The following post is courtesy of Love Without Nagel, who’s currently busy subduing 1,000 hungry cannibals with a green talisman and a copy of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”. While we anxiously await LWN’s foreign correspondent report from last week’s Florida-Tennessee game, he takes time out of his never-ending road trip to ruminate on Miami’s new coach.

Randy Shannon is not my hero.

Randy Shannon is not in a coaching situation I want to be in.

Randy Shannon is not Jimmy Johnson, Butch Davis or Larry Coker. Randy Shannon is a coach I want to hate.

Randy Shannon is a not necessarily a hard luck coaching guy that I want to give credit to, but I can respect him. Typically a guy like this leaves Miami for a better job. By better I mean, the Assistant Head Coach of Big Ten North. Instead, the Miami brass identified him as the new head man at Miami. I felt a twinge of anger/ulcer when this word came from Donna Shalala (who, by the way, sounds like a Gloria Estafan/Miami Sound Machine back up singer).

I called his team out in my latest column on my other wildly popular website, smokeymctrees.com. Now I feel like Mike McDermott driving Kinish’s truck for extra dough after I lost it all against Teddy KGB.

Randy Shannon is different from all the other Miami coaches in his era. He is neither white, nor privileged, nor arrogant. What he is, however, is a true grinder. A man that can actually bring Miami some respectability. A man who seems to have the judge’s game clocked after seeing half a hand.

I was not so sure about this, since his team got waxed by a good Oklahoma team, but I am certain about it after seeing his team destroy an up and coming Texas A&M team.

For those of you not in the know, Randy Shannon has had some hardships. Shannon lost his father via murder at age three, and his sister and two brothers are dead from AIDS. These are not hardships anyone deserves. He has been a member of the 1987 Hurricanes National Championship team, and a member of the Dallas Cowboys (barf). His loyalty led him back to Miami, when he was hired in 1991 by D. Er and rode it out until becoming defensive coordinator in 2001.

Shannon, after the 34-17 pasting of A&M, can now feel like Mike McD picking up Worm from the joint. He paid his dues; they are all square. He has the Miami program moving in the right direction. Believe me, it angers me to say it. I even mocked him earlier in the year when he not only banned names from the back of those ugly jerseys, but also banned rap songs from certain dormitories and, above all, guns owned by players.

No, no, no, don’t get me wrong; I will not root for Miami and their privileged fan base. What I will do, however, is root for a man who is not expecting a biased edge from big brother (the NCAA). After the Texas A&M win, Randy Shannon seems to be a man who has a never-ending string of boats against Teddy KGB, and he plays it straight up.