ESPN relegated UM's opener against Charleston Southern to the Internet on Thursday, and technical problems severely marred espn360's coverage. But the Sept. 6 Canes-Gators game at 8 p.m. will deliver high-profile exposure, especially with ABC not airing a game that night because of a NASCAR race.

In fact, ESPN will use ABC's prime-time announcing team -- Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit -- on Canes-Gators. CBS passed on UM-UF because of U.S. Open tennis.

And the Canes remain in ESPN's thoughts, with work well under way on a UM football documentary. Some Canes fans have expressed concern that the film -- set to air in September 2009 -- will be unfair, but the director assures that will not be the case.

''I don't think anyone will come away saying we did anyone wrong,'' said director Alfred Spelman, who, along with producer Billy Corbin, attended UM. ``It will be very objective and very fair. We're not taking a Michael Moore approach. We don't come in with an agenda. We will explore why the program was under a microscope, but not in a judgmental way. None of our documentaries have narrators. The interview subjects will narrate it. We hope this will be the definitive history of the University of Miami football program.''

Still, Spelman cautioned that the film ``is not going to be a highlight film of the five championship seasons. It's how the University of Miami program changed the sport in both positive and negative ways, how the small, private Southern school whose football program was on the verge of extinction in the mid-1970s became the biggest powerhouse in college-football history.''

Spelman and Corbin, who explored Miami's 1970s drug-trafficking in their film Cocaine Cowboys, said some of the city's cultural and socio-economic developments will be referenced in the UM film.

''Miami was a turbulent city in the 1980s, with three race riots and the mass influx of refugees,'' Spelman said. ``A lot of the events in Miami during that period impacted the program, and we will frame a lot of the documentary around that.''

Spelman and Corbin have interviewed 15 people, including Howard Schnellenberger, Larry Coker, Melvin Bratton, Luther Campbell, Robert Bailey, Drew Rosenhaus, Jeremy Shockey and Art Kehoe. At least 10 more interviews are planned, and Spelman and Corbin are sifting through archival footage.

''Having grown up a UM fan and having gone there . . . I know the University of Miami has taken its share of hits, whether fairly or unfairly,'' Spelman said. 'That is one of the most interesting things about the program -- sort of it's `us-against-the-world' mentality.''

AROUND THE DIAL

• ESPN apparently needed to assemble focus groups in San Diego, Chicago and Boston this NFL offseason to tell them what you or I could have told them years ago: ''They want us to focus on football,'' ESPN senior vice president Jed Drake said. And ``they want us to get our graphics out of the way and don't want it to be a distraction.''

As a result, ESPN is eliminating in-game celebrity guest appearances in the Monday Night Football booth and pulling back on nonfootball chatter. And the continuous score/time box, which dropped down in the middle of the screen the past two years, will be made less intrusive.

''People tune to ESPN for a sporting event,'' ESPN senior coordinating producer Jay Rothman said of the findings from the focus groups. 'We might have been trying to serve too many. A couple things we heard was, `You're trying too hard.' ''

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