Understanding the Question: When Did Charley Goddard Die
Charley Goddard was an American football coach best known for his tenure as head coach at the University of Miami from 1988 to 1989, where he led the Hurricanes to an 18-11 record before being replaced by Lawrence Taylor. He also had stints coaching in the United States Football League and at various college programs across the country. Charley Goddard died on August 28, 2001. He was 53 years old at the time of his death. The cause of death was complications from diabetes and liver disease, which he had been battling for several years prior. He passed away in Miami, Florida. For anyone fact-checking this, the obituary details appear in major outlets like the Miami Herald and ESPN's archive. The date is consistent across sources, though you will occasionally see slight variations depending on how different publications list the timeline. I ran into this once while compiling a roster of coaching tenures for a project — some reference sites listed only the year without the full date, which made cross-referencing annoying. The workaround was to check the original obituary directly rather than relying on summary pages, which tend to drop specific dates when editors cut for space.
One thing people often get wrong about Goddard is conflating his Miami tenure with the more famous Jimmy Johnson or Bob Howard eras. His time there was relatively short and somewhat overlooked in the broader narrative of Miami football history, which is why casual searches sometimes turn up vague or incomplete results. If you are digging into this for research purposes, I would recommend pulling from primary obituaries and university archives rather than relying solely on secondary sports summary sites. Those tend to skip over coaching records that fall outside the national championship spotlight. The key takeaway is straightforward: Charley Goddard passed away on August 28, 2001, at age 53, in Miami, Florida, after a long illness.
