2022-23 College Basketball Epilogue, Part 5: South Florida, A Basketball Hotbed?
The sun’s shining on basketball in the Sunshine State.
Florida Atlantic and Miami fell short of winning a national championship this past season, but both reached a significant milestone with potential, long-lasting effects just by making the Final Four.
And while neither the Owls nor Hurricanes claimed the championship in Houston, Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern completed an undefeated run to the Div. II championship.
When both Boca Raton’s FAU and Miami advanced to the 2023 Final Four, Florida became the third different in as many NCAA Tournaments to send two teams to the national semifinals.
All-time, however, the Sunshine State’s 2023 March Madness success marked only the fifth instance of one state producing multiple Final Four qualifiers since 1991. And — like the ‘91 and ‘22 editions, which both featured Duke and North Carolina — ‘23 is just the third time since the 1980s when two programs from the same metropolitan area went to the Final Four.
But whereas Duke and Carolina reside on Tobacco Road, a region renowned for treating basketball as religion, the metropolitan Miami area has long been associated with football.
The Orange Bowl dates back to 1935, with the Festival of Palms Bowl predating that by another two years. Only the Rose Bowl Game is older.
South Florida produces hundreds of college football prospects each year, and the University of Miami’s ability to keep some of the cream of the crop at home during the 1980s transformed a once-moribund program into a powerhouse that spanned multiple decades.
However, the degradation of Miami football is well-known: The Hurricanes have not won a conference championship in the almost two decades since leaving the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Only once has a Miami team qualified for a Bowl Championship Series game/New Year’s Six bowl1 since its jump to the ACC: The 2017 Orange Bowl, when Wisconsin pasted the Hurricanes on The U’s home turf2, 35-3.
Meanwhile, in the six years since Miami football’s flirtation with being Back, Miami basketball reached the Elite Eight in 2022 and the Final Four this season. The ‘23 Hurricanes claimed a share of the ACC regular-season championship — and, sure, the ACC was comparatively down this past campaign for its typical, lofty standards.
But this year’s marked the second ACC crown of coach Jim Larranaga’s tenure after the 2012-13 Hurricanes pulled off the sweep with the regular season and ACC Tournament championships.
Between bookending ACC titles over the last decade, Miami made four NCAA Tournament appearances. With the two in ‘13 and ‘23 for six total, the Larranaga era has produced as many trips to the postseason as the program’s entire run from 1960 through 2012.
Now, it does warrant mentioning Miami couldn’t field NCAA Tournament teams from 1971 through 1985 — though that’s even more reflective of the dire straits in which basketball found itself in South Florida a few generations ago.
The university shuttered its basketball program for those 15 years amid what was originally framed as it being “temporarily suspended.”
I suppose that wasn’t entirely untrue, though a freshman enrolling at the University of Miami in fall 1985 — the semester during which The U’s basketball program restarted — would have not yet been in Kindergarten when the Hurricanes last played.
All told, the program’s stretch beginning at dormancy lasted more than a quarter-century before it reached decency. Leonard Hamilton was hired in 1990 at the end of Miami’s time as an independent, inheriting a fledgling program that played mostly .500 basketball against a weak schedule for its half-decade back.
Hamilton took over just before Miami joined arguably the best conference in college basketball, the Big East, and things were initially dire. The Hurricanes went 1-17, 7-11 and 0-18 in their first three Big East seasons, and a combined 25-61 overall.
You know it was the ‘90s seeing those records, because a power-conference program coach today would not see the next few years Hamilton needed to get Miami to its first NCAA Tournament since 1960 at the conclusion of the 1998 campaign.
Hamilton’s steady build of Miami basketball is just one reason why3 I view the current Florida State coach as one of the most influential and important figures of the sport over the last 50 years.
Along with the coach of Miami’s current rival, another seemingly unlikely source played a part in The U’s basketball maturation: the local NBA franchise.
“When the Orlando Magic And Miami Heat franchises began, '864 or something like that, basketball all of a sudden became a major sport in the state,” Larranaga said at Final Four weekend.
And there’s a coincidental parallel in the Hurricanes beginning to break through in the Big East and qualify for NCAA Tournaments at the same time the Heat became contenders in the NBA. The latter became a primary contender to the New York Knicks and Chicago Bulls in the late ‘90s, forging a heated rivalry with New York in particular.
Heat basketball took a step from contention to the pinnacle in 2006 with a team featuring Shaquille O’Neal and Dwyane Wade. Because sports have a way of aligning the cosmos, Wade is part of the 2023 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame that was honored at this year’s Final Four.
Now, before playing college ball at Milwaukee-based Marquette, where Wade recorded a triple-double in one of the best individual March Madness performances I’ve ever seen on the way to the 2003 Final Four, he came up in Chicago.
