In early 2012, I had a conversation with a former Miami staffer who landed at Alabama. I congratulated him on Alabama's championship and told him that it must be nice to coach so many studs. He looked at me and said, "Miami's good players are better than Alabama's good players."
I couldn't believe it. Alabama was the national champion. Miami was 6-6 and coming off an embarrassing home loss to BC. Alabama had multiple projected first round picks. Miami had a few mid and late-round guys. But he was insistent.
"Lamar Miller is better than Trent Richardson. Olivier Vernon is better than Courtney Upshaw. And Seantrel Henderson is better than any lineman we've got. Watch them in the pros."
Now that we've seen those guys in the NFL, we know he was dead-on. Why were the programs so far apart on the field? The coach said it came down to football infrastructure (training table, strength and conditioning, medical staff) and depth. He left out coaching, for obvious reasons, but you can assume that's another factor. Once those guys get to the NFL, he said, all the external things will become equal and raw talent will prevail.
Golden has done a better job than Shannon in terms of player development; specifically, strength and conditioning. Perryman, Dorsett, Walford and Duke all got bigger and stronger without losing their speed. But why is a team with so many elite players struggling in a talentless Coastal division?
Coaching is an obvious factor that is being addressed in every other thread on this board. The other factor is depth. In my view, there are three reasons depth is not where it needs to be:
1- We cannot identify undervalued South Florida talent. We are the anti-Louisville in this regard. These South Florida three-stars should be the main source of depth for this team, along with blue-chip young players.
2- The camp has produced nothing. I've discussed this before, but it bears repeating: the camp is the biggest indictment of the Temple crew's talent evaluation skills. If Paul "Delaware" Williams offers a kid at the camp, I just assume it's a wasted scholarship.
3- The Temple coaches have a Northeastern, Parcells approach that does not work here. This relates to numbers 1 and 2. Golden says that you support the star players with "coal shovelers." His idea of a coal shoveler is a low-rated, low-maintenance guy who has ideal measurables to develop. That's crap. The meat of this program should be South Florida ballers who may lack a measurable or two. The guys that go to Louisville and talk **** to our five-stars. Football players, not projects with good attitudes. If we had been stacking these guys for four years, this team would look much, much different.
Right now, our best players are better than anybody's best players. Anybody. Watch Perryman, Dorsett, Flowers, Duke and Walford in the pros. No other Power Five school can match those upperclassmen. Four years later, Miami is still undefeated on Sunday and .500 on Saturday.
