MACwood Squares: Include The Cradle?

MACwood Squares is our summer reading series on the best athletes in Mid-American Conference sports history. This week features Miami. Looking for your MAC school? Consult our schedule for other teams and please submit your nominees as well.

And we finally run into this dilemma with the one that produces all the great coaches and managers. When speaking of the Cradle of Coaches, the focus is not in how well they played at the school — or even if they played at all — but just that they were a respected coach who at one time received schooling in Oxford.

There've been so many legendary coaches to come out of Miami, you can even do an A-to-Z phrase on them, such as "from Alston to Zook." And many of them played athletics. Bo Schembechler was a football tackle. Charlie Coles was inducted to the MU Athletic Hall of Fame as player six years before hired as head coach — and his plaque will be rightly amended when everything's said and done. Walter Alston played baseball and basketball. Ara Parseghian lettered in three sports, as was Weeb Ewbank.

And on and on.

Quite honestly, I feel that coaches deserve their own squares, because this was really about athletes in the first place. If a great athlete went onto become a great coach, then there's no harm in that. Especially for Miami ... there's just so many of them that it'd be improper to mesh the two. Make sense?

Who are your nominees for Miami's MACwood Squares? Comment below, tweet us at @HustleBelt or submit a FanPost making your case. The final nine will be revealed Friday.