The players in this class of note were Miami / local kids that wanted to go to Miami regardless of who was coach, like Duke Johnson...but all of them were seemingly recruiting struggles. Example, Tracy Howard was a bit overrated by the sites (small and slow!), but I recall it being an absolute recruiting battle for this guy with Florida...which brings me to my takeaway from the honeymoon class of Golden...and Memnon also highlighted an issue pertaining to this in the previous class review because this is really when **** changed...
To put this into CollegeFootball 26 terms, this group of coaches didn't scout any of their prospects, sent the house every week on a bunch of three star players in "recruiting battles" with LSU (Jacoby Briscoe), VaTech (Blue and Lockhart), West Virginia (Vernon Davis, DMauri Jones), GaTech (Antonio Crawford, Gadbois - along w UK on that one), Louisville (Ivery), among others - basically these types of guys were everyones backup plans and backups to the backup plan for these schools and we are just throwing what little resources we had into these low upside backup plans in the P5 (which means they are actually G5 types - where a lot of them end up, or lower).
A lot of wasted time, resources dedicated by a staff that did not have a good eye for talent and weren't good at scouting, evaluating and we won't touch on the absolutely horrid relationships they had with local coaches and whatnot. Didn't press X on a single recruit to scout. The end result was a ton of busts (that RED X over the Green Gem - as it would be in CFB26). Just low level - not even a dumb dumb playing video games would be this negligent unless it was their house rules to make the game more difficult.
This is the era where Miami starts to become small and slow which we'd get to the peak of during the Diaz era. Look at those DBs. oof.
No matter how many NFL players you get, when your class is 75% useless for this level of college football, and those NFL players give you 75 cents on the dollar (with a few exceptions), it negates any correlation to success having NFL starts and players. This is where we became Cal or Washington or USC without the peaks (because we embarrassed ourselves during what could have been Washington level peaks with end of season bed ****ting). Put a ton of players in the NFL that play a lot (but are not that great of NFL players - what were pro bowl level players we're putting out are just role players for the part in the NFL), but they are supplemented with a bunch of anchors and unplayable types that made us a middling program despite some good players.
But because of that struggle, its an era where poon hounds are replaced by video game addicts and you have a ton of players on the roster that quit (fully give up with a bad attitude to boot). Definitely did not evaluate these players for skills, nevermind the mental makeup of a player. The cliques and factions start to grow as well that would exacerbate the quitting nature of these upcoming teams.
Just overall a class that demonstrates the lingering pull of the University of Miami to local talent (we still get some dudes), but that pull becomes weaker, to get the recruits became more of a struggle and a massive time-cost-benefit for some middling players. We are now in the true dark times of the University of Miami.
