The University of Miami’s 2021 football season came to an abrupt end Sunday night — five days before the team was set to play Washington State in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas — after Atlantic Coast Conference and school officials decided there were far too many COVID-19 cases affecting the roster to safely compete in the game.
How many Hurricanes were out? A source told
The Athletic earlier in the day Sunday there were at least 20 players who missed last week’s bowl practices and two position groups — offensive line and the secondary — were decimated, leaving the team in a precarious position when it went home for Christmas break.
When players returned to campus Sunday and were retested, the situation wasn’t any better. The news was hardly surprising considering Florida ranks ninth among states where coronavirus is spreading the fastest on a per-person basis, a USA Today report showed, due to the omicron variant.
That didn’t make Sunday’s news — delivered via Zoom to players in a team meeting led by interim coach Jess Simpson — any less tough to swallow for players like fifth-year senior receiver
Mike Harley, who was looking to use the bowl game as a final in-game audition for
NFL scouts.
What did school officials tell players?
“They didn’t want to risk getting guys sick. We had some guys out right now that would’ve been back before the game, but it’s just bad timing,” Harley, Miami’s all-time leader in receptions,
told local Fox affiliate WSVN on Sunday night.
“We heard something with the ACC saying it’s a new strand. So, usually, it takes 10 to 14 days to come back. Now, it takes seven days to come back. It was just all in the air. They didn’t want to risk it.”
Aside from players testing positive for COVID-19, there were fears players who hadn’t been able to practice or train in weeks would get injured playing in a game more than a month removed from their regular-season finale, a 47-10 win at Duke on Nov. 27.
Miami altered its bowl practices last week, staggering position groups and keeping offensive and defensive players separate during conditioning and individual drills in hopes of avoiding more positive COVID tests.
It all went for naught, though, as Miami became the third ACC school on Sunday to pull out of a bowl game because of COVID protocols, joining Boston College and Virginia. Miami, like BC and Virginia, will still get a cut of the ACC’s bowl money, which is shared between all 14 schools.
What’s next for the Hurricanes? Coach Mario Cristobal, who took over for Manny Diaz a week before the early signing period and pulled in two top 100 recruits in what so far is a small signing class of nine players, is going to spend the next week finalizing his coaching staff for 2022.
On Monday, receivers coach Rob Likens, who was going to serve as Miami’s offensive coordinator in the bowl game, announced his farewell. He’s leaving to become the offensive coordinator and receivers coach at SMU under former Hurricanes offensive coordinator Rhett Lashlee, who previously hired Miami’s Garin Justice as his offensive line coach.
So far, the only assistant Cristobal has hired at Miami is offensive line coach Alex Mirabal, who played with him at Miami Columbus High and has been an assistant with him for years. Receivers coach Bryan McClendon, defensive line coach Joe Salave’a and strength coach Aaron Feld, who were with him at Oregon, have also been rumored to be joining Miami’s staff.
Cristobal spent the past two weeks — after the early signing period ended — meeting with every player on the roster and setting the stage for offseason expectations.
“We don’t shoot from the hip on anything,” Cristobal told WSVN. “We have a lot of good players on this football team and we will assess every single person. We’ll do body fat, body comp, bone density, we’ll do it all to make sure that we have a specific plan and a path for everyone in the program to develop.”
Miami, which was ranked 14th in the preseason AP poll, finished 7-5 in 2021 and has played in the ACC championship game only once since joining the conference. The program’s last bowl victory came in 2016. Cristobal, who will make $8 million a season on a 10-year contract, will have the biggest budget for assistant coaches in the ACC. He is expected to turn Miami into a winner quickly.
“I don’t think culture can ever be a T-shirt, a tagline, a slogan. People all the time ask, ‘What’s your slogan?’ I don’t need a slogan,” Cristobal said. “Why don’t you just get your butt up at 4:30 in the morning and get your butt to work. I don’t think anybody’s really focusing on, ‘Hey, bring back the old days.’ We want to launch Miami into the future with a lot of those principles and values. Because great principles and values stand the test of time.”
The Hurricanes are also expected to invest heavily in upgrading facilities under new athletic director Dan Radakovich, who will drive down from Clemson with his family on Jan. 1 and begin work shortly thereafter. The Hurricanes will begin work on new locker rooms immediately and look to upgrade their athletic home.
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