Miami Football Hires Al Golden: What Does This Hire Say About the Hurricanes?
The Miami Hurricanes are set to announce Al Golden as their new head coach on Monday. Golden comes in with a 27–34 record as a head coach, which has some people skeptical as to whether this was really an upgrade over Randy Shannon. Golden can tout that he has taken one of the worst football programs in the country from 1–11 to records of 9–4 and 8–4 respectively over the five years he has been at Temple. It is no doubt that there are a lot of positives to Golden coming into Miami as the new head coach, but many will consider it hardly the “home run” hire they were looking for.
What does the hiring of Golden say about the attractiveness of the job at the University of Miami? The last few coaching searches turned up Coker, Shannon and now Golden—hardly the murderer’s row of coaching hires that would make people take notice.
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The truth is Miami made the hard press at a lot of coaches over the past 10 years, and this time they went after Jon Gruden and struck out. Then allegedly offered Boise State’s Chris Petersen the job and he backed out of it as well. Miami never seemed to be in the running for Harbaugh or Petrino, and the entire song and dance with Dan Mullen seemed like he was never really interested in coming to coach the Hurricanes.
It took Miami several weeks to find a coach and close the deal, and Florida lost Urban Meyer and hired Will Muschamp from Texas within a few days after allegedly being rejected by the likes of Bob Stoops and Bobby Petrino. Florida claims that Muschamp was their guy all along, and Muschamp says he would not have left for any other job, those statements are nice and politically correct. We know that Muschamp would have left for a lot of jobs if the price and situation were right. Miami wanted someone with head-coaching experience as stated from the beginning, and it seems Florida was rejected just as many times as the Hurricanes were.
What this says about the Miami job is that it’s not necessarily undesirable, but it is a very unique job like no other in college football. There are positives and negatives to that, and in reality Miami has never went and hired big-name coaches in the past. The University of Miami has always made coaches into legends and vaulted them into their next job because of the success they found in Coral Gables. It would seem that this hire is right in line with what Miami did in the past when it was winning national and conference titles.
Being that Golden does not have a big name and Miami has what are considered good facilities, but not ones that can stack up with some of the other power programs in college football, it will be interesting to see how Golden is able to recruit and compete against the best in the country. The program's history and success of sending players to the NFL are where the advantages are. If it comes down to fan support or facilities those are issues that have to be resolved at some point, but will take time to fix. Some believe the issue of fan support will never be fixed due to the history of Southern Florida sports fans, and there are others who say, "Just win and it will take care of itself."
Miami is a good job, but not a great one. It’s not as bad as Mark May made it out to be a few weeks ago when he was discussing the job on ESPN. There is sporadic fan support, and it’s a hot seat almost the minute you take the job. The ink from Golden’s signature is hardly dry on the contract and you already have a subset of the fanbase discussing renting planes and not being happy with the hire. Many fans think Miami deserves to pluck coaches from schools like Georgia, Arkansas and even Oklahoma and are upset that the coaching search was narrowed to coaches from Temple, UConn and the CFL.
The truth is some of those coaches have been at those schools for over six years, and although they may get on the hot seat at times, they manage to keep their job. Miami has jettisoned coaches two times during the same period some of these coaches were employed in their current jobs, so why would they leave stability for the unknown? For instance, coach Randy Edsall would have been a significant upgrade, but he is now a god at UConn and the expectations are low.
Taking the job at Miami is not something everyone can do, and the fact that Golden is willing to come in and take a shot at it means the fans should give him the benefit of the doubt before passing judgment.
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