CORAL GABLES, Fla. — His voice nearly cracking, University of Miami Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt somberly laid out some of the many reasons why Randy Shannon was right for the Hurricanes.
The academic success. Improved recruiting classes. His decades as part of the Miami family.
Then there were 22 reasons that Hocutt couldn’t ignore the games Miami lost under Shannon. In the end, those carried more weight than anything else.
A coach who left an indelible mark on Miami’s past will not be part of its future, and the Hurricanes started the process of moving on Sunday, with former offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland taking over on an interim basis, and players gathering for a tearful meeting.
“Change is difficult and change is hard,” Hocutt said Sunday. “But change, sometimes, is necessary. And this time, this change was necessary.”
Hocutt fired Shannon on Saturday night, hours after Miami lost to the University of South Florida in its regular-season finale. The Hurricanes fell to 7-5, still have yet to play for an Atlantic Coast Conference title and lured only 26,369 fans, many of them rooting for the visitors to Sun Life Stadium on Saturday, the smallest home crowd since Larry Coker’s last home game in 2006.
That crowd, or that loss, was not the final straw.
