Miami Is Back, as Discipline U

On the Miami sideline, Randy Shannon was busy either trying to get his kicker's attention or turn every steel support beam in Land Shark Stadium into a boiling puddle. Given the atomic stare coming from the third-year coach, either seemed like a fair bet. As place kicker Matt Bosher walked by, Shannon clenched a granite jaw a heavyweight champion would be proud of, and burned his gaze into the side of the kicker's face.

Bosher did the smart thing. He never looked up.

He had just missed his second field goal in as many possessions and the steam coming out of Shannon's ears could've boiled a Cup of Noodles for each one of the 45,000 on hand.

After all, the Hurricanes were only beating their old nemesis by 16 points late in the fourth quarter.

"We need to get better," Shannon would say after the game. "Those kicks could come in critical situations."

But they hadn't Thursday night. The 20th-ranked Hurricanes upset 14th ranked Georgia Tech 33-17 in a manner so thorough and unquestioned that even Yellow Jacket coach Paul Johnson would admit his team had lost in every facet of the game.

And yet when Bosher's second field goal went awry with less than four minutes to play and the Hurricanes up by what felt like an utterly out of reach 16, Shannon sent a message every bit as strong as his team's kickoff-to-kneeldown win.

Miami is back. And this time, no mistakes are tolerated.

What a difference a year can make.

A season ago, Georgia Tech hammered Miami into the ground with its rushing attack, snapping a five-game Hurricane winning streak with an embarrassing 41-23 romp. The Yellow Jackets ran for 472 yards – a par 5's worth of yardage -- all televised live from coast to coast. The misdirection of Georgia Tech's triple-option offense confused the young Hurricanes. They gave up assignments, followed fakes instead of footballs and, in general, looked like a group of guys playing three-card monte with a deck with no queens.

Thursday night, Miami was in no mood for games. They made no effort to pick the right shell. They picked them all. They followed every assignment as it was drawn up, swarmed the ball like a search-and-destroy unit. They blocked on the offensive line, they ran routes as crisp as Autumn air.

They were less a football team than a drill team and they were every bit the U, Randy Shannon style. Disciplined. Agressive. And an elite team.

"There's a lot of people ... that are praising us now and they are hyping us up, but this team isn't taking anything to the head," Jacory Harris said." We are very humble and we understand that we have other teams at hand we have to beat."

Humble and Miami? The words go together like baseball and ballet.

But on the field and in the history books, they look the part.

After Week 1's Monday night win over Florida State and Thursday night's victory over the Yellow Jackets, the Canes have beaten two consecutive ranked teams to open the season for the first time since the Gatorade was bouncing off Jimmy Johnson's Aquanet hairdoo during the program's late-80's peak.

These aren't the Larry Coker Canes, who, in 2006, turned a cupcake tilt against a forgettable acronym school (It was FIU, for the studious) into a Royal Rumble, stooping to the level of a Sun Belt also-ran, a team that wouldn't have earned notice from Miami during the school's heyday, let alone be able to crawl under its skin so easily.

These aren't the Canes whose rap sheets had more pages than the playbook -- Quick, name the last time a Miami player was arrested -- or the groups that flashed the U sign around every few seconds, apparently believing it stood for "underwhelming" or "under indictment."

These are Shannon's Hurricanes, exactly what Miami fans hoped for when the school turned the program over to its no-nonsense defensive coordinator.

And the swagger is still there, even if the stupidity isn't.

There were still heavy hits. Yellow Jacket Sylvan Sylvester's head is almost certainly still ringing in the key of Jordan Futch after the linebacker walloped Sylvester on punt coverage, and freshman Vaughn Telemaque bounced Georgia Tech's Roddy Jones off the ground like a six-foot tall pogo stick.

There was quarterback play that must've sparked a few Heisman whispers with former winner Gino Torretta on the sideline. Jacory Harris threw for another 270 yards and three touchdowns. There was start-to-finish dominance that left an otherwise fine football team looking shocked in South Florida.

But Miami's statement Thursday night was simply how well they played the game. They rarely missed defensive assignments, turning the triple-option of Georgia Tech's offense into the right to run left, right, or in reverse, anywhere but up the field. Georgia Tech earned just 95 yards on the ground.

The offensive line blocked everything that came its way. If you paid for the good seats in Miami, you got closer to Harris than anybody in gold and white.

The Hurricanes did commit eight penalties, but almost all were garden variety holding and false start penalties. Only one -- a roughing the passer call after the game was all but technically finished -- demonstrated poor judgment. Another was an intentionally taken delay of game.



"Our guys came out and played hard and did what we asked of them," Shannon said. "They stayed within the game."

But if the last two weeks were a coronation for Miami, then consider the next two the first palace coup. Even after ousting Florida State in Tallahassee and wrecking Tech in Miami, the Hurricanes must travel to Blacksburg, Va., in nine days to face Virginia Tech, and then return home to host Oklahoma, which will be looking to do a little reputation repair itself.

Don't expect the schedule maker to get a Christmas card from the Shannon household.

But the Hurricanes seem ready, as mentally prepared by their coach-slash-drill sergeant Shannon as they were physically prepared for Georgia Tech.

"There is a different mentality," senior safety Randy Phillips said of this season. "A lot of people expect us to fold, but I don't know what they are thinking. We are ready for anyone."

They better be. Because as Bosher found out Thursday night, the only thing worse than losing might be answering to Randy Shannon. At Discipline U. mistakes aren't tolerated.