Miami Hurricanes look to stay the course after Notre Dame win dented ACC title game hopes
The Miami Hurricanes kept ACC Championship Game hopes alive on Friday night with their 44-41 win at North Carolina State. Then, they watched those hopes take a hit when Notre Dame beat previously top-ranked Clemson in double overtime on Saturday.
Before that, ninth-ranked Miami’s easiest path to an ACC title game berth would have been for Clemson to defeat Notre Dame, as the Tigers did to UM on Oct. 10, and then win out and hope for either another Fighting Irish loss or to win a tiebreaker at the end of the regular season that could’ve even come down to computer rankings.
Notre Dame’s win over Clemson, which was without star quarterback Trevor Lawrence, means the Irish, normally an independent but playing in the ACC in 2020, now lead the conference standings without a loss. Clemson and Miami each have a loss, but Clemson would own the head-to-head tiebreaker. UM doesn’t play Notre Dame this season.
The Hurricanes (6-1, 5-1) would need another Clemson loss or two Notre Dame losses — and to win out — to play one of the two in the ACC Championship Game. A three-way tie does Miami no good against the Tigers and Irish, with a loss against the only team the Hurricanes played this season.
Clemson’s remaining schedule: at Florida State, vs. Pittsburgh, at Virginia Tech. For Notre Dame, it’s: at Boston College, at North Carolina, vs. Syracuse, at Wake Forest.
Despite the dwindling chances, even with just one loss on the road to a team ranked No. 1 at the time, Miami coach Manny Diaz is pleading his players to simply stay the course and let everything else take care of itself.
He said on Monday he joked with players, “We called the ACC and asked them what the tiebreaker was, and they said, ‘Go 1-0 this week.’ “
It may have brought levity to the Hurricanes, aware of the implications of Saturday night’s result in South Bend, Indiana, but it also relayed a necessary approach with Miami facing another tough road test in the ACC at Virginia Tech this Saturday.
“That’s it. That’s all we can control,” Diaz said. “Nothing matters. If we’re sitting around talking about what December looks like, we will get beat in November. Our guys have done a pretty good job of that.”
“Everyone remembers November. Everything you do in November, this is the back end of football, so it’s taking advantage of every opportunity,” said senior receiver Michael Harley.
Diaz broke down the extent of conference scoreboard watching within the program.
“Every week, we sort of pull the lens out, we look at where the league is and then, when we’re done talking about it, we don’t talk about it again for the rest of the week,” he said. “It goes into ‘beat Virginia Tech, beat Virginia Tech.’ Winning on the road in the league, that’ll be enough for us to focus on in one week.”
Added tight end Will Mallory: “We just got to take it week by week. We can’t look too much to the future. We just got to keep improving as a whole team, especially me as an individual. We’re just focused on the next week and the next opponent.”
The Hurricanes hope to turn a corner regarding player availability this week. They had 11 players on the unavailability report on Friday in Raleigh, N.C. Four of them were new names to pop up after several missed the win over Virginia that preceded the bye week remained out.
Diaz revealed postgame that, in one of the practices leading up to N.C. State, Miami only had 70 players available (college football rosters normally go into triple digits with 85 on scholarship). The Hurricanes had players practicing drastically out of position on scout team and graduate assistants on the staff even had to fill in as players.
“We won’t have a backup quarterback playing on our dime defense like we did last week,” Diaz said. “It’ll be better. We are getting guys back. It’s still incremental as the week goes on.
“We hope the lowest number of guys that we’ve had around available, that we’ve passed that, but we don’t assume anything in 2020. … We did have more guys out there (Sunday) night, and as the week goes on, we hope to have more guys cleared, but we’re still waiting on medical clearance.”
While the coaching staff appeared to have come away unscathed from any COVID-19 outbreak, unlike the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, Diaz reiterated the team has plans in place for which coaches handle which duties under such circumstances.
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