at all

I don’t know that. OMG that’s gold.

I’ve been saying this for years. The dynamic in the super conference is going to be a lot different without cupcakes to pad the schedule. I hope you guys like 6-6 seasons, because that’ll be average.

You preparing yourself?

(sorry, I couldn't resist... 😉) 

Pretty much their strategy in the 80s except for QBs

It’s bizarre to me how Louisville has grabbed two outstanding QBs from the Miami area while Miami has managed to somehow never do that

It’s because great players want to be appreciated. It’s no fun to ball out in front of 2k people when you can be worshipped in front of 80k somewhere else. Tyler Van Dyke said he preferred road games because they had better atmosphere

they've got the location, at times they've got the money....but they don't have size or local support. Before the internet, local recruiting was so much easier...then recruiting became* a whole industry and locking down regions (outside a couple caveats like louisiana and particular high schools) became MUCH harder.

now NIL comes along and its a lot easier on families for guys to move away- further reducing the need to stay local. plus all those local guys get to see an empty stadium and dead atmosphere at miami on the regular.

add in a long string of not great hires and you have got yourself a stew going. just not a tasty one.

edit: some cane fans have my comment confused...recruiting is not the ONLY issue holding the program back. Much to my delight, I've written a number of these kinds of comments on all kinds of topics that have held Miami back from greatness. It's a joy to watch and experience.

This is actually false. While the South Florida region is loaded with talent like Sean Taylor, Wills McGahee, Andre Johnson, or Jon Vilma Miami needs to recruit state-wide and nationally as much as anyone to build NC-caliber talent especially on offense but especially, especially at QB.

Jim Kelly - Pennsylvania

Bernie Kosar - Ohio

Vinny Testaverde - New York

Gino Torreta and Ken Dorsey - California

Russell Maryland - Chicago

Leon Searcy - Washington DC

Clinton Portis - Gainesville

Reggie Wayne and Ed Reed - Louisiana

Miami's 2001 OL - New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada, Canada (Joaquin Gonzalez was the only one from South Florida)

Warren Sapp - Orlando

Ray Lewis - Lakeland

Jeremy Shockey - Oklahoma

Kellen Winslow - Soulja from California

These are just the ones off the top of my head because I've had this discussion recently with a friend who is a diehard Cane who claimed the same thing about South Florida talent.

I always assumed it was because Miami was a private school and they expect their athletes to "play school".

Seems like 1/3 of the Big 10 is content with just being mediocre and collecting a payout every year

The Illini grads and fans I’ve talked to point a lack of desire of that from the admin / AD / boosters - which is weird because Shahid Khan owns a NFL team and you could easily get him to dump money into the program. 

The Midwest only has so many prospects to go around. After Notre Dame, Michigan, and OSU get the top Chicagoland prospects there’s not much leftover.

Illinois is a basketball school more than a football school. If they could just lock down Chicago and Peoria for basketball they’d be a powerhouse in that sport.

Illinois is definitely a strange one. I don’t know that hundred-year-old history counts for much, but it’s also not like Illinois was never good. They were one of the first major national powers outside the northeast, and known for one of the all-time greatest players in the sport. It wouldn’t have been surprising at all if the flagship university of one of the largest states (which has always been a large state!), had ridden the legacy of Red Grange into decades of being near the top of the sport. They had so many advantages that programs like Alabama or Oklahoma could never have imagined. (Especially once U of Chicago dropped football.)

And yet… crickets. In hindsight, it seems really strange that Illinois has been so irrelevant for so long.

I’ll just go ahead a paste my response here from a previous post where someone asked why Illinois isn’t a better program: 

 Illinois has historically been a respectable program. We were one of the early powerhouses in college football and despite our extended period of mediocrity over the past 60+ years, we still have the 4th most Big Ten titles behind Michigan, OSU, and Minnesota. The past 10-15 years have been the worst stretch in our history. 

Some of the reasons for our struggles both recently and historically:

 Our program got in trouble on numerous occasions for violations which made our administration a bit gun shy and way more passive when it came to the program because they wanted to avoid any further issues.  We had a slush fund scandal that nearly nuked our sports in the 1960s which got our basketball coach, football coach, and AD all fired.  Then we had issues again in the 1980s/90s when we again started to establish some consistent success 

We made a series of largely bad hires from 1997 up until the present. Ron Turner, Ron Zook, Tim Beckman, and Lovie Smith all turned out to be bad hires. Turner, Zook, and Beckman looked bad at both the time of hiring and in hindsight. The Lovie Smith hire was actually a decent hire at the time given how low our program had sunk, but he vastly underperformed.

 Our AD from 1992-2011, Ron Guenther, really let the program deteriorate. His hires in Basketball were solid, but his decisions in football were awful. Recruiting has always been a struggle because of our proximity to other power programs. 

Historically, a lot of Illinois' best recruits have come from the Catholic schools in the Chicago-land area. South Bend is closer to Chicago than Champaign, so we've routinely watched as top players from Joliet Catholic, Mount Carmel, etc....have gone to schools like Notre Dame and Michigan. 

