allCanesBlog.com : Q&A

Over the course of the summer, Canes305 and The Beast will be answering your questions regarding some of the hottest topics surrounding Hurricane Nation. The latest question comes from Jerome in Miami:

“What steps must ‘The U’ take to gain more overall exposure?”

Canes305: When you live in a large metropolitan city and pro sports town full of transplants, you’re forever dealing with fans that have an attention span that can be measured in nanoseconds. With so many other distractions, winning ballgames is your ultimate answer.

Win and you’re nationally ranked. Beat big time teams and you’re the lead-in story on SportsCenter, as well as a constant topic on College Football Live and the countless other shows ESPN runs during the week. There is only so much to talk about in the sports world and with so many hours of programming – so if you’re winning, you’re going to get talked about often and the exposure is priceless.

Crazier than the fact Miami’s been irrelevant for almost a decade; what’s become of the sports media during that span. While 2001 doesn’t feel all that long ago, so much has changed regarding the sports coverage, social networking, blogging, podcasting and around the clock news. College football has become even bigger business and there’s so much more money / hype behind the machine that runs it. Being out of the limelight for so long, Hurricane football hasn’t truly experienced or benefited from this new medium as it’s been forever since UM was on top. Win and you’re front page news again.

Where the University of Miami is doing a great job; embracing the Internet and social media world. Former athletic director Kirby Hocutt added Chris Freet as associate athletic director of athletics for communication last July and from that moment on, everything tech-related regarding UM athletics went from non-existent to one of the best in the land thanks to Freet.

One of the beautiful things about this era we’re living in; it doesn’t cost much to put out something of quality. It just takes talent, heart, desire, effort … and a MacBook equipped with Final Cut Pro, if you’re an aspiring filmmaker putting out glorious content.

Look at some of videos on UM’s official “CanesAllAccess” YouTube channel. The “U Tough” workout clip, footage from the first staff meeting or behind the scenes on ‘Signing Day’ – you feel like a fly on the wall at Hecht or as if you’re watching “U Reality TV”.

All the pieces are well-produced and entertaining and those clips, combined with the efforts the athletic department has made on the social networking front have UM in that upper echelon. Where ‘The U’ can’t compete on the financial front, it’s absolutely making the most of resources like this where the playing field is level.

While the mindset at Miami has always been to complete annually for national championships, in the modern era the Canes have to become consistently conference-relevant. When you look as these past seven seasons in the ACC, Miami hasn’t really been in the hunt and controlling its own destiny regarding a conference title more than once (2005).

Earning a berth in the ACC title game ensures one more nationally televised game on championship Saturday and by being in the hunt as the season winds down, that means more November games will be prime time and / or nationally televised, as well.

Miami needs to play meaningful games down the stretch and there have been too many meaningless November games for the Canes as of late.

Winning a national title is something that even the greatest programs can only hope for once a decade (or twice, at best) these days – but being in the ACC hunt should be an annual thing and BCS berths should happen several times a decade for a program like UM’s.

Success breeds success and getting back to that point (consistently) will bring Hurricane athletics more exposure – especially with more media coverage and nationally televised games, which are a result of winning.

Until then, keep up the athletic department needs to keep up the great work with viral videos and social networking as it’s one thing that’s completely in the university’s control. Play to your strengths and sell the brand. Small private school in a big city, South Beach, pro sports franchises, tremendous sports history … you need to expose ‘Miami’ as much as you’re selling and exposing ‘The U’.

The Beast: I guess it’s too easy to answer this question by simply saying, WIN! In all reality that is the right answer to the question, though.

Let’s look at The U’s exposure. There aren’t too many other college sports programs that get more coverage. ESPN loves Miami and when the Canes play on that network, the games are always heavily watched. When you have the number 1 sports network happy with the premise of putting you on in prime time, that’s always going to help you.

Speaking of TV exposure, “The U” gets a ton of exposure via the fifty-six alums that play in the NFL on Sundays in fall. How much exposure is Ed Reed or Andre Johnson tossing up “The U” worth? The “U” logo is truly known internationally and while UM ranks in the low twenties in merchandise sales, chalk that up to the small size of the alumni base – not actual interest.

Sometimes we think too much about football and forget about the rest of campus. The effort president Donna Shalala has made to truly make the Miller School of Medicine one of the best in the country has only helped the viability of the university as a whole. Bascom Palmer Eye Institute is rated the best eye hospital in the nation almost every year in the US News and World Report annual rankings and The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, The Miami Institute for Human Genomics and the Sylvester Cancer Center are also among the nation’s best.

The university has certainly bought into the social networking trend in order to help exposure. Their use of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, multimedia presentations and all new media is definitely ahead of the curve in both college academia and athletics.

So, what steps must “The U” take to gain more exposure? Winning is truly the answer. If you step back and think about it, “The U” gets a lot of exposure. The only way to increase it would be to win another title in football or make a huge run in basketball. That of course is on the national level.

Locally here in South Florida, that’s another issue. I’ve talked about this before and I think the folks at “The U” understand what I’m about to say.

QAM does a great job promoting “The U” – and they should since they pay a large rights fee to carry the games every year. However, the AM dial’s audience isn’t what it used to be and unless you start getting exposure on the Latin and other ethnic stations in South Florida, you’re missing the majority of the local population.

The old belief is that you need to have you games broadcast on the sports station as it will drive talk about your teams on said station. In reality we know that sports talk radio will generally talk about you whether you’re on their station or not, so the smart move would be putting your games on a FM station with a blasting signal.

Games that originate on FM sound amazing. For years I listed to the Patriots on WBZ FM in Boston and the quality would blow you away if you’ve only heard your team broadcast on AM.

Unfortunately most broadcasters originate the broadcast on AM and simulcast in FM, meaning the sound quality won’t be the same.

QAM’s signal gets blown away at night due to interference from radio stations in Cuba (seriously). This means that football, basketball or baseball games played at night will at times get lost somewhere in the atmosphere. Beasley Broadcasting (my former employer) could originate games on Power96 or Kiss Country and simulcast on QAM, if they so chose but again, that’s just my opinion.

Lastly, another thing UM should do – reach out to big TV hosts, radio hosts and local columnists. I rarely see the number one sports anchors on radio / TV or number one columnists at UM anymore and this never was the case. The media used to love hanging out down in Coral Gables when there was a buzz at ‘The U’.

From what I can tell, head coach Al Golden would like the media to get in for a few interviews before practice and to be off campus before most folks have sipped down their morning coffee. Unfortunately that’s not a great incentive for busy anchors, reporters and columnists to make the trek to Hecht.

But even with that, we still know it all comes back to winning. If you win, they will come. They’ll have no choice.

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