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2006 Season

In retrospect, 03-06 should have been the canary in the coal mine in the sense that we should have gone to a uptempo spread around then. We finally put Brock in the shotgun in 04 and let him do his thing more, and it worked to an extent, but once he left, it was reflexively back to a style of offensive football for which we didn't have the horses up front. We just had to try and do it just like it was done in 00-02. That mentality served us badly for a long time......hopefully this is the start of finally getting rid of that mentality for good.
 
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bshaw28 said:
The Phillips vs Meriweather thread made me look back at the 2006 Season.

This is just a history lesson and reminder that no matter how bad last season felt - it's actually better now than it was 15 years ago.

In 2006 we went 7-6 with a roster that had

- Jon Beason, Greg Olsen, Brandon Meriweather, Kenny Phillips, Calais Campbell, Sam Shields (5 Pro Bowl players)
- We were ranked #12 pre-season
- We lost 4 games where the defense gave up 13, 14 17, and 17 points
- Opponents scored 20 or less in 11 out of 13 games
- We scored 20 or less in 8 out of 13 games
- QB's threw 15 TD's & 15 INT's
- Offense scored 19.6 pts per game (only season under 20 ppg since 1979)
- We beat Houston by 1. We beat Nevada by 1. We beat Duke by 5. Duke was 0-12 that year.
- Wake Forest won the ACC
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head-in-sand.jpg
 
Rellyrell said:
We actually played 5 top 25 teams my guy. One of the five wound up falling out the top 25 by seasons end, but at the time, they were a top 25. But I would argue, 2005 was the beginning of the end. That fake swag was finally exposed on epic proportions against LSU, and we carried that chit onward and it's been the same chit since the end of 2015 until now. We have a MPC and Russell Athletic Bowl trophy to our names since then. FML.
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I wouldn't say we played 2 Top teams this season because UVA was #20 when we played them when they finished unranked.

2005 you could start to see the cracks. The 2005 defense & offense were both better than 2006 and we were winning games much, much easier.

I'd say beating #3 VT on the road as our biggest win in the last 15 years with 2017 ND being 2nd. So there was a lot of positives in 2005. But yeah, late in 2005 GT probably exposed us, then LSU delivered the death blow that we've never come back from.

In 2005 we were serious NC contenders late in the season, but 2006 was a struggle the entire year right from the jump and has been ever since.
 
Sagarin rated our scedule 69th in 2006, and 68th in 2019. He actually had our schedule one place worse in 2006. I kind of forgot how bad the 2006 schedule was.


Anyway, the missing starters against Duke is overblown. At the 1:11 mark, the video lists only 4 missing starters.

One of the missing starters was the punter, and I have no idea why they count James Bryant, who rarely played, as a starter. If you subtract Bryant, it’s only 2 guys (Brandon Meriweather and Derrick Morse) who were missing in the 22 man two deep. Granted that Meriweather was probably the best player on the team.
 
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GojiraCane said:
Larry Coker failed to recruit wide receivers at a replacement level from 2004 onward. Going into that summer, we had six scholarship wide receivers. One of them - Ryan Moore - was largely unavailable. A cornerback (Hill) and a punter (Monroe) were converted to wide receivers.

Miami was suited to run a triple-option offense - not a passing attack.

It's the biggest sustained recruiting failure I've seen, as it crippled Miami's offense once Devin Hester and SInorice Moss departed for the NFL. And it squandered the last traditionally great Miami defense.
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Brian Monroe only played WR during practice.
 
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a51 said:
Brian Monroe only played WR during practice.
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Here is what we rolled into 2006 with, and this is why we failed:

Lance Leggett
Junior
247 Ranking: 5 Stars
Total Games in 2006: 13
Receiving Yards: 584

Sam Shields
Freshman
247 Ranking: 4 Stars
Total Games in 2006: 13
Receiving Yards: 501

Ryan Moore
Senior
247 Ranking: 5 Stars
Total Games in 2006: 5 (was suspended first 8 games of the season)
Receiving Yards: 251

Darnell Jenkins
Junior
247 Ranking: 4 Stars
Total Games in 2006: 3
Receiving Yards: 183 (suffered torn ACL in week 3)

Khalil Jones
Sophomore
247 Ranking: 3 Stars
Total Games in 2006: 11
Receiving Yards: 51

George Robinson
Freshman
247 Ranking: 2 Stars
Total Games in 2006: 0
Receiving Yards: 0 (Tore ACL in October practice and was redshirted)

It's not that Leggett, Shields, or Jenkins were not talented....it's that there were too few overall players to field an effective offense. With Robinson and Jenkins off the board by October, that left Miami with just three scholarship receivers (plus TE Greg Olsen) to go into the second half of the year...at least until Ryan Moore returned. Just three And it's no surprise that Miami, which started out at 5-2 began to grind to an absolute halt.

