Dead Letters: Miami University

Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast

Richard Johnson and Alex Kirshner

News, Sports, Sports News, Football

4.9 • 916 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Miami University went on an unprecedented run of hiring coaches: Woody Hayes, Ara Parseghian, Bo Schembechler, and many more: . By 2003, with Ben Roethlisberger behind center, the RedHawks were the best program outside the power conference. Then trouble hit, both for Miami and the MAC.

Split Zone Duo’s paid subscribers can listen to an extended cut of our interview with Steve Baker, the longtime voice of the RedHawks. Subscribe now.

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Dead Letters is a Split Zone Duo series about when bad things happen to great college football programs. In the series’ first 10 episodes, we’ve covered the rise and fall of teams like Tulane, Nebraska, Florida A&M, Ole Miss, and the entire Southern Conference. These episodes are all in the Split Zone Duo podcast feed, and we have made a handful of them (including this one) free.

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Paid subscribers can listen to the extended-cut interview I did with Miami play-by-play announcer Steve Baker about the history of the RedHawks.

More college football history

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi. Let's go back to a Thursday night in early December 2003.
0:12.0	The students, the fans, they're cold. We all are. Temperature heading to freezing. Precipitation on the way, could be mixed mixed should arrive at about an hour and a half
0:22.1	Sean Suisham set bowling green won the toss defer the option off we go with the championship game in the
0:29.0	mid-american conference it trembles back to darrell hunter across the 20 and he's brought down
0:36.3	at the 23 yard line at top of the pile beat j lane one of the
0:40.3	running backs and at the bottom tim Arnold four bowling green in the arms Miami of ohio in the white
0:46.2	and gardener red and you bring out ben rothlessberger not too far from here finley ohio the junior
0:51.7	quarterback who is a record center ben leads leads a team, this Miami football team,
0:55.5	but it's number four in a nation and margin of victory.
0:57.7	That's how good they are.
0:58.7	They beat their opponents by an average of 23 points per game.
1:03.8	500 plus points this season.
1:07.7	The first thing that you notice about the 2003 Mac Championship game is who's in the booth for ESPN.
1:15.4	Mike Torrico's got the play-by-play.
1:18.1	Lee Corso is there.
1:19.6	Kirk Herb Street's there too, flanking him.
1:22.6	Both teams are ranked, and Doit Perry Stadium is pretty full, an announced crowd of 25,000 or so in the cold and
1:30.8	bowling green Ohio to watch one of the bigger games of the college football season.
1:36.2	A few things are about to happen. In the short term, Miami University is about to have a heck of a
1:42.5	night. In the long term, things are more fraught.
1:47.4	You could not have known exactly how many different ways the sport was going to change
1:52.2	almost immediately after this night, and how these elements would conspire with seemingly
	...

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