Redemption is Jim Larranaga’s as his Miami Hurricanes hit ACC tournament as No. 1 seeds | Opinion
A gorgeous day blessed the team’s sendoff to Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. The marching band sent brassy notes into the blue sky, and the cheerleaders and fans were outside the Miami Hurricanes’ campus arena to wish the men’s basketball team well as it left for the ACC tournament as the No. 1 seed for the first time in 10 years.
Can the Canes match last year’s run to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament? Is it madness to imagine they might advance even further? These are heady days for UM hoops.
You looked at a smiling Jim Larranaga as he stepped up onto the team bus to leave and you had to feel good for the 73-year-old “Coach L” because you know what he had to go through and climb up out of to get here — to his career’s redemption and renaissance.
From 2018 into 2021 UM endured three losing seasons in a row devolving to a rock-bottom 10-17 record the season before last, Miami’s worst since 1994. Suddenly Larranaga was cast as the aging coach who had lost it as some fans brought torches and pitchforks to social media in calling for his job.
The three-year nightmare was the residue of an FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball recruiting that had peripherally and erroneously implicated Miami before ultimately clearing the school and its coach.
“I had no control over that but had to deal with it, the kind of adversity I had avoided for 45 years,” Larranaga recalled in a quiet moment Tuesday, after practice and before the band cranked up outside. “Took them over a year to exonerate us, and it impacted our recruiting for two years. It was a series of problems that only patience could overcome.
“There was a thunderstorm over our heads,” he said. “It pours like crazy here in Miami and then in 20 minutes the sun is out and shining. Except the cloud over us was three years. But the university never gave up on me. That meant the world to me, and still does.”
Larranaga emerged from the downpour to score the school’s first ever Elite Eight appearance a year ago.
The team he took north on Tuesday — the one that stands atop an ACC once dominated for so long by Duke and North Carolina — might be even better. When the Canes crushed the Blue Devils 81-59 this season, it was no accident, no fluke by UM, which debuts in the tournament on Thursday vs. the winner of Wednesday’s Syracuse-Wake Forest game.
Miami is ranked No. 14 at 24-6 (15-5 ACC), and if that seems a bit too low, call it the least surprising thing in the sport. UM, the “football school,” is routinely underestimated on the hardwood. Surprising doubters has become a Larranaga trademark.
He famously took George Mason to the Final Four in 2006. In 12 seasons at Miami, his teams have exceeded ACC preseason-poll projections nine times. This season began with the Canes, on the heel of an Elite Eight run, nowhere to be found in the Preseason Top 25.
That’s disrespect rooted in a continuing underestimation of Larranaga, who surpassed 700 career coaching wins this season and is a Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame nominee.
His current team is undersized (nobody in the rotation talller than 6-7) but is a savvy blend of veteran Canes and big gets from the transfer market. If the player-movement portal and Name, Image & Likeness are a whole new language in college sports, Larranaga has become fluent fast.
Leading scorer Isiaiah Wong, the newly named ACC Player of the Year, is a fourth-year Hurricane.
Jordan Miller, a second-year transfer from George Mason and fifth-year senior, “may be the best player in the ACC.” says Larranaga.
Nijel Pack is a major transfer-get from Kansas State — so coveted he won a two-year, $800,000 NIL deal (plus a new car) from Miami megabooster John Ruiz.
Norchad Omier, a transfer from Arkansas State, has brought a low-post presence Miami completely lacked last season.
Larranaga’s is not a team with 7-footers or McDonald’s All-Americans or one-and-dones with one eye on the NBA. It has a curated, blend that works. It also is a team that has been blessed with great health, as the eight players who lead the team in minutes played have appeared in 238 of a possible 240 total games.
“Not a guy on our team with a large ego,” Larranaga says. “All these guys fit in beautifully with our program.”
A month ago Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim accused Miami and others of “buying” their teams through NIL deals before walking that back to make clear that wasn’t cheating. I asked Larranaga if that was hurtful or if he took it as sour grapes.
“Neither,” he said. “I just ignore it. Tell me what the rules are, we’ll follow the rules. Someone says something that’s not true, that has nothing to do with my team.”
That three-year thunderstorm was long gone as the Canes headed for Greensboro on Tuesday — all sun and not a cloud in sight as the bus pulled away and the brassy notes of a marching band rose like helium balloons.
