Miami Hurricanes to Micron PC Bowl

Yesterday the University of Miami (and not of Ohio) accepted a bowl bid to play in the Micron PC Bowl on December 31 in Boise, Idaho. As a native son and outspoken supporter of the Boise Broncos I am proud of that program and everything it has achieved, so it is no reflection on my love for Boise, the Blue Turf, or the Broncos when I say that objectively it's not the most glamorous bowl game. And its usually fucking cold in Boise right around New Years.

Still the bowl, known as the Humanitarian Bowl before it wrangled corporate sponsorship, has played host to all kinds of fish out of water teams, mostly from the ACC including Clemson, Georgia Tech and Virginia. (It's always fun to see Southern boys running around confused in the cold.) There is a National Championship team among these ranks, but none so far has matched the prestige of the U and they are coming humbly to Boise on the heels of their worst season in a long, long time.

But they won’t play the Broncos, who more often than not play in their home-town bowl game, because there’s also a rarely seen degree of poetic symmetry at play. Boise State is on the rise, while Miami has fallen on hard times and their post-season destinies have crisscrossed. Boise will be visiting the BCS playing on a stage as grand as the Orange Bowl, which Miami calls home. Miami is making the opposite trip to play the Nevada Wolfpack.

For me it highlights a great subplot to this season: the continued delicious demise of the dominant Florida programs.

You will remember that both Miami and Florida State really began their downward trends last season. Larry Coker was a pre-season hot-seat occupant (and a dead-on prognostication to the college football media’s credit) while Bobby Bowden was beginning to catch some of the same aging-legend-can’t-coach-anymore-and-better-retire flak that Joe Paterno was so used to.

It’s interesting to point out here that Paterno shook this by winning last year, going 11-1 and beating FSU in the Orange Bowl. Now, you could say, hey, FSU won the ACC and made it to the Orange Bowl last year, and you’d be right. But at 8-5 we all know it was bunk as the new-look ACC has sort of gotten into the habit of turning out tepid champions. Take your pick this year, Georgia Tech or Wake Forest.

In any case both teams were highly-ranked pre-season for no other reason than that they are Miami and Florida State. And they played early ranked #11 and #12 in the country. The game without offense sucked and that’s when we got the first whiffs of putrification.

But it's been a refreshing kind of putrification, refreshing like seeing the neighborhood bullies finally get their comeuppance. You don’t see a lot of justice in the world, particularly in the conflict between the haves and the have nots. But now two of the most thuggish, arrogant haves of all of college footballdom are groveling at 6-6 and it's awesome.