This isn't easy to write, because the Miami football program doesn't deserve the coach I'm about to suggest.
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| Miami, Jim Grobe is your man, if you're smart enough to take him. (AP) |
Miami football doesn't deserve Jim Grobe.
If Miami is only as astute as the media that writes about it, the Hurricanes don't even know who Grobe is. In the 48 hours after Larry Coker was fired, the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Palm Beach Post rattled off a total of 16 potential candidates, all of them leading with Rutgers' Greg Schiano, none of them including Wake Forest's Jim Grobe. The Sun-Sentinel offered coaching failures like Cam Cameron and Norv Turner, for God's sake. The Herald threw out household Sunshine State names Mike Leach and Steve, um, Kragthorpe.
Miami deserves those kinds of guys. By all means, Miami, hire them. Any of them. All of them. Hire them and remain behind ACC rival Wake Forest, a long-running joke of a football school that Grobe has turned into something completely serious.
Understand something about Wake Forest. Al Groh could win in the NFL, going 9-7 in his one season with the Jets, but he couldn't win at Wake Forest, where he was 26-40 from 1981-86. Men who won elsewhere in college football, John Mackovic (14-20) and Bill Dooley (29-36), couldn't win at Wake Forest. Jim Caldwell, groomed by Joe Paterno at Penn State and now assistant head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, was an absolute failure (26-63) at Wake Forest.
Nobody wins at Wake Forest. The Deacons entered this season with an all-time ACC winning percentage of .287, worst in the league.
Jim Grobe has Wake Forest in the league championship game. The Deacons are 10-2. If there are five better college football coaches than Jim Grobe ... there aren't. Just don't go there.
Me? I've been here before. Three years ago I begged another vulnerable powerhouse to hire Grobe, but Nebraska subscribed to the Sun-Sentinel and went with a failed NFL coach named Bill Callahan. Three years later Nebraska is 9-3, which ought to be the minimum at Nebraska, after seasons of 8-4 and 5-6.
Jim Grobe wouldn't be a sexy hire for Miami, which can reasonably pursue almost anyone it chooses. Grobe, 54, has a quiet charisma but isn't a showman in the slightest. He wouldn't win the press conference. But he'd win a ton of football games.
Not that he's won a ton of games at his first two schools, Ohio and Wake Forest. Here is Grobe's career coaching record, and I do not flinch as I write it: 69-67-1.
That doesn't look good. I understand. But in the 10 years before Grobe arrived, Ohio won a total of 17 games. In 10 years. That should put his 33-33-1 record there into perspective. So should the fact that, in the four years after Grobe left, Ohio went 11-35.
Grobe is 36-34 at Wake Forest. The last Wake Forest coach to win more than he lost was D.C. Walker. He was there in 1937.
