When it came time for the 2001 Miami Hurricanes to do their summer workouts, they had one plan in mind: Make it as grueling as possible.
Nobody really wanted to work out at 1 p.m. in the scorching heat and high humidity in South Florida. But nobody wanted to waste the opportunity in front of them, either: A shot at the school’s first national championship in 10 years.
“They were the hardest workouts we ever did,” cornerback Mike Rumph said. “But it was crucial to never show how much pain we were in. We used to say that was the easiest workout and we would suck our fingers, like that was pie. It started as a joke first, but it just went to like, no matter what you put us through, we can’t be hurt. We’re tougher than you think.”
Twenty years later, the 2001 Miami Hurricanes are widely regarded as one of the greatest college football teams of all time. Their roster was loaded with future first-round picks — from Andre Johnson to Jeremy Shockey to Vince Wilfork and at least one NFL Hall of Famer in Ed Reed. They dominated nearly everyone on their schedule, culminating in a resounding 37-14 win over Nebraska in the BCS National Championship Game in the Rose Bowl.
What players and coaches insist set this team apart was their camaraderie, accountability and willingness to do whatever it took to win a championship — especially those afternoon workouts. “It wasn’t about elite, starters, pecking orders, all that other great stuff,” center Brett Romberg said. “It was literally, you’re doing the same thing that I’m doing. You’re sweating, you’re bleeding, you’re laying everything on the line for the guy next to you, and there was no envy.” They were driven by the snub they all felt the previous year, after Florida State got into the BCS national title game instead of Miami — even though the Hurricanes won their regular-season matchup. From there, this iconic team started its journey toward greatness. In interviews with more than two dozen players, coaches and opposing coaches, here is the story of the 2001 season, told in their own words.
Adversity hit shortly after the calendar turned to 2001, when coach Butch Davis left to become head coach with the Cleveland Browns. Players lobbied then-athletic director Paul Dee to elevate offensive coordinator Larry Coker to become head coach.
Former coach Butch Davis
I’d agreed to a contract before Thanksgiving and my plan was to stay at the University of Miami for decades. But there were a few things in the contract we were having a difficult time agreeing on. … At the very end of January, [my family and I] ended up making the decision to leave. I wanted to be there. We’d been through so much pain. We had a player [backup LB Marlin Barnes] murdered on campus. We had 31 scholarships lost. We gave up the bowl in 1995. We’d just beaten Florida in the Sugar Bowl and gone 11-1. The deck was loaded. We’d signed a great class. It was like, this is going to be outstanding for the next three, four, five years.
OC Rob Chudzinski
Butch did a great job recruiting and developing and building the culture. And obviously you can point out all the talented guys on the team, but at the time, they weren’t the biggest recruits and the five-star guys. A lot of what we did, Butch should get credit for. It was a competitive culture and accountability was huge and he built a family environment.
CB Mike Rumph
When Butch left, we were kinda stuck, and I remember we all went upstairs to talk to Mr. Dee, myself, Bryant McKinnie, Ed Reed, Ken Dorsey and a couple more guys. There was a rumor that we were going to get that coach from Wisconsin, Barry Alvarez, and we were like, “We don’t want him. We want somebody from in-house who knows us, and that’s Coach Coker.” They listened to us.
Head coach Larry Coker
In my mind, I didn’t know if I’d get the job. The players coming to my backing was a big asset in me getting the job. It was a somewhat natural transition because I knew the players.
Davis
If Greg Schiano had not left and gone to Rutgers it would’ve been a potential for him to get the job, but I was glad for the staff and players that there wouldn’t be a blow-up. Because when Jimmy [Johnson] left after winning two national championships, they really changed the whole program, and I didn’t want that to happen to those kids.
C Brett Romberg
Larry Coker knew that once that baton got handed off, he wasn’t changing anything. We have the recipe, we have the tools, we have everything to be successful. We just hope that this train just doesn’t go off the track.
QB Ken Dorsey
He was the perfect coach for our team, and his personality just meshed with us.
