Hurricanes can close in on Coastal title
CORAL GABLES — The challenge, from Hurricanes coach Mark Richt, was simple.
“One day, a Miami team will win the Coastal … Are you the team?” Richt asked his players this season. “I don’t know.”
The answer, for Richt and his Hurricanes, could come late tonight.
The Hurricanes, who have won 12 in a row dating to last season (including seven straight to open this year), sit atop the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Coastal Division standings. They are 10th in the College Football Playoff rankings, which were released earlier this week, and could potentially lock up the division title and a berth in next month’s ACC Championship Game with a win today.
That win will just have to come against reigning division champion Virginia Tech, an old Big East rival that like the Hurricanes has its sights set on Charlotte.
It’s as significant a game as the Hurricanes have played late in the season in years, and no one in Coral Gables has downplayed the stakes. Instead, Miami is embracing the opportunity, knowing that a win over the No. 13 Hokies, combined with a Georgia Tech win over Virginia earlier in the day, will give the Hurricanes that first division championship it has wanted for so long.
And with a national audience set to watch the primetime matchup of two top-15 teams, Miami is hoping to put on a show and move one step closer to making program history.
“The response is: it’s definitely us,” linebacker Shaquille Quarterman said of how the Hurricanes have embraced Richt’s challenge to be the first Miami team to win the division. “We have the chance to do it, too. That’s what every game is looking toward. Every win is important because it gets us closer to our goal, which is to win the Coastal, and once we do that, we don’t want to stop there. We want to keep going. That’s always the everlasting goal, to get that big ring.”
While Quarterman isn’t the only Hurricane hoping for big things, he and his teammates understand getting past the Hokies won’t be easy, especially with some of the issues that have plagued Miami in recent weeks.
Though the Hurricanes (7-0, 5-0) haven’t lost this year, they’re coming off their worst offensive performance of the season, an effort offensive coordinator Thomas Brown deemed “embarrassing” in a 24-19 victory over a struggling North Carolina team.
Miami had a season-low 59 rushing yards. It turned the ball over twice, including on a fumble late when the Hurricanes were driving to close out the win. And in that game, Miami couldn’t capitalize on any of the four turnovers its defense forced and had to settle for a field goal after a blocked punt deep inside Tar Heels territory.
In all, Miami has won its past four games by a combined 18 points, something that hasn’t impressed the pollsters that dropped the Hurricanes a spot in the AP Top 25 last week or the CFP committee that had them behind six one-loss teams in the rankings. And finding a way to jump-start the offense comes against the backdrop of facing a stalwart Hokies defense that leads the ACC vs. the run (110.8 yards per game) and is second in the nation in scoring (11.5 ppg).