Miami Hurricanes rout Miami of Ohio in opener, but for UM the real proving starts next week | Opinion

Wait a week. No, wait a season. Curb your enthusiasm, as the saying goes. Make Miami Hurricanes football earn the trust and belief it has lost.

Recall one year ago when the ballyhooed Mario Cristobal era arrived with what seemed a parade and began with a 70-13 victory followed by a 30-7 win over minor opponents Bethune-Cookman and Southern Miss. Happy days were here again! Except it meant ... nothing. Zero. All it did was lie to us. Or tease, at least. UM’s previous worse season than last year’s 5-7 was in Lou Saban’s 1977 season.

We give Cristobal a mulligan for his nightmare debut, a do-over. But fans should expect and demand at least a four-win improvement over last year and a season that ends with the kind of bowl invitation you aren’t embarrassed to accept.

The 87th season of UM football and Year 2 for Cristobal as head coach began Friday night with an encouragingly thorough yet perfunctory 38-3 victory over the outmanned Miami of Ohio RedHawks in the Miami schools’ first meeting since 1987. Ronald Reagan was running the White House then and UM was running college football, in the midst of that run of five national championships.

Miami scored less than two minutes into the game on Tyler Van Dyke’s 44-yard scoring pass to Colbie Young and the rout was on, although Miami of Ohio, average in the lower Mid-American Conference, was this year’s Bethune-Cookman, the rote soft opening.

The opening night Hard Rock Stadium crowd of 49,024 was surprisingly credible, considering rain before the game and intermittently during it, the low-watt opponent, and the track record of Canes fans.

UM showed who the real Miami was Friday in comparison with their smaller foe.

But is this the real Miami compared to The U’s own history and standards? Is it getting close? Progressing? Let’s see.

That starts next week vs. ranked Texas A&M, which beat Miami 17-9 last season.

Everything in the postgame glow pointed to next week.

“We can be a lot better,” said Cristobal.

“Big opportunity coming next week,” said linebacker Kiko Mauigoa. “Gotta make everything perfect Super-excited for this game!”

“We know who we got next,” said safety Kam Kinchens.

There are signs of a much better team. Cristobal’s staff upheaval was needed even as it served as an admission many of the assistants he brought in last year didn’t work out. The new offensive coordinator was especially needed. Now a greatly improved product on the field must result.

It’s been a long and unfinished climb to get back to national relevance for the Canes.

The latest big tease and false hope came late in the 2017 season, when Miami was 10-0 and ranked No. 2 in the polls. Remember? (It almost feels like a mirage.)

The U’s fortunes took a sharp U-turn right then. That season ended 0-3 and from that point through last season Miami has been 33-31 overall and 23-20 in the Atlantic Coast Conference — mediocrity defined. Not terrible, perhaps, unless you recall those five national titles and can’t believe it’s been more than 20 years since the last.

The positive in Friday night is that in the lull of the past five years even the presumed easy victories have sometimes been a big ask for UM.

To the witness stand we call a couple of home losses to Duke, a 35-3 bowl loss, a loss to FIU (!), a 14-0 bowl loss to Louisiana Tech and, of course, last year’s loss to Middle Tennessee.

For unranked Miami a return to national stature begins with beating all of the opponents you should beat and then surprising at least couple teams as an underdog.

That’s where this season comes in — and waiting a week before taking the measure of what if anything Friday night may have foretold.

Four games will tell. They will define this season and how we feel about Cristobal moving forward:

Next Saturday vs. No. 23 Texas A&M.

Oct. 14 at No. 21 North Carolina.

Oct. 21 vs. No. 9 Clemson.

And Nov. 11 at No. 8 Florida State.

Those are the four games circled in red for Miami. The last two especially are vs. Miami’s recent and traditional rival, the twin Litmus tests for where the Canes truly stand on the climb back to being big again.

Win the first two of those four games and you have the poll voters’ attention, and the credibility to believe or at least hope ACC giants Clemson and FSU might be in play for you, too.

Win every game you should and even one of the those four red-circle games and you have 9-3 season, a ranking, a big bowl invite and renewed hope that the master-recruiter Cristobal might be the answer after all.

But the thing about a 5-7 debut capping a five-year swoon is that benefit of doubt is not available and you are officially in the show-me state. The prove-it state.

ESPN had a preseason ranking by tiers of all 133 FBS teams and listed 43 schools before it got around to Miami, lumping the Canes in a tier quite fairly labeled, “Kinda, Sorta, Maybe.”

So there we are, right now and this season.

Should Canes fans feel optimistic this team will be greatly improved?

Kinda, sorta, maybe.

Beating Miami of Ohio merely avoided instant calamity to launch the Mario Cristobal Vindication Tour.

Beat ranked Texas A&M next week and you have our attention.