UM football coach wins another award.
Walter Camp award is his 2nd of season
Honors continue to highlight the turnaround football coach Mark Richt has brought to the Miami Hurricanes in two seasons as he was named Tuesday as the Walter Camp 2017 Coach of the Year.
Last week Richt became the first Hurricanes coach named ACC Coach of the Year.
The Walter Camp Coach of the Year is selected by the nation’s 130 Football Bowl Subdivision head coaches and sports information directors.
Richt is the second Miami coach (Jimmy Johnson, 1986) and the third from the Atlantic Coast Conference in the past five years (Dabo Swinney, Clemson, 2015 and David Cutcliffe, Duke, 2013) to earn the Walter Camp award.
“It is wonderful that the Walter Camp Football Foundation and its voters recognize what we at Miami have known up close for two years — Mark Richt is a phenomenal man and football coach,” UM athletic director Blake James said. “We know that we have a special coach leading our talented staff and incredible young men in our football program, and we are thrilled that Mark has received this prestigious honor.”
Richt, 57, led the Hurricanes to a 10-2 record and the No. 10 ranking in the final College
Football Playoff poll.
Among the milestones this season was Miami winning its first ACC Coastal Division title and a berth in the league’s championship game.
The 10 wins are the most for the program since 2003 and the seven ACC wins were their most since joining the conference in 2004. Along the way, the Hurricanes ended a seven-game losing streak to rival Florida State.
Although Miami fell short of being selected for the CFP playoffs after ranking as high as No. 2, the Hurricanes will play Wisconsin in the Orange Bowl on Dec. 30 at Hard Rock Stadium. It will be Miami’s first appearance in a New Year’s Six game, which began as part of the College Football Playoff in 2014.
In two seasons as Miami coach, Richt has a 19-6 record and is 164-57 in 17 years as a college football head coach. He was twice named SEC Coach of the Year (2002, 2005) during his 15 seasons at Georgia.
His .744 winning percentage ranks as the seventh-best among current FBS coaches with at least five years of experience.
While there was a sense that the Hurricanes overachieved this season and progressed to a top-10 team quicker than expected, Richt said Sunday that losing the past two games was a big letdown after starting the season with 10 wins and extending a winning streak to 15 games.
The 38-3 rout by Clemson in the ACC title game, in particular, “was a tough pill to swallow for everybody,” he said.
“It hurts to lose. We were kind of getting used to winning and lost the last two,” he continued. “We’ll have time to rest up and regroup and maybe get little stronger the next couple weeks and get back to work and ready to play Wisconsin, which has done nothing but win all year long.”
Richt isn’t resting on this season’s laurels. He and his assistants were already on the road recruiting in preparation for the Dec. 20 early signing period when the Orange Bowl bid was announced Sunday afternoon.
The thoroughness of the loss to Clemson made it clear the Hurricanes still have a significant job of building to reach the level of teams that will be playing for the national title in the upcoming CFP tournament.
“We have to continue to recruit, continue to get stronger in our offseason program,” Richt said after the debacle against Clemson. “We’ve got great players, like I said. We need more great players. We need more guys that can line up. We got to be able to have enough depth to withstand attrition, whether it’s guys getting hurt, whatever it may be, guys transferring, things like that that happen in college football.”