Part of the series 149 Weeks: Why the Miami Hurricanes Were the NFL’s Best Team of the 2000s
Clinton Portis woke up with the flu.
Nauseated, legs weak, and a game to play in a few hours.1
And what a bad time for it. His Denver Broncos were floundering. Just a month ago, Denver was 7-3 and tied for the lead in the AFC West. Then came an overtime loss. Then another. And then a late interception at the goal line. Three consecutive losses.
By mid-December, Denver was 7-6 and tied for last in the AFC West, the season just about squandered into mediocrity.
As the Broncos were watching a once-promising season slip away, the Kansas City Chiefs were salvaging theirs. The Broncos had dropped the Chiefs to 3-4 back in Week 7, but the Chiefs had since won four of their last six games.
“Both are clinging to hope,” the Associated Press wrote of the Broncos and Chiefs ahead of their Week 15 matchup, “knowing a loss will leave them home for the playoffs.”2
Portis kept his illness to himself. He got ready, headed to the stadium, and began warming up.
It must be hell playing running back in the NFL. It’s the running back’s job to run directly at some of the largest people on earth, somehow get through or around them, and then outrun some of the fastest people on earth. And when they’re not doing that, they’re running into and blocking those same very large people. The position places impossible demands on those who play it.
Today, Portis faced those impossible demands with a body weakened by the flu. He’d barely eat before the game, nearly vomit during it, and sit alone in the tunnel as the game ended, physically and metaphorically too sick to watch the Chiefs attempt to tie the game in its waning seconds.
But before he’d do all those things, he’d have to find a way to get out of bed. Maybe he’d of felt better had he known that in just a few hours he’d set an NFL record.
Or that he’d commence one of the most stunning collective achievements in American football history. Although nobody would notice for years.
It’s often said that the Miami Hurricanes are college football’s greatest program.
Well, maybe not so much in South Bend. Or in Tuscaloosa, Columbus, or Ann Arbor.
But me, my friends, people in South Florida. We say it a lot. Loudly. Annoyingly.
To be fair, we have a pretty good case. The five national titles. The two Heisman Trophy winners. All those first-round draft picks. The three first-overall draft picks. The Hall of Famers, 16 for college football, 11 for pro football, two for both.
And then there’re the names.
Jim Kelly and Vinny Testaverde. Michael Irvin and Jerome Brown. Russell Maryland and Cortez Kennedy. Warren Sapp and Ray Lewis. Edgerrin James and Dan Morgan. Reggie Wayne and Santana Moss. Jeremy Shockey and Ed Reed. Andre Johnson and Willis McGahee. Frank Gore and Greg Olsen. Devin Hester and Jimmy Graham.
Maybe Miami’s the greatest program of all time. Maybe it’s not. But here’s something indisputable: the University of Miami was the greatest college football program of the 2000s.
Nowhere is that more clear than in a singular achievement, accomplished across nearly a decade in places far from the Orange Bowl. Nearly three dozen Hurricanes claim it, the oldest drafted in 1987, the youngest undrafted in 2010. An aberration so massive in scale that it constitutes a statistical epidemic.
It commenced on a December afternoon in Denver.
The Broncos selected Portis in the 2002 NFL Draft out of the University of Miami.
“When I looked around [at the draft],” Portis said of his decision to leave Miami a year early, “I didn’t see anybody who was so much better than me at running back on any other team.”3
His confidence was well earned. He’d started as a true freshman, turning in 147 yards in his first games as a starter, and later that season put together a streak of four consecutive 100-yard games, missing his fifth by just two yards.
A couple years later as a junior, he’d led an impossibly deep Hurricanes backfield (Portis, Frank Gore, Willis McGahee, Najeh Davenport) in rushing with 1,200 yards and 11 touchdowns (10 rushing, one receiving). He was a third-team All-American and won a national title.
Five Miami Hurricanes became first-round picks in that year’s draft: OT Bryant McKinnie (#7), TE Jeremy Shockey (#14), CB Phillip Buchanon (#17), S Ed Reed (#24), CB Mike Rumph (#27).
But Portis wasn’t one of them.
He fell to the second round where the Broncos selected him with the 51st overall pick, the fourth running back taken after William Green (#16), T.J. Duckett (#18), and Deshaun Foster (#34).
It stung.
“I’m glad to be in Denver,” he said. “But mark my words, everybody else is going to pay. That can be put in the newspaper, on TV, on the radio, I don’t care where. They all should know that they will regret letting me slide. This is motivation.”4
When the coaches asked for the starters on the first day of Denver Broncos training camp, the rookie Portis stepped forward, his competition — veteran Olandis Gary, 2000 rookie of the year Mike Anderson, and future Hall of Famer Terrell Davis — standing next to him. His running backs coach had to pull him back.5
Portis was starting by Week 3.
