Each week, Miami coaches hand quarterbacks the Tip Sheet, a complex array of hot routes, adjustments and stems that always ends with a simple message.

‘Patience,’ it says. ‘Completions are good, but incompletions are not bad.’

‘Just patience,’ Derrick Crudup said.

He said it with conviction, because Crudup knows what patience – three and a half years worth, to be precise – can do. After waiting through a redshirt year, two seasons as backup, a racial controversy and half a somber season, Crudup has finally been tapped as Miami’s starting quarterback. With a little patience, he might save the Hurricanes from an unprecedented flameout.

‘I’ve waited for a long time,’ Crudup said. ‘I just had faith in God and had faith that my opportunity was going to come.’

Six months ago, opportunity seemed to have lost its way. When spring practice ended, Miami head coach Larry Coker dubbed Brock Berlin – a hot-shot Florida transfer who sat out last year under NCAA rules – his starter, relegating Crudup to a third consecutive season as backup.

Complicating matters, Crudup’s father, Derrick, accused Miami quarterbacks coach Dan Werner of using slurs during meetings and suggested the decision to start Berlin was racial favoritism, because Berlin is white and Crudup is black. Crudup and his father later recanted the allegations, but too late to save Crudup from scads of hate mail and a ripping in the Miami media.

‘That seems like it never really happened,’ Crudup said. ‘We don’t mention it. We don’t think about it. That’s over. That’s in the past.’

Racial allegations aside, Crudup’s claim to the starting job seemed legit. Media reports suggested he played at least as well as Berlin in spring practice. Then, in Miami’s spring game, Crudup hit 7 of 8 passes for 100 yards and a touchdown.

After the game Crudup told The Associated Press, ‘I feel real confident I should start.’ Seventeen days later, Coker named Berlin the starter.

‘It was a close competition,’ Coker said Monday. ‘I was pleased with the way (Crudup) progressed.’

Now, Coker has grown so displeased with the season he has benched Berlin. Through nine games, the junior completed 61.5 percent of his passes and threw nine touchdowns, but he was intercepted 14 times. That includes two picks in a 31-7 loss at Virginia Tech on Nov. 1, followed by two more and a fumble in a 10-6 loss to Tennessee last week.

A more mobile quarterback, the 6-foot-1, 205-pound Crudup should squirm from pressure better than Berlin, who struggled behind an offensive line that has been downgraded from years past. More important, Coker has cautioned Crudup about turnovers, so he will likely not take too many chances downfield.

Patience, Crudup said, is the game plan.

‘If I have to run the ball every down, I’ll run it,’ Crudup said. ‘I don’t care if they say, ‘Aw, he’s running the ball every down.’ If I’m moving the sticks, I’m moving the sticks. Whatever it takes to move the sticks and score touchdowns.’

Syracuse has prepared for both Berlin and Crudup, whom head coach Paul Pasqualoni knows well. Crudup’s coach at Deerfield Beach (Fla.) High, Perry Schneider, said he met Pasqualoni at Southern Connecticut State in the early 1970s, and the two have remained close. When Syracuse plays Miami, Pasqualoni gives him a sideline pass, though Schneider will watch from the bleachers Saturday.

Pasqualoni recruited Crudup heavily, and if not for an ill-timed family tragedy, he may have landed the prized prospect. Schneider works at SU’s summer camp, and after Crudup’s junior year, he invited him up to work with Syracuse coaches and meet Donovan McNabb. But the night before Crudup planned to leave, his grandfather died, canceling the plans.

‘If he had come and met Donovan,’ Schneider said, ‘things might have been different.

‘Derrick is like the guys up there. That’s why Paul wanted him so bad. He’s like McNabb.’

A couple months later, Crudup chose Miami over Syracuse and Georgia. After a redshirt season and another as a backup, Crudup was streamlining toward a starting job.

‘Everything was a process,’ said Schneider, who now coaches at Taravella High in Coral Springs, Fla. ‘He was the backup. He was getting groomed. Everything was going in the right direction.’

That is, until the Hurricanes brought in Berlin. Although Coker, out of respect, named Crudup the starter for spring practice, most considered it a formality. The hard-throwing Berlin, most assumed, would inevitably surpass Crudup on the depth chart. When it happened, some wondered if Crudup would transfer.

‘He never said anything,’ Schneider said. ‘He’s a real mature kid. If you noticed him even Saturday, Berlin was screwing up, and Derrick was over there patting him on the back.’

Crudup said he never considered transferring.

‘People asked me about leaving,’ Crudup said, ‘but I would just tell them, ‘No, I’m not thinking about leaving.’ I just believed in God, and I knew he’d come through for me.’

It just took longer than expected.

Published on November 11, 2003 at 12:00 pm