Despite all the hoopla on any given Saturday afternoon, every reasonably close football game hinges on about four or five plays. Suppose a great completion on third down had floated out of the receiver’s reach. Suppose a crucial fumble in the fourth quarter ended up back in the hands of the offense. Suppose a go-ahead field goal is made from the post. These hinge points are not difficult to find.
Miami has spent the last two months on the positive side of each of those hinge points. In the Squid Game that is the 2024 college football season, Miami (7-0) has kept its head down and put one foot in front of the other, watching as other top-10 teams (Clemson, Alabama, Tennessee, etc.) He fell and was left behind.
It’s a good strategy: keep your head while everyone around you loses theirs. But Miami has not strengthened its business in recent weeks. Sure, the Hurricanes began 2024 by defeating their first four opponents by an average of nearly 40 points. But since Miami got to the thick of the ACC’s conference schedule, things have gotten considerably more complicated.
Start with one of the craziest plays of the year, a potential Hail Mary touchdown that would have given Virginia Tech an upset victory with no time remaining:
The ruling: Receiver out of bounds, game over, 38-34 Miami. The closest you can get to victory and still lose.
Next up: a visit to Cal, complete with the “College GameDay” extravaganza. The Golden Bears throttled Miami and threw the ‘Canes into a ditch, taking a 25-point lead into the third quarter. Miami quarterback Cam Ward went wild and led the ‘Canes to a huge 39-38 victory. You could see that as a test of the team’s resilience, but you could also wonder how exactly a top-10 team came up 25 points behind a team that’s now 3-4 in the first place.
And then there was Louisville, where the ‘Canes benefited from two big calls, starting with an uncalled penalty that allowed Ward to throw a 63-yard pass that led to the go-ahead touchdown:
Ward later lost control of the ball and Louisville returned it for what appeared to be a touchdown:
A Miami fumble returned for an apparent touchdown by Louisville was ruled incomplete on review. Joe Tessitore had questions even on the initial call. “Is it a live ball? Louisville is returning it like it is!” pic.twitter.com/b6GubjckWw
– Horrible advertisement (@awfulannunciando) October 19, 2024
Further review declared that Ward’s arm was moving forward, making it an incomplete pass rather than a fumble.
You get the idea. If hurricanes were a cat, they would have burned most of their lives away by now. Every team benefits from calls throughout a season, but when several crucial calls (or non-calls) get in your way, time and time again, you’re living a charmed existence.
Perhaps this is all a karmic balance off the scale of last year, when Miami suffered one of the most humiliating losses in recent college football history, turning the ball over and then allowing a touchdown on what should have been a kneel-down that ended to the game:
Miami could have taken a knee and won the game. Instead, they ran the ball, fumbled it, and then Georgia Tech won on the final play. CRAZY pic.twitter.com/ajiRMZbDdq
– Bussin’ with the boys (@BussinWTB) October 8, 2023
Or maybe Miami is just a team that exists in constant chaos. Who can say?
According to third-year head coach Mario Cristobal, this is all part of the plan. “People always talk about how in stage one of a program, or Year One typically, if you have to redo things, it’s a year where you take really hard losses,” he said earlier this week. “And then in the second year, you’re more competitive, and some of them are close, and you win a few and lose a couple. And after that, you start winning, sometimes by a little bit. And then eventually, as you go, you become a more sustainable type of evergreen program, right?”
So far, the knife-edge life of 2024 hasn’t affected Miami. The ‘Canes play in the ACC, a remarkable facsimile of a Power Four conference where it’s possible to go through an entire season’s schedule without once playing a ranked team. So far, that’s exactly what Miami has enjoyed: no Clemson, no Pitt, no SMU, just a long string of mid- and low-level teams.
This weekend, Miami faces the zombified corpse of Florida State, which shuffles into Hard Rock Stadium on Saturday, a desiccated husk of the team that posted an undefeated regular season and won the ACC championship last year. The Noles are 1-6 and showing absolutely no signs of life… but a season-derailing win over Miami might ease some of the pain in Tallahassee.
“I don’t think, and I can say this as a player, that we never looked at the record of anyone we were playing against,” Cristobal said of the Florida State-Miami rivalry. “Whatever any team’s record is in this rivalry, you’re going to get the best version of them and they’re going to get the best version of you, and that’s what makes the game so incredibly intense and physical, and that’s why so many players come here to play that game.”
Certainly, Miami faces chances of a bigger challenge later in the season; There are still schools on the horizon that “will also receive votes” like Duke and Syracuse. And then there’s the ACC championship, where No. 9 Clemson potentially awaits.
Pollsters are already cooking up the weakness of Miami’s schedule; Two one-loss teams are already ahead of the ‘Canes, and they could go further. A Miami with one loss should sneak into the bottom of the playoffs, but two losses? Probably not.
The magic act continues this weekend in Miami. ‘Canes fans should expect a little more margin of victory, a little less Twitter drama. It is the best way to go.