While the hot-seat watch is largely focused on Brady Hoke at Michigan and Will Muschamp at Florida, there's another endangered coach at a high-profile program who has surprisingly managed to remain under the radar.

Like Hoke and Muschamp, Miami Hurricanes coach Al Golden has had only three full seasons to prove he can turn around a team. Which just goes to show how short the evaluation period has become, doesn't it? The window of success opens, or begins to open -- and then it slams shut on your pinkie finger.

Take Golden. If he wins a few more games a little bit sooner in Coral Gables, he would have been a prime candidate for Texas when it was done with Mack Brown.

And now? Well, Golden's .500 team is favored at home this week against Duke, and that's somehow newsworthy. Win or lose, the Hurricanes, in Golden's fourth season, are in a glut of mediocrity that defines the ACC's Coastal Division.

They could win, they could lose -- this week and every week. But so could the other six teams in the division. Miami is no better or worse than anyone else, and that’s damning because Miami has the wealth of the state’s recruiting base. Remember, that’s why it was such a coup that the ACC got "the U" from the now-defunct Big East in the first place.

So where is that Miami payoff? Tick, tick, tick. Tick. And if Golden doesn’t produce, and soon-ish, it'll be someone else's opportunity (or burden).