Miami Hurricanes vs. Florida State Pregame Column: For So Many Reasons, Just Win the Damn Game

I’ve never been one to subscribe to the tired “Sports as a Metaphor for Greater Things in Life” narrative. You can call this game good versus evil if you’d like—certainly most of America would label it that way, with Miami actually being the good in the eyes of the nation for once. However, at the end of the day, Miami can’t go up to Tallahassee and enforce the law. Miami can’t help protect the litany of lives negatively affected or fully destroyed by members of the Florida State Seminole football team. Miami can’t dismantle the toxic culture that permeates every corner of Tallahassee, where the police look out for the best interests of a football team, not the community.

But here’s what Miami can do: the ‘Canes can take away the only thing that the ugly side of the Seminole fan base cares about. They can win the damn game and end the Seminoles 25-game winning streak. In a twisted way that I can’t fathom, to those in Tallahassee who create and enforce the rules made for the common good, winning football games matters far more than a fair investigation of a rape allegation. It matters more than a remotely reasonable assessment and punishment of a hit-and-run car accident that was likely a DUI as well. It matters more than taking just legal action against countless other incidents ranging from trivial property damage to very serious alleged felonies.

Like I said, the Miami Hurricanes and we as their fans can’t change any of this, but we can hit the FSU fans with ugly priorities right where it hurts the most: in the loss column. It’s time to shock the system, to deliver Al Golden’s first signature victory when it would mean the most. Let’s deliver a serious blow to a arrogant coach getting more and more out of touch everyday as he stands behind his players in the most sickening of circumstances. Let’s knock a quarterback who seems to lack any awareness, accountability and remorse for his myriad of off-the-field incidents down a few pegs. Let’s send a strong message to an entire town in northwest Florida that they can cover up any and all possible obstacles to getting their players on the field and it doesn’t matter because we’ll beat them anyway.

I understand that Miami has hardly been a bastion of morality over the years, but what’s going on in Tallahassee is far more serious. Never in the history of the UM program have the Coral Gables police actively worked to shove anything the players did wrong under the rug.

Perhaps the most sickening thing through all of this has been the Seminole fans, banding together to justify everything that has gone on, them asserting that this is all the media coming down on their school unfairly and then subsequently creating an us-against-the-world mentality. Want to know the reason that seemingly everyone outside of Tallahassee is against you, Seminoles fans? It’s not because of the media. It’s not because of an unfair bias. It’s because the TPD and FSUPD have repeatedly actively hurt the lives of everyday people in your community for the sake of winning college football games and somehow your school and the majority of those who follow it are the only people on this freaking earth who don’t see what’s wrong with that.

So let’s win this damn game. Let’s be so loud and angry in the stands that Jameis Winston and Jimbo Fisher can literally feel the noise vibrating in their chests and the stadium shakes around them. We can’t solve the problems of a corrupt system up in Tallahassee, but we can take away the only thing that matters to many of FSU’s most deranged fans.

Go ‘Canes. Beat FSU.