The U

I just finished watching a espn E:60 series documentary on the college football program at the University of Miami, in Miami, Florida. For those who don’t really follow college football, the University of Miami has been a football powerhouse for the past number of decades. This documentary follows the schools rise to power.

                When the school first started football their team was predominantly white, and comprised of football players from mostly upper class suburban neighbourhoods, much the same as the demographic of the school.  The school football team was in the gutter and had so much trouble putting fans in the stands that they even once tried promoting tickets for free at burger king, in a buy a burger get a ticket promotion. They had a lot of trouble competing both in games and recruiting battles with the two powerhouses in the state, the University of Florida, and the university of Florida state. The team had countless 1 or 2 win seasons, and it got to the point where the school thought of shutting down the football program.

 However it was decided that the program would be given one more chance under Coach Howard Schnellenberger, a one time assistant for the Miami Dolphins. Upon his arrival at the University of Miami he guaranteed a national championship within 5 years, something that most people believed to be impossible. He went about rebuilding the program by focusing recruiting on a little (at the time) recruited portion of the population, in the African Americans that lived in the local south Florida ghettos. The level of high school play in some of these schools was extremely high, and people would even bet their life savings on some of these games. Paying off players wasn’t uncommon either. This meant that the players that the university of Miami was recruiting were used to high steaks football, and played hard as it was there only opportunity to “make it” in life.

The part of the show though that really shocked and awed me was some of the stuff that these players got away with doing; there are parts of the show where former players talked about benefits that they were given. As most people know the port of Miami is infamous for cocaine smuggling, and the city is known for a large cocaine problem. Players talk about having piles of cocaine worth thousands of dollars at their fingertips, and having school boosters buy them prostitutes and strippers to party with. Since college football players aren’t paid, there is another part of the show where they talk about wearing ski masks and robbing people to have money to buy food. Many of these players went on to be NFL superstars and the University of Miami won many national championships.

Miami WR Michael Irving
Photo retrived from sports.espn.go.com

The documentary was mind blowing to me, to think that people around my age were achieving national stardom playing a college sport, meanwhile receiving so many illicit benefits.