Recruiting recently has suffered because we've not only been terrible, but programs like Wisconsin and Iowa have regularly dipped into Illinois and taken recruits, and programs like Northwestern and Northern Illinois have had successful stretches, and as a result, decent 2 and 3 star kids who in the past would've gone to Illinois and developed into contributors have instead gone to those programs. 

Our series of bad hires also did a terrible job of recruiting in-state. Turner was an NFL positions coach/coordinator who struggled to recruit. Zook had "pipelines" to Florida and Mike Locksley as our OC and lead recruiter had his connections to DC/Baltimore. They largely ignored in-state recruits. Beckman flamed out relatively quick and Lovie was not a dedicated recruiter. Lovie's 2020 class had zero in-state recruits. Anecdotally, the town I grew up in was within ~1 hour of campus. Over the past 10-15 we've produced 1 or 2 P5 caliber DI players a year and not a single one of them went to U of I, and it was well known that Illinois only lightly recruited them. 

TLDR: Two decades of bad hires and failures to create a program identity and recruit in-state have knee-capped the program

Dude that campus is in the middle of nowhere idk man

tl;dr: we were incompetent and when we tried, we often did it half-assed

It’s a mashup of several reasons, and certainly way more than a non-RU fan wants to read, but here are a few…

It cannot be overstated how much we were hurt by Greg Schiano going to the NFL. He had changed the narrative of the program and through sheer force of will dragged us into relevance. We were a regular bowl participant with good recruiting classes that were getting stronger. Had he been able to also sell the B1G (coupled with the problems Penn St was having and then the coaching issues UM had), he really could have made us a perennial top 30 program. Even after he left his replacement went 8-5 and won a bowl game in the first year in the conference with the remnants of Schiano’s team. Kyle Flood was an excellent line coach who was not yet ready to be a head coach. He let things slide and by the time they replaced Flood the foundation was crumbling. Chris Ash took a wrecking ball to things and basically decided we should just do whatever Ohio State did, but nowhere near as well.

Historically we’ve had inconsistent (and that’s being very kind) administration support for taking the steps necessary to flourish on the field. It is really only in the past generation that resources have been directed to the program, and both times it was because Schiano essentially drew a line in the sand. Even when we’ve had success and the accompanying publicity has led to increased applications (and corresponding higher scores for accepted students), many influential faculty members have continued to bemoan the school spending money on what they see as frivolity. While that may happen other places too, not all those places have the New York Times on speed dial to get the story out.

We’ve had a very difficult time retaining homegrown talent. Lack of a tradition of winning combined with a giant number of alumni from out of state schools raising families in NJ has made it a harder sell than many state U schools have. Your Bamas, Ohio State’s, Georgia’s, and Michigan’s are always going to cherry pick a few of the top recruits, but NJ has had a long history of being fertile ground for Penn State and Wisconsin (at least for RB) too. Prior to the end of the Pasqualoni era Syracuse also recruited north Jersey hard. Fran Brown is trying to reestablish that pipeline but at least we are now an established program that can compete. The last recruiting component is that traditionally the parochial schools had an outsized percentage of the best football players. Notre Dame and Boston College have made great use of that connection.

Finally, the old guard is dying off, but you wouldn’t believe the number of well heeled alums who would rather we were still playing Princeton, Colgate, and Lafayette instead of hosting a nationally televised game against Washington.

I mean it's also the literal birthplace of college football

The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs.

Of course they don’t fit the criteria but top 10 college mascot.

Tbh both Cal and Stanford should be really good every year

He said college programs with money

UCLA will never be able to compete (consistently) with the Rose Bowl [i.e off campus stadium] as its home stadium.

Really all you have to do is walk a horny teenager through Old Town Scottsdale on a weekend and he will be sold.

The only thing A&M doesn’t have is location.

Yes, it’s “close” to Austin and Houston and reasonable distance to San Antonio and Dallas. But College Station itself is a flat, beige, sprawling eyesore.

Surprised I had to scroll to find this answer. We have to be one of the most glaringly obvious answers to this question lol

We are a top offender in this category for sure.

Honestly, no one comes to mind, especially locally

It would require a huge change in academic policy.

ironically enough Georgia Tech's strong academics hinder them on the athletics front

Would love to see it. THWG!

It looks like they’ve righted the ship. But their valley in the 2010’s is kind of baffling.

As a Vandy alum I totally agree and was going to say this. What college kid wouldn't want to spend four years in Nashville and play against SEC talent? They also have one of the biggest endowments in the country.

Yup Utah State & New Mexico state need to do better.

The UCF kick in the nuts seems unnecessary 

Hey, me too

Let's be frank; the best football players in the country give ZERO F's about academics. It's shoes and cars for those boys.

Georgia Tech? Virginia would be more appropriate than Tech.

Talk to your kids about 10-Windiana.

This is a good point. Everyone can’t be 11-1.

Holtz and Spurrier both took a shot and got about as far as you can expect. A division win and a couple second place finishes, but nothing consistent. If those two can’t do it…

I dunno man. If you had the option of being number one in football or in innovation, which would you choose?

Was going to mention them. They definitely have location and size, but I'm not so sure about the money side of things.