A New Year’s plea to South Florida sports fans: Stop fretting about the Dolphins and Tua Tagovailoa for a moment and Google “ACC men’s basketball standings”.
Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Look who’s sitting there on top of the heap, in first place, ahead of Louisville, North Carolina and Duke: The University of Miami Hurricanes.
Shocked? Don’t be. Those Canes that you have probably been ignoring are 11-3 overall, 3-0 in the conference, and riding a seven-game win streak heading into Wednesday’s home game against Syracuse.
They are fun to watch and scored 90-plus points in back-to-back wins over North Carolina State and Wake Forest.
Different players catch fire each night. Kam McGusty scored 27 against Stetson. Jordan Miller, a George Mason transfer who has been the biggest surprise of the team, put up 25 against the Wolfpack. Isaiah Wong torched the Demon Deacons for 25.
They have a true point guard again. His name is Charlie Moore, and he took a circuitous journey to Coral Gables with stops at Cal, Kansas and DePaul before transferring to Miami last summer.
Moore is not as electric as Chris Lykes, who transferred to Arkansas, but he is efficient, a calm leader who exudes positive energy and doesn’t need the ball in his hands. He is more than happy to dish off to open teammates, reminiscent of former UM point guards Shane Larkin and Angel Rodriguez, who led their teams to Sweet 16s.
Maybe most significant, Moore is a sixth-year senior who turns 24 in February. He is one of four sixth-year seniors on this UM team, along with center Rodney Miller (25), McGusty (24), and Sam Waardenburg, who turns 23 in February. They are mature, experienced, and they love college basketball.
It is too early to know how Miami will finish, but these are exactly the kind of players Jim Larranaga loves to coach.
Larranaga has done best with veteran rosters. His 2012-13 Sweet 16 team that won the ACC and finished No. 5 in the AP poll, featured six seniors. His 2015-16 Sweet 16 team was led by redshirt senior transfers Rodriguez and Sheldon McClellan, senior Tonye Jekiri, redshirt junior Kamari Murphy, and junior Davon Reed, who is now with the Denver Nuggets.
UM basketball players and coaches are having fun again. Larranaga is doing post-game dances again.
But most local sports fans wouldn’t know any of this because they don’t show up for games. Despite the seven-game win streak, Miami ranks dead last in ACC home attendance so far this season with 3,015 fans per game.
The student section fills up only when there is a chance to mug for ESPN cameras. Most nights, it is only half-full, if that. One November game, there were two students total in that section. TWO. Granted, it was the start of Thanksgiving break, so out-of-town students had gone home, but what about the large number of South Florida commuter students? Where were they?
There have been brief periods when fans flocked to see the Canes play, like in January 2013, when students camped outside the arena on “Larranaga’s Lawn” the night before UM stunned No. 1 Duke 90-63.
But for the most part, UM basketball has never gotten the attention it deserves.
Dick Hickox led the 1959-60 Hurricanes to a 23-3 record, top-10 ranking and their first NCAA Tournament. Players on that team, known as “The Cinderella Five,’’ drove themselves to road games and their coach, Bruce Hale, laundered their uniforms and shared an office with coaches from three other sports.
When Hale went on the recruiting trail, he pulled out a photo of the palm tree-lined Miami Beach Convention Hall and told prospects that is where the Hurricanes played most of their games — never bothering to mention the campus was a half hour drive from Miami Beach.
In 1964-65, the Canes got some attention because future NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry led the nation with 37.4 points per game.
The program hit rock bottom on April 22, 1971, when the UM Board of Trustees voted to do away with basketball because of sagging attendance and financial losses. The nomadic Hurricanes had traipsed from the Coral Gables High gym to the Miami Beach Convention Hall to Miami-Dade Junior College to Dinner Key Auditorium.
I was a student at UM in 1985 when the program was resurrected after being shut down for 14 years. That team, coached by Bill Foster and led by “Downtown” Eric Brown, Kevin Presto and Dennis Burns, played at the James L. Knight Center adjacent to the downtown Hyatt hotel.
I began covering the team for the Herald in the late 1990s, when they played at Miami Arena and Leonard Hamilton got the team back to national prominence. They reached the Sweet 16 in 2000, a minor miracle considering UM went 0-18 in the Big East in 1993-94.
“If only they had an on-campus arena,” people would say. “The students would come. The place would be packed.”
Well, they got a $48 million, 8,000-seat on-campus arena 18 years ago. Still waiting for those students and packed houses.
Maybe Dan Radakovich can help. He was just hired as the new UM athletic director. He has a long to-do list. Filling the Watsco Center should be near the top.