Yes, Miami made due by converting defensive back Ryan Hill into a wide receiver (71 yards in 2006), but the Hurricanes simply ran out of bodies at wide receiver. Again, they were far more suited to run the triple option offense than they were to run a conventional passing attack.

Coker went hard after Preston Parker and Sam Shields in 2006, but lost the former to FSU. In 2005 it was lower ranked recruit Bruce Williams (I believe), who flipped from Miami to Syracuse of all places. Coker only recruited four wide receivers in three years (Shields, Jenkins, Jones, and Robinson). Only two wide receiver signees in three years that could be considered blue chips. It was a complete failure and it crippled the 2006 Hurricanes. Absolutely embarrassing from a recruiting standpoint, and not fair for the rest of the team to go into the season that badly undermanned at such a key position.
 
bshaw28 said:
I wouldn't say we played 2 Top teams this season because UVA was #20 when we played them when they finished unranked.

2005 you could start to see the cracks. The 2005 defense & offense were both better than 2006 and we were winning games much, much easier.

I'd say beating #3 VT on the road as our biggest win in the last 15 years with 2017 ND being 2nd. So there was a lot of positives in 2005. But yeah, late in 2005 GT probably exposed us, then LSU delivered the death blow that we've never come back from.

In 2005 we were serious NC contenders late in the season, but 2006 was a struggle the entire year right from the jump and has been ever since.
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Larry Coker's recruiting on offense delivered the death blow. It made the 2006 Hurricanes seem far worse than they otherwise were (defense was still talented), and put Randy Shannon in a deep hole in year one. And those two years made the Hurricanes look like chumps at a time when the SEC was rising up - that was the most damaging blow.
 
a51 said:
Enos didn’t know he was fired at the time of the FIU game. That was the La Tech game.

And the news of his firing was leaked a few hours before the game. He wouldn’t have known he was getting fired at the time he was doing the prep for the game.
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Come on man, use your brain. The offense was an absolute disaster. I'm not saying it was communicated directly to him. I'm saying he read the writing on the wall.
 
a51 said:
Nix wasn’t Miami OC until 2007.


2006 was Rich Olson, who Miami forced Coker to hire. He was constantly fighting with Todd Berry, the QB coach who Coker had wanted to hire as OC.
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Ohhhh yeah. He sucked some serious balls.
 
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Rellyrell said:
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. We just went 1-2 against G5 opponents. We are the first P5 team to lose to FIU in their history. We lost to a 3-9 GT team. We struggled against CMU. Our O got shut out by LA Tech in a bowl game, and if I’m not mistaken, we’re the first team to get blanked in the Independence Bowl.

2006, 5 of our 6 losses came to top 25 teams. The lone “bad” loss was against 5-7 UVA

We followed that lost by beating #18 BC to become bowl eligible and won our bowl game.

Make no mistake about it; we tricked off the 2006 season w the caliber of NFL players on the roster, but this past season was a low point in our history. No comparison.
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And again, massive talent gap. And the '06 team had a roster full of guys that were used to winning. Can't say that about this team.
 
JD08 said:
You're not wrong, but Enos will be lucky to work as an OC again.

Regardless of whether he knew he was gone and mailed it in, the end of the season is going to hurt him. If he knew Williams was a flop, he should have started one of the others. I'd at least have more respect for him if he at least looked like he tried to win.
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He did. He started all of them. They all sucked. Did you SEE Martell play QB?

Enos has been an HC and worked under Saban. He'll get decent work again, while Jon Richt is out there saying "I coached Malik Rosier at QB."
 
CashMoneyCane said:
Wasn't that a Patrick Nix offense?

He's now the second worst hire in modern UM history after Jon "Nah Dad, I'll look for a job tomorrow. This couch is comfortable" Richt.
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No that was 2 years before Nix. 2006 was a cluster**** of Rich Olsen, Coker, and Todd Berry playing wheel of playcalling.
 
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Think that was the year Louisville showed us what we really were. Especially after we danced in their end zone before the game
 
In my opinion I still despise Coker more than any other coach ever here before: politician Diaz, burnt out nepotistic Richt, Golden with his best buddy at dc....even more so than guys like donofrio, nix, baby Richt, and soon to be joining in Blake baker. Crazy since he won a nc and should have had 2, right?

The evidence is all in this thread and brings back terrible memories. A useless clown being gifted the greatest cfb roster of all time. And then riding that momentum to still have countless draft picks and pro bowlers and still, each year, record wise getting worse and worse and worse. The overall program development falling off a cliff. I remember getting so ****ed off when usc began their ascent at this time and were initially called the miami of the west coast.

