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.
And boy, 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 back-to-back overtime losses. 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.”
The local Denver media opted for pessimism. “[Y]ou and I both know that [the Broncos] are history,” wrote Rick Jussel of the Daily Sentinel the day of the game. “…toast…dead meat…yesterday’s news.”1
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.
It’s no wonder running backs have the shortest average career length of all positions, just two-and-a-half years. 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.2
He’d also 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 one thing’s indisputable.
The University of Miami was the greatest college football program of the 2000s.
And that comes down to one 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.
And 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 leaving Miami early, “I didn’t see anybody who was so much better than me at running back on any other team.”
That 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.3
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.”
He took that confidence into camp. 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.4
“When it comes to confidence,” said Larry Coker, Portis’s coach at Miami who visited Denver camp in the offseason, “this kid’s in a class by himself.”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.
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.
It was unseasonably warm in Denver – about 60-degrees Fahrenheit in mid-December – when the Chiefs kicked off. The Broncos returned it to their 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. Touchdown 13 came midway through the third quarter, putting the Broncos up 21-7. And finally touchdown number 14 came near the end of the third, a 66-yard touchdown reception that put Denver up 28-7.
Portis tied the Denver record for touchdowns in a single game (he broke his own record a year later) and became the youngest player in NFL history to score four touchdowns in a game (21 years, 105 days).
He finally told his coaches he was sick near the end of the third quarter.
“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.”
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.6
With five seconds to go from the Denver 30, Chiefs quarterback Trent Green lobbed it into the end zone towards an expectant mob of Broncos and Chiefs. 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.
On the other side of the country, the New York Giants were facing an even more precarious scenario: Lose and you’re out. Out of the division race, out of the wild card race, out of the playoffs. No room for error.
So slim were the Giants’ playoff hopes by Week 15 that even if they ran the table with defeats of the rival Dallas Cowboys that afternoon, the Indianapolis Colts the following week, and the division-leading Philadelphia Eagles in the finale, they might still miss the playoffs unless other teams lost.
The media in New York and New Jersey had already thrown in the towel. They’d moved on to an all-time favorite of local sports radio hosts and newspaper columnists: the coulda-woulda-shoulda.
We coulda signed Rich Gannon instead of Kerry Collins, argued Adrian Wojnarowski (yes, that Woj) of the Record.7 We shoulda signed Simeon Rice instead of Kenny Holmes, wrote Paul Needell of the Star-Ledger.8
Holmes in particular had drawn the media’s ire. He arrived in New York a beacon of hope. “No end to Holmes’ potential,” read a headline in the Star-Ledger after the Giants gave him $20 million in the 2001 offseason.9
But Holmes underwhelmed. He’d signed with New York following a career-year with the Tennessee Titans, sacking the quarterback a career-high eight times and forcing a career-high five fumbles in 2000. The Giants in particular thought so highly of Holmes that when they played the Titans in the 2000 season, they double-teamed him instead of the more renowned Jevon Kearse.
But Holmes, a University of Miami alum like Portis, regressed to 3.5 sacks in 2001 and a knee injury nagged him for much of his first season in New York. The Giants went so far as to slash his salary nearly in half the next offseason, believing he’d failed to justify the then-lofty $20 million contract. (The rewritten contract allowed him to earn back the money with incentives.)
Teammate Michael Strahan tried to talk him out of the slump as the Giants traveled to St. Louis for their opening game of the 2002 season. Love the game, he told Holmes. “You can’t come out here and be mad and hate football because your situation is not good.” In other words, find the joy.
“Michael was telling me he was to a point where it was, ‘What am I doing this for? Do I still love the game?’” Holmes said of his conversation with Strahan. “He had to re-evaluate himself, and make himself love the game again. He said that to me and I started to tell myself that, too. I still love to play the game. This is the same game I was playing when I was 12 years old.”10
Holmes recorded three tackles, sacked the quarterback, and deflected a pass that led to an interception in the opening week win over the Rams.
By Week 15, he’d recorded five sacks, his career-high of eight within sight.
And, as the Asbury Park Press would describe it the following day, he was about to hit paydirt for the first time in his career.
Nearly 10 minutes into the Week 15 matchup with the Cowboys, Micheal Barrow, yet another Hurricanes alum, sacked Chad Hutchinson and jarred the ball loose. Holmes scooped it up and returned it 50 yards for a touchdown, putting the Giants up 14-0.
It was Holmes’s second fumble recovery of the season and the first touchdown of his career.
“You see it every year, four, five games left and you’re not looking too good,” said Holmes after the game. “And then somebody else goes down. That’s why you always work hard as long as you’re mathematically in it. And here we are.”11
The Giants beat the Cowboys 37-7, their playoff hopes also still alive, and also just barely.
New York did the improbable and won their next two as well, earning a playoff spot but losing to the San Francisco 49ers on Wild Card weekend.
The Broncos had lived to fight another day but lost to the Raiders the following week and ultimately missed the playoffs.
But the fate of the 2002 Broncos and Giants is beside the point.
Portis’s four touchdowns and Holmes’ one marked the start of The Streak.
For 149 consecutive NFL regular season weeks, at least one Miami Hurricane would score at least one touchdown. Thirty-five (35) former Hurricanes combined for 668 touchdowns during The Streak, considerably more than those scored by players from any other NCAA program during the 149-week span.
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
Daily Sentinel, December 15, 2002
Daily Sentinel, December 16, 2002
Miami Herald, November 28, 1999
Miami Herald, October 11, 2002
Chicago Tribune, December 15, 2002
Fort Collins Coloradoan, December 16, 2002
The Record, December 15, 2002
Star-Ledger, December 15, 2002
Star-Ledger, March 18, 2001
New York Times, September 17, 2002
Asbury Park Press, Dec 16, 2002