Ed Note: The photo appears to come from an artist’s rendition of the Hurricanes playing in Sun Life Stadium before the team moved from the Orange Bowl and not a more recent photoshop. Its place on the Hurricanes website is with other photoshopped images from the stadium. Our apologies for the error.
The idea here of the Miami Hurricanes photoshopping a sold out crowd into Sun Life Stadium is perfectly congruent with the saying “fake it ’til you make it,” as it appears that’s what the Hurricanes are trying to do.
Miami Hurricanes football hasn’t been much of anything lately. They’ve been ranked sparingly since 2011, their highest ranking coming at No. 7 in 2013 under now fired head coach Al Golden. So if winning on the field is an issue, the least you can do is whatever you can to win off of it, right?
That’s what they did on their website, Hurricanesports.com. A Reddit thread shows examples of the empty Sun Life Stadium we are used to seeing nowadays when it comes to football at The U. It then shows you the link to a photo used on the website, and with a closer look, it’s clearly photoshopped.
If you were to zoom in on the photo, you can see clearly that many people in the stands are wearing Miami Dolphins gear. Sure, you’ll have the occasional fan or two who comes to the stadium rocking a jersey that has nothing to do with the event that he’s at, but there’s tons of them here.
Another thing we have here is the Miami banner that outlines the border between the field and the stands. Zooming in on this, you can see where the decorations were placed and see some difference in the color between what’s beneath it and what was added.
The endzone is also clearly photoshopped when you take a closer look. The artist put a base layer over the endzone, and added the necessary Miami helmets and text to match what the field would look like on a college football Saturday.
The biggest giveaway? The fact that the hashmarks align with the goalposts as they would for an NFL game and are there are no wider hashmarks as there would be for an NCAA game.
Miami is by no means wrong for having photoshopped this, because any program clearly wants to present itself in the best fashion that they can. It just seems particularly sad that this is what has become of Miami Hurricanes football.
