The Miami Beach Bowl is back

The FIU Golden Panthers are fighting an uphill battle for their sixth win and bowl eligibility. But they got a bowl game coming up against the Miami Hurricanes at the site of the historic but now non-existent Orange Bowl on Saturday.

Marlins Park had the Miami Beach Bowl from 2014-16 and each game came with amazing moments. The first game between Memphis and BYU in double-overtime win by the Tigers and ended in a brawl. The second installment saw Western Kentucky quarterback and former Miami Dolphins practice squad member Brandon Doughty end his collegiate career in his hometown against South Florida and his former coach. The third game ended with the Golden Hurricanes of Tulsa demolishing Central Michigan and finishing the season with a 3,000-yard passer, a pair of 1,000-yard rushers and receivers, something that has never happened in FBS history.

And we are underway at the Miami Beach Bowl. 2:30 kickoffs on a Monday never great for crowds. pic.twitter.com/X1g4DAwlVv

— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) December 19, 2016

Even though the games were memorable to those who attended, the ratings and attendance numbers were forgettable. The conferences that controlled the bowl game and ESPN (who created bowl games for content purposes) did the Miami Beach Bowl no favors when they held each game on a Monday kicking off at 2 p.m. The game was basically nothing more than a bridge between the noon Sportcenter to Monday Night Countdown. It didn’t matter how few people were at the game.

College football has experimented with holding bowl games in MLB ballparks before and continue to do so. San Francisco, Arizona, Tampa Bay, New York and Miami all played host to bowl games in baseball venues and Boston is going to lend Fenway Park to bowl season in the next year. It offered a unique experience for fans that are used to see the game from afar in what looks likes a modern day coliseum.

“I tell this to people all the time, you don’t realize how intimate [ballparks] are until you go to a baseball stadium to watch a football game. The upper deck is stacked right on top of the field,” said Miami Beach Bowl director Carlos Padilla II back in 2014.

The Miami Beach Bowl returns in spirt tomorrow when Miami and FIU face each other. Which reminds me of this beautiful brawl between Memphis and BYU.https://t.co/jIdLXiVJ7R

— Tony Capobianco (@TonyCapobianco) November 22, 2019

The Miami Beach Bowl moved to a soccer stadium in Frisco, TX, but the game pretty much gets to return in glorious fashion between Miami’s two FBS programs.

FIU has always been in the shadow of UM despite having four times the enrollment. The Panthers established their football program in 2002 on the heels of the Hurricanes’ recent era of dominance and became a FBS program in 2005 when the dominance was starting to fade towards mediocrity.

A massive fight in the Orange Bowl in 2006 nearly severed all ties between the two programs. After 2007, a decade would pass before they would play each other again in 2018 at Hard Rock Stadium. A win for FIU would make their season and perhaps be the biggest win in program history. It may even be bigger than their first bowl win in 2010 against Toledo in the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl which remains the only time the Miami Herald made FIU the centerpiece of their sports section.

Under Butch Davis, the Panthers are as good as they ever been in program history. They are coming off back-to-back bowl appearances for the second time in program history and last season won nine games for the first time ever. This year they are 5-5 and need a win against either Miami and C-USA leading Marshall to reach three straight bowls.

The Panthers have never won a game against Miami. Usually teams from the Power 5 conferences (Big 10, Big 12, ACC, SEC, Pac-12) dominate teams from the “Group of 5” conferences (Sun Belt, C-USA, American, MAC, Mountain West). It’s why most of the games in the first month of the college football season involves clashes with these classes of conferences, usually amounting to nothing more than a glorified preseason.

This matchup has a deeper meaning than that for these programs. The Hurricanes are treated as a de facto professional team in a college landscape. UM is a private school in Coral Gables with less than 11K students that became a football powerhouse because it took advantage of its rich recruiting base. FIU is the cities main public university and has more than 40K students yet many of them grew up cheering for the Hurricanes and just happen to not attend the school.

This has led to a clash on social media between the two fan bases leading up to the game.

This game might as well be senior day for both teams. Seniors from both teams are playing their final game in town on sacred ground and both rosters are comprised with players who played together or against each other in high school.