FanPost

Ridiculous Fans and Antiquated Notions

To begin, I did this as a FanPost because I wanted to make sure that you all understood that what follows is from me. Not the blog, site, or anyone else. This is my reaction to a lot f the dumbassery I see on twitter every day from people who claim to be Canes diehards.

That being said, strap in.

First of all, let's get this whole "Fire Golden" and "Golden Sucks" shit out of the way. Stop it. When you say that stuff after he has only had 2 years on the job, you're making yourself look like a complete idiot. You are all the same folks who were either really REALLY hoping for Gruden, which is stupid in its own right, or praising Golden last year when he pulled Howard, Bush, McCord, Duke, etc out of nowhere. Now all of a sudden he sucks and needs to be fired because he had a damn good year on the field and missed out on a few recruits that YOU think he should have gotten?

Right.

I'll play your game for a second, to make you feel welcome, and to see just how far ahead you've thought this idiotic idea through. Let's say Miami does fire Golden because he didn't get Thomas or Kirkland or Collins, shall we? With the school treating the head coach that way after all that he has done, how do you think guys like Kehoe, Cristobal, Coley, and Barrow will feel? Think they stick around? Or do you think they try to find other gigs where they know their job doesn't hinge on the decisions of teenagers? So now, in your world, we have established that if Golden is gone, a good part of the existing staff is gone too. Which, unless I am sadly mistaken about how you construct these fantasies, does not fix this year's recruiting class one bit. In fact, it hurts it worse than missing out on players, because guys that did commit will look to transfer since the people that brought them there are gone. So what about next year? 2014 is loaded with talent, and Miami should clean up right? Not so fast, young buck. A good amount of those 2014 recruits have been in contact with Miami's now former staff for a while now, and since they are gone, those recruits are feeling pretty wary about Miami. They bring in a new coach, and a new staff, some of whom are proven recruiters, but may not have the ties to Florida that the other staff had or had built. There goes a few more of those 2014 recruits, because you aren't going to land a whole lot of kids with an unproven staff and brand new bridges being built with high schools. So now in your world, you're saying "trust me, just give Coach Guy time, he'll turn this around!" which, GASP, is the same shit people were saying about Golden when he got there his first year! Funny how that works, isn't it? The notion that a coach needs time to turn a program around.

Golden has been here for two years. TWO. Stop pretending like Miami was some sort of ivory tower when he took over, either. Shannon had ruined a lot of high school connections, he had gotten the team lazy, uninspired, and undisciplined. Golden was brought in to build this thing up from scratch, not continue a process. Some of y'all like to say "but that's what Howard did in the 80's, and look what he did!" SHUT THE F*&K UP. The game has changed monumentally since the 80's, and it's become quite obvious that while Florida remains the hot seat for talent, not all of that talent wants to stay home like it did back then. So please, for my sanity and more so for your own, stop with that fence around south Florida crap. It isn't going to happen. Will this staff do better in the area with new coaches and better ties? Absolutely, but you people that get so upset and angry when a south Florida kid that you think is a world changer leaves to go elsewhere are just ridiculous. It's happened before, it's still happening, and it's going to in the foreseeable future. Stop living in the 80's, realize that Miami has been mediocre for more than a decade, and get over yourselves. It's going to take a hell of a lot longer than 2 years to get things rebuilt, and it sure as hell would take even longer than that if everyone gets fired on a whim every couple of years.

Oh yeah, and that whole NCAA thing. All of you are going to condemn what they are doing and how long they have taken to wrap this thing up and insult them and all of that, but you aren't going to give Golden any credit for what he's done while under that shadow? You all are just going to say that the NCAA is a crutch with recruiting and that it doesn't affect kids all that much in the same breath that you say it's horrible that we have to miss 2 bowl games? That's a thing you're going to do? Any of you who think that the NCAA issue does not affect recruiting as much as everyone says it does clearly needs to be evaluated. All it takes is a glance at some of the comments made be recruits, the mentions of negative recruiting, all of that. These kids are seeing two straight years of no bowl games and STILL no end to the investigation, which means that all it takes for other schools to move in is an in-home visit and talk of "You know, they aren't done with that thing yet. You want to play in a bowl game, don't you?" for these recruits to start thinking. For any fans to downplay the effect of this NCAA investigation is an absolute insult to the work that Golden and his staff have done during their time here while embroiled in the middle of all of that. Now that it is supposedly reaching its end, Golden is having to try and guess at a scholarship number to fully cooperate with the NCAA so they don't come down any harder than they already indirectly have.

Now, to my last point. This notion that coaches are 100% at fault when a kid you like chooses another school. That notion is basically implying that coaches have to FORCE these kids to attend their school, or else they have failed. Coaches are in the business of selling their teams, campuses, and programs, not in the business of brainwashing. All they can do is take the scholarship situation that they have in front of them, sell their school to these recruits for as long as they possibly can, and hope that they did a good enough job to make the kid feel at home. In the end, though, it is still up to the kid. Unless of course you commit some sort of violation to basically bribe the kid to come, BUT THAT'S WHAT GOT MIAMI INTO THIS MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE. I get the notion that if you are going to remove blame from the coaches when a recruit signs elsewhere, you can't praise them when they land recruits. Sure, on paper, in black and white, it's either a success or a failure, but the connotation with which y'all throw that word failure around is an indictment that the staff didn't do everything it could to land a certain recruit. That's simply not true. If they stopped recruiting a guy halfway through the off season, then sure. You'd be on the closer side of right, but if they have stayed on the kid the entire time, right up until the last second, and he chooses another school, that's no fault of the coaches. Period. To suggest otherwise is taking the choice out of the hands of the kid that made it, and not one of us has the right to do that.I have too many of you tell me to look at Saban or Freeze or Muschamp or any other coach who has great recruiting years time after time. That too, is silly. We aren't them. They aren't us. They aren't dealing with what we are dealing with. If you want to continually point them out, go cheer for them instead of Miami. Period.

Chalk this up to what it is: a difficult recruiting year mainly due to numerous outside factors. To suggest that it was anything but that is about as stupid as it gets. Calm the hell down, realize that this year will not make or break the team now or in the future, and cheer for your damned team.

We at SOTU are not responsible for the content posted in this section. I mean, we're responsible for the good stuff that gets posted in this section. That was totally us. Beyond that, we take no responsibility whatsoever.

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