OT Bryant McKinnie
We didn’t want to have to change and have to learn a new offense, defense, or anything. We liked what we had already, and we really wanted to just keep what we had. A lot of us were going into our senior year, and we didn’t want to have to risk playing a little slower, still trying to learn something.
Chudzinski
Larry wasn’t a sexy hire at the time, and it’s rare the players have that kind of influence over who gets hired. Larry coming in, two new coordinators, there were a lot of questions. But Larry was a perfect fit for that team. There were a lot of expectations, and Larry took the pressure off of them. It really gave the players and the coaching staff somebody to rally behind.
S Ed Reed
We [were] truly a team. The individual’s put on the back burner for your brothers. I tried to display that my senior year, ’cause I could have left my junior year. I would have got drafted higher and everything. I knew this. But I wasn’t leaving these guys. I wanted to win the national championship — we wanted to win the national championship. And I felt like I was a chess piece to that.
Romberg
We all felt that that Sugar Bowl game against Florida, we knew that we should have been playing for a national title.
Davis
The motivation of being upset and disappointed, that played a huge role in going to the Sugar Bowl and what we did against Florida to make a statement that we probably should’ve been the champs. The one newspaper that I still love to this day is the New York Times because they picked us as national champions at the end of the season.
Romberg
So the following year was definitely a salt-in-the-wound, chip-on-the-shoulder type of season where we wanted to obviously take no prisoners and rectify what happened the year before.
CB Markese Fitzgerald
Randy Shannon told me, “If you come back to school, I’m not going to promise you or guarantee it, but there’s a good chance you will never lose another college football game.”
With Coker in place as head coach and key players like Reed and McKinnie returning for their senior seasons, the Hurricanes knew what was in front of them. They made sure their offseason workouts were the most intense of their lives
Dorsey
It pushes you through those workouts and the offseason, and it was a huge motivator for me, because guys like Reggie Wayne and Santana Moss put their heart and soul into the program, to not be able to give them a national championship when you thought you could’ve — it’s one of those things that sticks with you. I think the next year, we had the mindset that, no matter what happens, we have to take care of business. Not a lot needed to be said. The guys before us set an expectation of how hard you had to work and what that standard was, and we knew we had to live up to that.
RBs coach Don Soldinger
They were all self-directed. They pushed each other to the limit, and the one thing that separates that group, they were super, super competitive. They hated to lose. They would challenge each other to sprints, or whatever it was, and they held each other accountable and would not accept mediocrity.
LB D.J. Williams
The heart and soul of that team was our strength coach, Andreu Swasey. He was the guy that really knew how to push our buttons, that knew how to challenge us. He was that father figure we were all afraid to disappoint.
runs. There will be unsung heroes picking up blitzes. That’s how it goes in those games. A lot of people talk about the struggles against Florida State, but we had those struggles against Virginia Tech.
OL Joel Rodriguez
Oh, absolutely I was scared. At that point, it was like, all right, the last game then we’re going to ship. That was the first time, for a portion of the game at least, we let our gaze get to the horizon and not on the task at hand.
Rumph
It was intense. The loudest game. It was so scary. We didn’t know it was going to come down to a 2-point conversion, but the football Gods were with us on that day, and that kid dropped that ball.
Fitzgerald
I mean, he was pretty much automatic for them. When he dropped the two-point conversion, I was like, I need some prayer right now. He was probably the most hated guy in all of Blacksburg that night, but at the same time thank you so much, because you just kind of saved us some heartache.
Walters
There were moments in that season that we felt we deserved to win those close games, because we outworked those teams in that offseason. Like you knew in your bones that we were going to pull it out. Because we had that extra whatever. It took that extra X Factor. We had it in us, and we knew we had it in us. We were confident. We never got worried.
Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer
We blocked a kick and a punt and blocked a field goal that day. That gave us a chance. But when you play a team like that, you can’t turn the ball over, and I think we ended up throwing four interceptions. That [last] interception was by Ed Reed. And we went into the Hall of Fame together this past year. I’ll never forget, he said he really liked our team. Anybody who could block kicks like that, he was a fan of.
