Newcomers eager to debut against Lakers
Now that the Orlando Magic revamped their roster, they have 27 games left to evaluate and assess it. The process begins Sunday in Los Angeles against the reigning NBA champion Lakers, who will also have a slightly different look.
Newly acquired Wendell Carter Jr., R.J. Hampton and Otto Porter Jr. are available to play Sunday, according to a Magic official. The game tips off at 10 p.m. and will broadcast on Fox Sports Florida.
While the Magic turned over their roster with trades, injuries will keep All-Stars LeBron James (ankle) and Anthony Davis (calf ) out of the Lakers’ lineup.
Carter, Hampton and Porter should join the rotation immediately, though whether that’s off the bench or in the starting lineup remains to be seen. Magic coach Steve Clifford hoped to begin acclimating the newcomers Saturday before the team left for Los Angeles.
Orlando started James Ennis, Chuma Okeke, Khem Birch, Chasson Randle and Dwayne Bacon against Portland on Friday — one day after trading five players in three separate deals.
Gary Harris, meanwhile, will not be available. The shooting guard continues to recover from a strained left adductor that has sidelined him since mid-February. Harris has played just once since Jan. 31 because of the injury.
Harris, who has battled injuries much of his career, said he’s eager
Hurricanes into one of the greatest dynasties in modern college football history.
It was called the “Miracle in Miami” that Jan. 2, 1984, night in the Orange Bowl when Schnellenberger’s Hurricanes won the national title and shocked the world by beating a seemingly invincible Nebraska Cornhuskers team that was being hailed as the greatest in college football history. As I wrote years later when Schnellenberger announced his retirement, it wasn’t a “Miracle in Miami”; it was a “Metamorphosis in Miami.”
It was the night the college football landscape shifted. The big, plodding college football Clydesdales of the past were beaten by Schnellenberger’s swift, speedy Sunshine State Shetland ponies. Schnellenberger came to UM, built a recruiting wall around South Florida he called the “State of Miami” and proceeded to load his roster with speed, speed and more speed.
“Coach Schnellenberger changed the way college football was played,” former college football head coach, ex-UM defensive coordinator and current U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville once told me. “He took wide receivers and made linebackers out of them. His whole philosophy was to put players on the field who could run.”
In the years to come, three other Miami football coaches — Jimmy Johnson, Dennis Erickson and Larry Coker — would go on to win four more national championships. Moreover, after Schnellenberger kicked the door in by winning the state’s first national title, the floodgates opened and eight other coaches — Johnson, Erickson, Coker, Bowden, Steve Spurrier, Urban Meyer, Jimbo Fisher and Scott Frost (upside-down face emoji) would combine to win 11 more.
“Without him, there is no Miami football,” UM’s official Twitter account posted Saturday after Schnellenberger’s death.
“The loss of Coach Schnellenberger is immeasurable in so many ways for the University of Miami family,” Miami AD Blake James said in a prepared statement. “He helped our University grow during a critical period of time and established a foundation for future success, on the football field and off.”
It is, of course, an absolute travesty that Schnellenberger never made the College Football Hall of Fame. The reason is because the HOF changed its criteria several years ago to mandate coaching candidates have at least 10 seasons and 100 or more games with a .600 winning percentage. Schnellenberger won just 51 percent of his games, mainly because any coach is going to lose a bunch of games when you resurrect two downtrodden programs (Miami and Louisville) and build another one (FAU)
from scratch at a commuter school.
Which is why one of the great philosophical questions in college football history is what would Schnellenberger’s legacy be had he stayed at UM after winning the 1983 national championship? Would he have won four more national titles that his UM successors won? Or would he have won even more because UM would have had no coaching transitions and the instability that comes with them?
“Who knows how many national titles Coach Schnellenberger would have won if he’d stayed?” Coker told me right after he won his national championship. “His success would have been off the charts.”
Instead, Schnellenberger resigned at UM after winning the national championship to accept a $3 million contract offer to become part-owner, general manager and head coach of The Spirit of Miami of the USFL — a franchise that was relocating from Washington, D.C. However, the USFL, at the urging of powerful, persuasive New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump, announced it was shifting to a fall schedule to compete with the NFL. The owner of the Washington franchise did not want to go head-to-head with the popular Miami Dolphins, backed out of the deal and the Washington franchise instead moved to Orlando. Schnellenberger quit, Lee Corso became the coach of the short-lived Orlando Renegades and the USFL folded a year later.
“Yeah, it was a horse-[expletive] decision,” Schnellenberger once said of leaving Miami for the USFL. “… If you look at it objectively, it was the dumbest thing a human being could do.”
But there’s a reason Schnellenberger did it.
He did it because he was a dreamer.
He always believed in his heart that he could replicate what he did at Miami.
When he took over at Louisville, he declared the Cardinals were “on a collision course with a national championship.”
When he took over at FAU, I remember sitting in his office that day in 2004 as he smoked his trademark pipe, ran a fingercomb through his bushy mustache and said in that thundering, baritone voice of his, “By our seventh year, we will be competitive with the Floridas and Florida States and the top teams in the country.”
Of course, those bold predictions never came true.
But it doesn’t matter. Howard Schnellenberger pulled off the greatest sports miracle in the history of our state.
He escorted national college football out of the dark ages and into the sunshine.