It’s not Cape Canaveral, but Miami is the Florida city where launches of a different sort occur.
A year ago, the first Miami Beach Bowl pitted BYU against Memphis. Bronco Mendenhall coached against Justin Fuente, in a wild game with a ridiculously entertaining overtime finish, marred by a messy and far-ranging brawl.
Now, Mendenhall and Fuente have landed Power 5 conference jobs. More than that, they’ll coach against each other in the Commonwealth Cup, the rivalry between Mendenhall’s Virginia Cavaliers and Fuente’s Virginia Tech Hokies.
That brawl inside the Miami Marlins’ home park was the most exciting thing which happened on that piece of real estate in 2014, but more importantly, it offered a national platform to each coach (even though it was an afternoon game, as it will be this year).
In the second Miami Beach Bowl, the launching-pad dynamic remains very much in place.
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If, a year from now, at least one of the two coaches in this game is not the new owner of a Power 5 job, it will rate as a surprise. Willie Taggart struggled for awhile at South Florida, but midway through this season, the former Jim Harbaugh assistant managed to unlock his team’s talents. If this upward trajectory is maintained with the Bulls — which should be contenders in the AAC East in 2016 — Taggart should get a long look from a Power 5 program in need of filling a vacancy.
Taggart will coach against the school he once piloted. Western Kentucky made its first bowl game under Taggart in 2012, but then lost its coach and hired Bobby Petrino in a post-motorcycle, post-Jessica Dorrell world. Petrino got the offer from Louisville to become the Cardinals’ head coach for a second time, and so in 2014, Jeff Brohm — who played quarterback at Louisville and served as quarterback coach under Petrino in his first go-round at UL — took over as the head man at WKU.
Brohm led the Hilltoppers to their first bowl win last year in the Bahamas Bowl. He’s now become the first Western Kentucky coach to win the Conference USA championship and lead the ‘Toppers to consecutive bowl appearances. He didn’t get plucked in the latest spin of the coaching carousel, but it shouldn’t be a long wait for Brohm if he wants to climb the ladder to the realm of the Power 5 conferences. Blessed with the ability to cultivate quarterbacks and create an offense in which his signal callers can flourish, Brohm is a natural fit for the modern game and its pass-friendly dimensions. If he pairs with a strong defensive coordinator, he will make a Power 5 athletic director very happy in the coming years.
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This game will also have value as a conference comparison. Western Kentucky is a champion of a Group of Five conference other than The American. South Florida was the fifth-best team in a loaded AAC this season. The American was clearly the best and deepest Group of Five conference, to the point that the other four G-5 conferences were not in its league. Had South Florida drawn Bowling Green, San Diego State, or Arkansas State, the same basic tension point would have existed: Would the AAC’s fifth-best group be able to take down another G-5 conference winner? This game will have more to say about the balance of G-5 power than most of the bowls on the docket.
Yet, with that story being acknowledged, the main headline for the 2015 Miami Beach Bowl is that two promising head coaches are standing on the launching pad, waiting to zoom to greater heights. It’s the nature of the coaching industry.
After the Mendenhall-Fuente matchup led to bigger things for both men 12 months later, Miami Beach Bowl II figures to follow in the footsteps of BYU-Memphis.
Willie Taggart and Jeff Brohm will be very, very happy in one year. Both men would like to experience the joy of winning this game and leaving 2015 on a high note.
