Dom Amore: UConn football, after a notable win, heads for hallowed halls of the ‘Cradle of Coaches’

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STORRS — It may not be a power-conference blue blood the UConn football team will play next, but a lot of college football’s most storied programs, and a couple of Super Bowl champs, can trace their roots back to Miami of Ohio, known as the “Cradle of Coaches.”

Here in Connecticut, the first name to come to mind when that school is mentioned is Carm Cozza, the longtime and legendary Yale football coach, who once got his alma mater to come to The Bowl.

The roster of all-timers that have come from Miami includes Paul Brown, Bo Schembechler, Ara Parseghian, Red Blaik, Weeb Ewbank, John Pont, Paul Dietzel and current NFL coaches John Harbaugh of the Giants and Sean McVay of the Rams. All 10 are represented with bronze statues, 120 percent life size, guarding the gates of the stadium in Oxford, Ohio, where the Huskies will enter on Saturday, to play the current-day RedHawks at 3:30 p.m. The gallery of greats doesn’t even include Sid Gillman or Woody Hayes, who were head coaches at Miami early in their careers.

“Any time you’re able to honor the past of our game, you should take a moment to reflect on it,” UConn coach Jason Candle said. “I say this all the time, it’s really hard to know where you want to go unless you know where you’ve come from. This game’s history walked through those halls. … The other side of that coin is, none of those guys are playing on Saturday.”

UConn’s strong defensive performance at Southern Miss an encouraging sign

Rest assured that if any of those legends in bronze were listening in, they would offer Candle a smile and a shake of the fist to say, “way to go, kid … Don’t worry about us, worry about the task at hand.” That’s the way they did it. The unbeatable Colts hardly scared Ewbank when he coached the Jets in Super Bowl II, did they?

One of the benefits of the independent FBS schedule for UConn is the chance to play an interesting variety of teams from a variety of leagues with a variety of histories. One of the disadvantages, for fans and scribes, is not knowing much about the schools UConn plays week to week, nor having any real ability to evaluate how good the Huskies are, nor how they might match up against certain opponents. With wide a wide variance of styles and levels, you can throw metrics out the window, as much as the metrics-minded hesitate to do so.

UConn routed Lafayette, the overmatched FCS warm-up opponent, then crashed back to earth against Maryland of the Big Ten. No real surprises there. This past Saturday, the Huskies traveled to Southern Mississippi, where Brett Favre did not play in the game, and routed the Golden Eagles of the Sun Belt Conference. How much that performance, dominant on both sides of the ball, means is something we will only really learn over time.

When you don’t play in a conference, there are a number of ways you can look at the season. 1. Every game is in itself a one-game season. 2. The entire schedule is, in effect, your conference. For me, the difference is split. When the Huskies play teams from the so-called “Group of Six” conferences, these are the equivalent of conference games, because this is, for better or worse, UConn’s element right now. Succeed against the Group of Six, and they position themselves for a power four.

Over the last two-plus years, UConn has done a good job of that, going 13-3 against those schools since the start of the 2024 season, with two losses in OT and the other to Army in Fenway Bowl, a game most of the Huskies’ top players skipped. So they’re off to a good start with the 48-20 win at Southern Miss.

Now the Huskies head into familiar turf for Candle, who coached 10 years at Toledo of the MAC, where Miami of Ohio was a rival. The RedHawks were routed by Pittsburgh, decisively beat FCS opponent Holy Cross, then let a Big 12 fish off the hook last week, losing 35-31 to Cincinnati.

“(The Mid-American Conference) is a bus league, regionally recruited,” Candle said. “Most of the players on opposing teams probably played high school football against each other, or with each other. So there’s a lot of familiarity. Coaches are usually from that regional footprint as well. You look at Miami and Chuck (Martin) and his staff, those guys have been together a long time. If they’re there and they haven’t been there very long,  they were probably there before as a graduate assistant. There’s something to be said for that, something to be said for that continuity in a world where, when somebody loses a game, everybody wants to replace everybody immediately. You see some of those coaches in that league have longer tenures and continue to have success. It’s a very unique league.”

Candle, in fact, was a quintessential MAC guy, a native of Ohio, he coached in that state his entire career before coming to UConn, with two dozen of his players and recruits following him. He stayed put at Toledo and went 81-44 before striking for new ground and a new challenge at UConn. Martin, a Midwesterner, was offensive coordinator at Notre Dame before taking over at The Cradle of Coaches in 2014. He didn’t have his first winning season until 2019, but with the stability and patience of the MAC, he survived and has had only one losing season since. Miami beat Toledo in the 2023 conference championship game.

So in its own, modern-day way, Miami, an early 3 1/2-point favorite, has stayed true to its history and will be a challenge for UConn, even if its illustrious alumni will be involved only ethereally. And a win there will have Rentschler Field rocking when Syracuse comes in Oct. 3.

“We’re playing their team this year and we have to watch the tape and what that looks like,” Candle said. “Make sure we’re playing together to go beat this football team that we’re playing. But they have one of those unique traditions, one of those unique histories, a lot of great coaches went through there, a lot of great players and we’re trying to replicate that here as well. We’re trying to built that same thing here so 20 or 30 years down the road, people are saying that about (UConn).”

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