Chudzinski
I don’t know if this ever got released to the media, but Kenny [Dorsey] got hit and took a hard shot to the ribs. He almost had to come out of the game. I remember the doctor saying he couldn’t really throw the ball. And they had a great defense. It was a challenge to figure out how to get through the rest of that game. A lot of people don’t know how close that was, but he was a huge leader for us, and he wasn’t coming out of that game. It was grit and toughness for him, and it was important he was in there the whole time.
Dorsey
Going into the locker room after the win at Virginia Tech, it was special. You go into the locker room and everybody is just elated. To solidify going to a national championship without having to worry about if somebody else was going to lose — that was special. I think it was kind of a weight off everybody’s shoulders at the end.
Ernest Wilford dropped what would have been a game-tying 2-point conversion. Damian Strohmeyer/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
Miami clinched a spot in the national title game against Nebraska at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., and felt confident this game would be its crowning achievement.
Rumph
One of the things that happened in practice, we caught a few guys in the stadium trying to record our practices, seeing how we were going to stop the triple option. We saw a guy in the 55th row laying down with a camera, and we started pointing him out, and he gets up and runs to one of the exits. It happened twice in the Coliseum.
Chudzinski
Sometimes the practices in the bowl games get a little stale or tired. But I remember a few days before the game we did a two-minute drill, our No. 1 offense against the No. 1 defense. I’ll never forget the speed and tempo and competitiveness. Shockey was diving for balls, Ed Reed was coming up full-speed, full-tackle. And as a coach, you almost never want that — guys on the ground, just a couple days before the game. But these guys wanted to win that two-minute drill as bad as they wanted to win the Rose Bowl. That’s always what Miami had been about, and what set it apart in my mind.
LB Jonathan Vilma
Randy Shannon is giving us every way to run this option, and I was frankly frustrated because it was hard to process it all. And he comes to me when we’re in Pasadena, he’s like, “Look, don’t worry, it’s gonna be easier in the game.”
Reed
Before we even went to the game, we made “Ballin Boys.” We made a song like the Super Bowl Shuffle, letting them know, “We’re going to whoop y’all.” Years later in the NFL, I’m hearing people like, “Man, I listened to that song.”
Romberg
I played with Richie Incognito with the Rams, and he told me when they saw us get off the bus at Disney [during the week], they started laughing. They thought that we looked like a high school team. They were big boys, all positions, not just the offensive line. They were cracking jokes at us, and they thought that they were gonna just drag us all over the football field and just pound us.
Chudzinski
Everybody’s fired up. We’re intense, pulling up on the buses. And I’ll never forget seeing the wave of red of Nebraska fans pulling up that seemed like it went for miles. And we’re in the buses going right through this wave of red, and it seemed like they all flipped us off in unison. And I’ll never forget, everybody’s fired up, and Larry gets up in front of the bus, and said, “Men, don’t worry about that. They’re just telling us we’re No. 1.”
Shannon
The first quarter, we’d always said, once we got the speed of the option down, we’d get it done.
Vilma
The first series, we line up, they run their option, and for as fast as it went for us in practice, it was like they were in sand. We go to the sideline, and Randy Shannon, after the first series he’s like, “Hey, how do they look?” I was like, “Coach, call whatever you want, we’re gonna win.” He was like, “You serious?” I said, “Coach, they’re slow as hell.”
Coker
I’d been at Oklahoma and Oklahoma State for years and we’d never beaten [Nebraska]. To me, it was special, and I knew it was going to be a tough game. I never expected it to be a blowout. They were a good team. But we were a great team.
Romberg
When Vince Wilfork took their All-American guard Toniu Fonoti and threw him five yards in the backfield and made a tackle for a loss, their whole sideline s— their pants, and then all of a sudden Vilma started decapitating tight ends, and it became a whole different animal, and they weren’t aware, used to it, privy to, they literally thought they were going to come in there and mop the floor with us. Incognito told me at halftime, their coach basically said, “Guys let’s just try to keep this thing close,” and he said that right in front of the athletic director.
