Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
State of Miami? It’s coming
CORAL GABLES — First, the good news: It’s all changed. Miami football mined South Florida hard again for its 2017 signing class.
The true story from a couple of years ago was an assistant coach from a Midwest college arrived at the Miami airport to recruit as a Miami assistant waited to fly out.
“Where you going?” the Midwest assistant asked. “To recruit,” the Miami assistant said. “Aren’t the kids here?” the Midwestern assistant said.
So, yes, the first thing you need to know is it’s all changed. That’s the takeaway from Wednesday’s National Signing Day. Mark Richt cut the state of Florida into nine pieces for his assistants upon arriving a year ago. They had a national territory, too.
Defensive backs coach Mike Rumph, for instance, had parts of Broward and Maryland. But Richt re-trenched everyone closer to home after a few months. Then again a few months later. Rumph’s final territory: Okeechobee and parts of Broward.
“I’d go to practices in Maryland and be the only coach,” Rumph said. “I’d go to Miramar and there’d be eight coaches from other schools with me. Everyone knows where the players are.”
This is no great surprise. Howard Schnellenberger famously built a recruiting wall around the State of Miami, as he called South Florida. Jimmy Johnson famously didn’t step out of it to recruit one year. Al Golden famously never quite fit
here.
Richt, in his first full year of recruiting, laid good groundwork. He visited South Florida parks each Thursday. High school coaches visited Miami each Wednesday. That bore some fruit on this Signing Day.
“Two-thirds of our team is from the state,” Richt said of the incoming class announced Wednesday.
They didn’t get everyone. No one ever does. But 16 of 24 kids are from Florida. Eleven are from South Florida, compared to seven in 2015 for Al Golden’s final class.
This isn’t to draw sweeping conclusions about talent or oversell this Miami class. It ranked 11th in the country, according to Rivals.com., if you believe such things can be ranked. But the class didn’t have a five-star recruit. Alabama had seven. Ohio State had six.
That leads to the realistic news of Wednesday. Miami walked a line between being happy with this class (11th is pretty good, right?), saying the groundwork is better for coming years (privately, they think 2018’s class could be dynamic) and realizing they need help now.
“The ‘Help Wanted’ sign wasn’t some recruiting ploy,” defensive coordinator Manny Diaz said. “We need people to step in and play.”
Who’s the quarterback? Richt doesn’t know. Who’s the starting secondary? Diaz can’t name the top four, “let alone the top five or the top six,” he said.
So if Wednesday was a good day for Miami, it’s tempered by Diaz’s honest assessment that these signings were mainly “filling voids so we can have a working program with some depth.”
He added: “When you looked at us in October, we had trouble fielding a [kickoff or punt coverage team] with players that weren’t our starting defense. Of the 26 players on defense we took to Virginia Tech, eight were true freshmen.”
You see why this class matters. And you can interpret Wednesday however you want. Miami flipped a cornerback, Jhavonte Dean, who had committed to Alabama and an offensive lineman, American Heritage-Plantation’s KaiLeon Herbert, who was going to Michigan.
How often has that happened lately?
But Miami also lost a couple highly ranked South Florida cornerbacks to Florida, where former Miami coach Randy Shannon pulls in recruits. The Hurricanes ranked behind Florida State (sixth) and Florida (ninth) in the recruiting rankings — again, if you believe such things.
The theme story was this was Richt’s first full year to recruit a class at Miami. The real story is a foundation was laid over this year that will bear fruit in coming years.
“You start recruiting kids in the eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade,” Richt said. “It’s not like we had a full year. You really need a recruiting cycle, which is three or four years long.”
Miami got some players to help Wednesday. But for dynamic proof its way is working? Stay tuned.