Best week ever for FIU? With major win and stadium news, maybe so
By David J. Neal
dneal@MiamiHerald.com
The week opened with a Labor Day announcement that the enclosing of FIU Stadium’s north side would be started after this season and finished for the 2012 season. The work week ended with FIU players and head coach Mario Cristobal jumping around like playful German shepherds in a dog park after whipping Louisville, 24-17, for their first win against a BCS conference opponent.
So where does this week rank in the decade history of FIU football?
There’s no question about the game itself. In front of an ESPN audience and the largest VIP contingent FIU has taken to a road game, the Golden Panthers didn’t just beat a Big East team, they did it the way that befits a school from style-conscious South Florida — with their best players making spectacular plays.
After wide receiver T.Y. Hilton blazed to 74-yard and 83-yard touchdown catches that left the Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium crowd in awe, he came up with a third-down conversion catch by cradling the pass in the crook of his right arm, mid-dive-roll. Outside of the officials who initially ruled it a catch, few in the stadium thought it would survive replay. It did. Made SportsCenter’s Top 10 plays, too.
Linebacker Winston Fraser, FIU’s best defensive player in the season opener, took an interception back 71 yards for a score and slammed running back Jeremy Wright on a third-and-one from the FIU 7 with the Golden Panthers leading 24-10 early in the fourth quarter. Afterward, everyone celebrated not so much the win — which players and coaches said they anticipated — but what they knew it earned, something even last year’s Little Caesars Pizza Bowl win over Toledo hadn’t: a fistful of national respect.
But what about the whole week?
“It’s at the top,” FIU athletic director Pete Garcia said Saturday. “This takes the entire athletic department to a different level. It showcases all the good things going on at the university, not just the athletic department.
“It’s getting the entire university to come together, it’s getting our alumni to rally behind us,” Garcia said. “It’s the reason the university added Division I sports and Division I football.”
And this week, when FIU hosts Central Florida, barring a lightning-lit monsoon, FIU Stadium will be standing-room-only, glutes-to-glutes. The largest home crowd in FIU’s 10-season history is expected to see if FIU — which never has been 2-0 — can make it three in a row.
The addition of a second deck to expand capacity to 45,000 is more than on the drawing board. Garcia said that got pushed up so FIU never would have to turn away a student from its rapidly increasing university enrollment. But it’ll also make FIU more attractive as a potential member of a more prominent conference than the Sun Belt. It’s probably not a coincidence that the long-anticipated stadium enclosure got fast-tracked just before what athletic directors and school presidents expect to be a mass national shifting of league memberships.
Garcia said he got excited texts from men’s basketball coach Isiah Thomas on Friday night, asking rhetorically, “Do you know what this means?”
“It’s exposure and national attention for the other sports, too,” Garcia said. “When you get in homes to recruit kids, they know about FIU from seeing us on national TV.”
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