He “made Broncos fans accept the move of 2000 offensive rookie of the year Mike Anderson to fullback - and forget the loss of Terrell Davis,” wrote the Associated Press, describing his rapid ascent up the Broncos depth chart.6
By Week 15, Portis was a near-lock for that year’s offensive rookie of the year award. Six 100-yard rushing performances, 1,098 yards on the season, and 10 total touchdowns.
He’d quickly add one more.
The Broncos returned the Chiefs’ opening kickoff to their own 21 yard line and quickly racked up a couple of first downs.
Less than three minutes into the game, the Broncos just shy of midfield, Portis lined up behind the fullback in the I-formation. He took the handoff up the middle, broke a tackle, and outran the Chiefs defense 51 yards for his 11th touchdown of the season.
Touchdown number 12 followed not long after, a three-yard rush at the end of the first quarter to put Denver up 14-0. Then touchdown number 13, midway through the third quarter, putting the Broncos up 21-7. And finally touchdown number 14 near the end of the third quarter, a remarkable run by a guy with the flu who managed a juke, two broken tackles, and a stiff-arm in a single play, 66 yards in all, to put Denver up 28-7.
Portis tied the Denver record for touchdowns in a single game (he broke it a year later) and became the youngest player in NFL history to score four touchdowns in a game (21 years, 105 days).
He finally admitted he was sick after the run.
“I had nothing left, and I almost threw up coming off the field,” he said. “I told the coaches. They asked if I could go back in, and I told them to put Mike (Anderson) in because I didn’t have anything left.”7
But he added 9 yards on three carries in the fourth quarter and finished with 130 rushing yards, 6.2 yards per carry, 3 rushing touchdowns, 75 receiving yards, and a receiving touchdown. His very own “flu game.”
A Chiefs fourth-quarter comeback bid threatened to make Portis’ effort for naught. A touchdown at the end of the third quarter. Another midway through the fourth. And a field goal ahead of the two-minute warning, drawing Kansas City to within a touchdown of the Broncos.
The Chiefs forced a Denver punt on the next possession and reclaimed the ball at their 39 yard line with less than two minutes to go. A 25-yard pass put them in Denver territory.
By now Portis was in the tunnel, too sick to watch and relying on a security guard for updates.8 With five seconds to go from the Denver 30, Chiefs quarterback Trent Green lobbed a pass into a mob of Broncos and Chiefs waiting in the end zone. Jump ball, batted down, incomplete.
The Broncos held on 31-24, finally earning that elusive eighth win of their 2002 season. Playoff hopes alive, just barely.
The Broncos’ fate in the 2002 NFL season is besides the point.
(For what it’s worth, they missed the playoffs. A loss to the Raiders the week after Poritis’ big day did them in.)
Portis’s four touchdowns marked the start of The Streak.
For 149 consecutive NFL regular season weeks, at least one Miami Hurricane would score at least one touchdown. And in all but 10 of those weeks, more than one Miami alumni scored a touchdown, Week 15 2002 included.
Nearly 10 minutes into the New York Giants’ Week 15 matchup with the Dallas Cowboys, Giants linebacker Micheal Barrow, another Hurricanes alum, sacked Cowboys quarterback Chad Hutchinson and jarred the ball loose. Giants defensive end Kenny Holmes, yet another Hurricanes alum, scooped it up and returned it 50 yards for a touchdown, putting the Giants up 14-0.
It was Holmes’ first career touchdown and the fifth touchdown by a Hurricanes alum on the very first day of The Streak. The next week, four Hurricanes alumni scored six touchdowns. The week after, four scored five touchdowns.
So it went, week after week for nearly nine years. Thirty-five players would combine for 668 touchdowns during The Streak.
It’s the most impressive thing the University of Miami football program has ever done.
There’s more to this story. Next up: Chapter 2: The Streak
Blair, Darrell. “Portis Battles Flu, Scores 4 TDs in Win.” Fort Collins Coloradoan, December 16, 2002.
Associated Press. “In Opposite Directions.” The Daily Sentinel (Associated Press), December 15, 2002.
Associated Press. “Portis Could Be Best of Rookie Crop.” The Daily Sentinel (Associated Press), December 15, 2002.
Swanson, Ben. “Broncos Legends: A Look Back Through Clinton Portis’ Broncos Career.” DenverBroncos.com, June 2, 2020. https://www.denverbroncos.com/news/broncos-legends-a-look-back-through-clinton-portis-broncos-career.
Cole, Jason. “Flashy Rookie Portis Proving He Belongs.” The Miami Herald, October 11, 2002.
Associated Press. “First-Year Phenoms Take on Added Roles.” The Daily Sentinel (Associated Press), December 15, 2002.
Blair, “Portis Battles Flu.”
Blair, “Portis Battles Flu.”