To this day I can’t stand him: because with all the excuses of the bad administrators we’ve had and their awful coaching hiring acumen, this idiotic clown legitimately destroyed a dynasty. And he did it year by year as everything became worse.

He is as symbolic for the descent to mediocrity as any administrator before or since that time.
 
RemainMack said:
In my opinion I still despise Coker more than any other coach ever here before: politician Diaz, burnt out nepotistic Richt, Golden with his best buddy at dc....even more so than guys like donofrio, nix, baby Richt, and soon to be joining in Blake baker. Crazy since he won a nc and should have had 2, right?

The evidence is all in this thread and brings back terrible memories. A useless clown being gifted the greatest cfb roster of all time. And then riding that momentum to still have countless draft picks and pro bowlers and still, each year, record wise getting worse and worse and worse. The overall program development falling off a cliff. I remember getting so ****ed off when usc began their ascent at this time and were initially called the miami of the west coast.

To this day I can’t stand him: because with all the excuses of the bad administrators we’ve had and their awful coaching hiring acumen, this idiotic clown legitimately destroyed a dynasty. And he did it year by year as everything became worse.

He is as symbolic for the descent to mediocrity as any administrator before or since that time.
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I hear this, but IMO Coker's fallacies weren't nearly as bad as Golden/Richt. Coker's issue was he didn't know how to manage a locker room. He recruited a ton of 5-star guys but had no feel for cohesive culture. Once we lost leaders like Dorsey and Reed, the wheels started to come off. Getting the culture right is a pretty nuanced endeavor.

Golden was a complete *** clown who saw a defense that didn't work year-in and year-out and refused to do anything about it. He knew there was a problem, could have taken a path to fix it, and was stubborn.

Same for Richt and the offense, except add in hiring his son, a move I hated from day one and hate even more now. Our QB room is STILL jacked up because of Jon "Yeah, seriously, my dad is the head coach at Miami... so do you have a boyfriend?" Richt.
 
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bshaw28 said:
The Phillips vs Meriweather thread made me look back at the 2006 Season.

This is just a history lesson and reminder that no matter how bad last season felt - it's actually better now than it was 15 years ago.

In 2006 we went 7-6 with a roster that had

- Jon Beason, Greg Olsen, Brandon Meriweather, Kenny Phillips, Calais Campbell, Sam Shields (5 Pro Bowl players)
- We were ranked #12 pre-season
- We lost 4 games where the defense gave up 13, 14 17, and 17 points
- Opponents scored 20 or less in 11 out of 13 games
- We scored 20 or less in 8 out of 13 games
- QB's threw 15 TD's & 15 INT's
- Offense scored 19.6 pts per game (only season under 20 ppg since 1979)
- We beat Houston by 1. We beat Nevada by 1. We beat Duke by 5. Duke was 0-12 that year.
- Wake Forest won the ACC
Click to expand...
This was the saddest year..as a 11 year old I just didn’t understand how we could have so much talent..that would prove to be nfl talent on a roster that was that bad..even on offense were we struggled we had blue chip talent at every position group..that’s the year Kyle Wright was supposed to take off but dealt with injuries and the fan favorite Kirby freeman showed why he belonged on the bench..distinctly remember the Louisville game on ABC our guys came out talking **** at midfield, went straight down the field and put up 7 then got the breaks beat off them
 
CashMoneyCane said:
Come on man, use your brain. The offense was an absolute disaster. I'm not saying it was communicated directly to him. I'm saying he read the writing on the wall.
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06 was the year we supposed to open up the whole offense and let Wright sling it around. As opposed to what we did in 05 which was lean on a top RB( RIP T Moss) and manage Wright..that was the first mistake on offense as FSU came out and beat Wrights brains out opening game..then Kyle also got hurt. All in all 06 Imo was lost with that mindset and a lousy oline
 
305to954 said:
06 was the year we supposed to open up the whole offense and let Wright sling it around. As opposed to what we did in 05 which was lean on a top RB( RIP T Moss) and manage Wright..that was the first mistake on offense as FSU came out and beat Wrights brains out opening game..then Kyle also got hurt. All in all 06 Imo was lost with that mindset and a lousy oline
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I was at that game. I still feel bad for Wright. Credit to him dude was tough as nails. He got hit on **** near every offensive snap that game.

Thing is if we look back every year to '05, to me the most common thing is lack of a top-tier OL.
 
CashMoneyCane said:
I was at that game. I still feel bad for Wright. Credit to him dude was tough as nails. He got hit on **** near every offensive snap that game.

Thing is if we look back every year to '05, to me the most common thing is lack of a top-tier OL.
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Exactly. I think the lack of skill on the outside is 06 was overstated. Granted it wasn’t elite those guys were good enough. That oline was the issue tho. And also not having a bell cow or a sspecial back. Even under butch the offense was always predicated on a strong run game then take shots
 
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