Let’s set this remarkable scene now, a convergence of events so profound and so full of potential, the lost program that is the Miami Hurricanes finally has hope again.
A championship coach and recruiter is fired by his longtime school and within 48 hours, decides he wants to coach again. At his alma mater.
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Get ready to win big again, Miami.
It’s not so much that Mark Richt has decided he’ll take the Miami job, with its elite south Florida recruiting base and unlimited potential. It’s that Richt has decided to reinvent himself — and by proxy, the Canes — by returning to what he does best: coaching offense.
Two things, more than anything, rule the current state of college football: coaches who can recruit, and coaches who are innovators on offense. Miami, which hasn’t won a championship of any kind since it played in the Big East more than a decade ago, might just have stumbled upon seismic change.
The days of Larry Coker and Randy Shannon and Al Golden running the once king of college football into a soul-sapping standstill are over. Miami, everyone, needs Richt as badly as Richt needs Miami.
And that’s why this thing will flourish.
The program with the best recruiting footprint in all of college football, with the ability to recruit nationally despite its diminished brand from irrelevant seasons gone by, is set up to thrive because it now finally has a coach who has built and sustained in the toughest environment of all — under the biggest expectations of all.
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If you can win 10 games a year in the SEC, what in the world happens when you move to the ACC and your division rivals are Duke, Wake Forest, North Carolina … do I need to continue?
What happens when you lock down the critical tri-county area of Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, and still pluck recruits from the talent-rich state of Georgia that you’ve owned for 15 years, then get back on the horse as a playcaller and quarterbacks coach — the very thing that got you the Georgia job long ago in the first place — and throw it all at a fallen champion desperate for something good to happen?
Championships happen. Redemption happens.
Richt’s time at Georgia had come to an end; there was no getting around it. We can debate the reasons, but it all comes down to a lack of elite quarterback play. As the head coach, he absolutely should take some of that blame.
Now he’s going to fix it. Not by hiring a hot young assistant or a former NFL assistant — but by himself. The same way he coached and developed David Greene from a freshman starter to the winningest quarterback in SEC history; the same way he developed D.J. Shockley — in one season — to lead Georgia to the SEC championship in 2005.
He got away from hands-on coaching in the second half of his career at Georgia, and the program changed. The Bulldogs still averaged 10 wins a season, but they weren’t winning games that mattered nearly as much as they once did.
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That's how they failed to win the SEC East Division the last three seasons despite the best talent in the division. That’s what ultimately led to his firing.
It’s no coincidence that in Richt's first six years, when he called plays, the Bulldogs won 61 games and two SEC titles. In the last nine, they won 84 games and didn’t win another SEC championship.
Richt is one of the grandest gentlemen of the game, a coach who truly believes successful players need life skills as much or more than football skills. He’s also one of the most competitive coaches in the sport.
His calm, stoic demeanor belies the fierce desire to win.
Years ago I sat down with him one summer when Sporting News picked Georgia as our preseason No.1. The hype hadn’t been this big since the days of Herschel.
As we walked into the football complex, he grabbed my arm and forcefully said, “stop!”
“Don’t take another step,” he said.
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I was one foot from walking on the big Georgia “G” logo on the carpet.
“Walk around it,” he said, smiling.
Then he may as well have explained his coaching philosophy in one short summation.
“It all starts there,” he said. “Everyone believing in the same things. Valuing the same things. Protecting the same things.”
Years later, someone in the school’s marketing department turned it into a fancy slogan that now defines the Georgia sports programs: Commit to the “G”.
An all-in, fiercely competitive, ultra-successful — and now highly-motivated — coach arrives at a program that can barely draw 20,000 fans to home games, is losing elite south Florida recruits to state rivals Florida and FSU (and Ohio State and Michigan) at an alarming rate, and hasn’t won an outright conference championship since 2002.
Get ready to win big again, Miami.