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Reviewing the Classes: The Class of 2013

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DMoney

DMoney

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We spend so much time on recruiting, but we rarely take time to look back. This series examines every class for the past five coaches- Manny, Richt, Golden, Shannon, and Coker. As Mario’s first class enters Year 4, what are the trends he needs to avoid if he wants to break the cycle?

Of course, bad coaching and development played a massive role in our downfall. But for this exercise, I wanted to focus on pure talent acquisition. That’s why I use NFL numbers. The NFL has the most...

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A lot of depressing times back then but Coleys commitment will always go down in history for me

The emotion he was showing that day. The hat. Most had figured he was going to FSU

He didn’t reach the heights many hoped for him but he always played his best against FSU
 
This is the class that I really started getting into recruiting and was following the Matthew Thomas and Mackenzie Alexander recruitments particularly. I remember I was in religion class at my college on signing day and my professor thought it was the weirdest/coolest thing I was doing following the decisions.
 
Stacey coley high school film is still the best I’ve seen of a receiver in YEARS. I know he was injured here but he lived up to the hype in my eyes. That freshman year was an unbelievable showing of pure talent. We need to land more dudes like him and A Richards. Landing Moore was a great step

Always showed up against the noles as well 🫡
 
I still remember seeing Olsen at the Publix across the street during his freshman campaign with a friend buying beer since he was still underage. I figured it was typical college behavior (maybe a little lack of awareness) but unfortunately it portended worse to come.
 
Some of these players that played some snaps on the fringe of NFL rosters didn't do a **** thing for us.

AQ Muhammad, Jermaine Grace, Beau Sandland, Gus Edwards (infamously?) didn't do much of anything here for a variety of reasons.

9 NFL players quickly gets to 5, and from those 5 only 3 had anything that looked like a career in the NFL (3 DBs). Kamalu and Coley were good players here, but not even a cup of coffee in the NFL. Smoke and mirrors kind of class that might look like a decent class on paper with the volume of players that took snaps, but a closer inspection shows a far more flawed group of players.

Thought the best evaluation of the class was Kamalu. Which, starts to track. Golden, since his days at Temple, could find these developmental defensive linemen. Olsen Pierre, Kamalu here...trying to find his next Muhammad Wilkerson. We'd also miss on a ton of higher rated prospects that were similar in projection (Jelani Hamilton, for example), but you could see what they were trying to go for.

This was an overall good year in recruiting, even the underwhelming players at the top of the class ended up in the NFL to some degree. But we missed on seemingly EVERYBODY, and if we didn't miss on them, they were straight up not interested in us. As Memnon said, this is the dark times for the University of Miami...where our "successes" would be mild successes at Temple. Brutal.

Just as an aside...another team to follow at this time of our look back is Penn State. Another program with a CLOUD over them that didn't end up in College Football **** for the next decade.

Nationally, this is also when the Penn State pedo scandal really hit them hard. They would still land Hackenberg and Adam Brenenman (QB1 and TE1 in the nation) and they both will go down as two of the bigger busts of the past 15 years at their position. James Franklin would take over in the very next season and within 3 seasons, once again be a Top 10 team in the nation.
 
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BoxingRobes said:
AQ Muhammad, Jermaine Grace, Beau Sandland, Gus Edwards (infamously?) didn't do much of anything here for a variety of reasons.
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We definitely didn't get enough out of them, which is a theme with every class in this era. D'Onofrio was the worst offender. It's a shame we didn't get to see AQM and Grace in Manny's defense.

But there’s a false narrative out there that NFL players only matter if they make Pro Bowls. It's just mathematically wrong. Less than 25% of four stars make the NFL at all. So if you have an entire class of four stars, and produce 25% NFL players, that's average. These guys were 53% for the entire class. If you include only the nine four stars, they made the NFL at a 78% hit rate.

The last 25 years have been dark days for the program. But if we're talking solely about talent acquisition, the Golden Period was a relatively bright spot even with "the Cloud" and a ton of mistakes. It only got worse after that.
 