It’s different from the aforementioned love for the game expressed on North Carolina’s Tobacco Road, but Chicago has its own deeply entrenched basketball culture evident in some of the Hall of Fame presence D-Wade joins in names like Isiah Thomas, 2022 Hall inductee Tim Hardaway5, all-time college great Mark Aguirre and countless more.
What Wade accomplished for South Florida was bringing some of that Chicago love for the game and making it Miami’s hallmark for almost all of his lengthy pro career.
“I have a few people who are part of my life [who] graduated from The U, and they are really jumping on the bandwagon,” Wade said at Final Four weekend. “As much as you can bandwagon jump, I ain’t never seen it as much as I see it now. It’s awesome to see.”
What starts as hopping on the proverbial bandwagon can turn into something much more significant with time and continued success, however — particularly for young people.
And that’s the target audience with which Larranaga said he hopes Miami’s Final Four run most resonates.
“As far as I'm concerned, I hope every 8-to 18-year-old that's still growing and trying to find a school…follow FAU and Miami during this Final Four and decide, ‘I'm going to play, basketball is going to be my primary sport,’” he said ahead of The U’s national semifinal matchup with UConn. “Because that's really how your sport really evolves. We have a lot of young players in Coral Gables and in Miami that are going to be very highly recruited. And there's a lot of great players throughout the state.
“This only enhances it; that [FAU’s] run and our run will make kids watching TV will make it like, man, I want to do that,” he added.
There was indeed a sense of that attitude Larranaga described — wanting to make basketball the main thing — emanating from Miami at the Final Four.
One reporter in Houston was clearly angling for a story on the powerful Hurricanes post player Norchad Omier being cut out for a transition to Mario Cristobal’s Miami football player.
Plenty of other March Madness standouts have made similar jumps, like star of Kent State’s Cinderella 2002 run, Antonio Gates, becoming a Hall of Fame-caliber tight end for the San Diego Chargers. Julius Peppers played in the 2000 Final Four for North Carolina before becoming an NFL backfield terror, and former VCU defensive dominator Mo Alie-Cox now starts at tight end for the Indianapolis Colts.
Given Omier’s sturdy frame and physically aggressive brand of basketball on the interior, and that people of certain generations associate Miami so much with football, it wasn’t an outlandish idea for an article. But Omier shot it down quickly.
He won’t be transitioning away from the currently winning Miami program to chase the past glory of another.
Meanwhile, as The U has sought to return to the way things once were on the gridiron, Miami’s other college football programs have had their own largely fruitless pursuits of glory fall short.
FAU and Florida International both played their first season in 2004. In 19 years, FIU won one conference championship; FAU, thanks to the Mary Poppins of college football and Miami-area legend Howard Schnellenberger laying a solid foundation, has won three conference titles.
However, neither program has enjoyed sustained success. Both have drawn the “sleeping giant” label that applies to most any program located in a major metropolitan area with quality high school recruiting pipelines.
In FAU’s case, the sleeping giant may well have been its basketball program.
Plenty of mid-majors to go on deep NCAA Tournament runs end up being flashes in the pan; maybe FAU ends up being more comparable to Florida Gulf Coast over the next decade than it is the next breakout mid-major power a la fellow 2023 Final Four participant San Diego State, which made its run to the Championship Game as the culmination of a nearly two-decade process.
But with Dusty May reupping to remain at FAU, the Owls have the potential architect of a sustained run. Returning a solid corps of players from this season’s remarkable run should have FAU ranked in the top 20 to open the 2023-24 campaign.
“Shoutout to coach May,” said Owls guard Bryan Greenlee. Though not a Miami-area resident, Greenlee was one of five Floridians on the FAU roster, hailing from Gainesville. “I feel like he did a wonderful job putting all the pieces together. We just have so much talent, it’s almost hard to keep one guy [on the floor]. There’s no drop-off at all.”
If FAU can continue at that level with no drop-off not just for 40 minutes a game, but from season-to-season in the coming years, the Owls can contribute to making South Florida one of the nation’s real basketball hotbeds.
In 2005, Miami’s second year in the ACC, it played LSU in the Peach Bowl (and lost, 40-3). While the Peach Bowl is currently part of the New Year’s Six, it was not a BCS bowl in that era.
Insomuch as the Miami Dolphins stadium, located a considerable drive from the University of Miami campus, is “home.”
As noted in the linked commentary, Hamilton recruited New York playground legend “Fly” Williams to Austin Peay in the 1970s through most unconventional and impressive means.
The Heat debuted in 1988; the Magic followed in 1989.
Hardaway played point guard for the late ‘90s Miami Heat teams.