2013 was the Hugh Freeze class;

He stole #1 ranked Robert Nkemdiche & Laremy Tunsil from UGA & Bama, then snatched up Laquon Treadwell from Oh ST.

It was one of the major shocks in the recruiting world at that time because it was believed that Nkemdiche was basically a lock to Pastor Richt at UGA being a Grayson kid. But we would later find out that the Iceman Hugh Freeze was playing the bag game just as good as anybody.

2013 overall was a much better class in terms of the grade of talent from the 2012 class. 2012 was an absolute down year; that class was riddled with busts at the top, but 2013 over time has proven to be a very solid class, even though it had its fair share of busts as well.

The best players were
Derrick Henry
Chris Jones
Jalen Ramsey
Joey Bosa
Alvin Kamara
Jonathan Allen
Ezekiel Elliott
Kendall Fuller
Tre'Davious White

The best QB's ended up being Baker Mayfield who was under-recruited & had to walk on to TTech, and JT Barrett.

It was a pretty bad WR group.
DT was really bad.
CB & Safety had maybe 3 good prospects, the rest was dust in the wind.

2013 was the year of the RB.

It was also the infamous #SaluteTheHoot Keith Bryant extravaganza.
 
Edwards still seemed to me to "run high" in the NFL. Unlike at UM, though, very productively -- right up until his recent release.
 
DMoney said:
We definitely didn't get enough out of them, which is a theme with every class in this era. D'Onofrio was the worst offender. It's a shame we didn't get to see AQM and Grace in Manny's defense.

But there’s a false narrative out there that NFL players only matter if they make Pro Bowls. It's just mathematically wrong. Less than 25% of four stars make the NFL at all. So if you have an entire class of four stars, and produce 25% NFL players, that's average. These guys were 53% for the entire class. If you include only the nine four stars, they made the NFL at a 78% hit rate.

The last 25 years have been dark days for the program. But if we're talking solely about talent acquisition, the Golden Period was a relatively bright spot even with "the Cloud" and a ton of mistakes. It only got worse after that.
Click to expand...
Golden was his own worst enemy. He was organized, could run a program and recruit. Way too stubborn with type of defense he wanted and who ran it. Hasn't been a head coach since. I'm sure he looks in the mirror and sees a lost opportunity as well.
 
Fun time covering this recruiting class

I remember going to the Coley announcement thinking he was gone to FSU.

Also remember LSU making late pushes for Artie Burns & Jamal Carter but both stood with their commitments.

MT not panning out still shocks me. He had everything physically but it’s clear the off the field stuff held him back
 
DMoney said:
We definitely didn't get enough out of them, which is a theme with every class in this era. D'Onofrio was the worst offender. It's a shame we didn't get to see AQM and Grace in Manny's defense.

But there’s a false narrative out there that NFL players only matter if they make Pro Bowls. It's just mathematically wrong. Less than 25% of four stars make the NFL at all. So if you have an entire class of four stars, and produce 25% NFL players, that's average. These guys were 53% for the entire class. If you include only the nine four stars, they made the NFL at a 78% hit rate.

The last 25 years have been dark days for the program. But if we're talking solely about talent acquisition, the Golden Period was a relatively bright spot even with "the Cloud" and a ton of mistakes. It only got worse after that.
Click to expand...
There is also a cavernous difference between making the Pro Bowl in the NFL and putzing around at the bottom of a roster / on the practice squad for a few years. Disproportionate number of bottom of the NFL types that would lead Miami to 7-5 type output.

Miami will always get a certain volume of talent by proxy of our location and conference affiliation...we have for almost 50 years(!!) now. At this level of football, that is going to happen no matter who the coach is (as we have shown in this series). Quantity of talent that at least has a cup of coffee in the NFL will never be our problem. Our recruiting base lends itself to this...considering the Golden hits at the top are all local Florida (most of them within the tri-county area) players that would have come to Miami no matter who the coach is supports this.

Duke, Howard, Flowers, Bush, Isidora, Waters, Jenkins, Artie, Coley, Carter, (and coming up next in the series), Thomas, McDermott, Toolbox...all players that live south of Tampa (most south of PBC) and all likely to be Canes no matter who the coach is.

Does Golden have some successes outside of the area...of course...Kamalu, Pierre, later on we get to Herndon and Njoku (shouts to Todd Hartley), Kaaya...but these are all very low ceiling success stories outside of Njoku.
 
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hotshot said:
Edwards still seemed to me to "run high" in the NFL. Unlike at UM, though, very productively -- right up until his recent release.
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Once he was no longer in the backfield with Lamar Jackson, his production disappeared.

He benefitted from playing with Lamar, because Defenses are scared to death of Lamar keeping it on mesh-point options, so Gus could get very easy yards running straight ahead. LB's would be so focused on keying in & spying on Lamar that Gus would already be 6-8yds up the field before they even noticed he had the ball.
 
Using 247's composite score, the 2013 class was actually the first time that we had double digit blue chippers (10) since 2008.

2006: 9 blue chippers out of 21 signees
2007: 11 blue chippers out of 19 signees
2008: 15 blue chippers out of 32 signees
2009: 9 blue chippers out of 19 signees
2010: 7 blue chippers out of 29 signees
2011: 4 blue chippers out of 22 signees
2012: 9 blue chippers out of 34 signees
2013: 10 blue chippers out of 22 signees

That said, it was also the sixth year in a row that our blue chip to overall signee ratio was under 50%. And the seventh time in eight years. By comparison, the blue chip ratio for the combined transfer/HS recruiting class in 2025 is 58% (23 blue chip players out of 40 overall signees).

The 2013 class also had an ignominous mark next to it. It was the fourth class in a row that saw 44% or more of its players attrit out after two seasons:

2010: 45% gone after two years
2011: 55% gone after two years
2012: 44% gone after two years
2013: 45% gone after two years

Three of our ten blue chippers from that class were gone by the start of the 2015 season.
 
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BoxingRobes said:
There is also a cavernous difference between making the Pro Bowl in the NFL and putzing around at the bottom of a roster / on the practice squad for a few years. Disproportionate number of bottom of the NFL types that would lead Miami to 7-5 type output.
Click to expand...
There is a big difference between a Pro Bowler and backup player. That's why I focus on those misses in the write up. The lack of elite players held these classes back from championship level.

But this was not 7-5 talent. I know that because when Richt and Manny inherited these players they immediately won 19 games in two years. A fully functioning coach (no disease, no unqualified son) would've done even better. They started losing when their own signees started playing more.

You're right that Golden benefitted from South Florida. This was a Golden Age in the area when South Florida was tiers above every other region. Our national kids were throwaways until Mario came with a national reputation and budget. The sad thing is that we left so much meat on the bone, both with the elite local kids and the low-hanging fruit.
 
Memnon said:
2013 was the Hugh Freeze class;

He stole #1 ranked Robert Nkemdiche & Laremy Tunsil from UGA & Bama, then snatched up Laquon Treadwell from Oh ST.

It was one of the major shocks in the recruiting world at that time because it was believed that Nkemdiche was basically a lock to Pastor Richt at UGA being a Grayson kid. But we would later find out that the Iceman Hugh Freeze was playing the bag game just as good as anybody.

2013 overall was a much better class in terms of the grade of talent from the 2012 class. 2012 was an absolute down year; that class was riddled with busts at the top, but 2013 over time has proven to be a very solid class, even though it had its fair share of busts as well.

The best players were
Derrick Henry
Chris Jones
Jalen Ramsey
Joey Bosa
Alvin Kamara
Jonathan Allen
Ezekiel Elliott
Kendall Fuller
Tre'Davious White

The best QB's ended up being Baker Mayfield who was under-recruited & had to walk on to TTech, and JT Barrett.

It was a pretty bad WR group.
DT was really bad.
CB & Safety had maybe 3 good prospects, the rest was dust in the wind.

2013 was the year of the RB.

It was also the infamous #SaluteTheHoot Keith Bryant extravaganza.
Click to expand...
It may have been an urban legend but the way I remember it is Henry wanted to go to FSU but they wanted him at linebacker (to be fair I think most teams did)

If that’s false I’m gonna remember it that way anyway
 
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