Part of the series 149 Weeks: Why the Miami Hurricanes Were the NFL’s Best Team of the 2000s
Between December 15, 2002, and November 13, 2011, at least one Miami Hurricane alum scored at least one touchdown in every NFL regular season week.
The Streak.
It spanned eight years, 10 months, and 29 days. Most of the 2000s. More than a two-term president. Thirty-five players scored 668 touchdowns.
To most, The Streak is a neat anecdote. Trivia. A fragment of pride during a 20-year stint in the college football wilderness.
But if you really think about it…
It’s the most impressive thing the University of Miami football program has ever done.
Priming The Streak
Before dissecting The Streak, it’s worth asking…
How?
How did University of Miami alumni manage not merely more touchdowns than other alumni groups, but nearly 20% more than the second-most prolific group?
How did Miami alums manage not merely a longer consecutive touchdown streak, but a streak more than double the second longest during the time span.
What forces converged to enable such a maelstrom of touchdowns?
The answer’s not very interesting.
Miami had more talent. More in both quantity and quality.
Fifteen Hurricanes were picked in the first round of the NFL Draft between 1982 and 1992, some of them eventual all-time NFL greats of the NFL. Cortez Kennedy went to six Pro Bowls. Jessie Armstead, Michael Irvin, and Jim Kelly went to five. Jerome Brown went to two before his tragic passing. Irvin, Kennedy, and Kelly are Hall of Famers.
The 1980s and early 1990s was Miami’s most dominant era. Four national titles in 1983, 1987, 1989, and 1991. A 58-game home winning streak at the Orange Bowl. Two Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks.
And yet, somehow, the collective talent produced by Miami in its most dominant era falls short of what the program churned out a decade later.
Butch Davis arrived in Coral Gables as the Hurricanes’ new head coach a week before signing day in 1995. Davis had served as Jimmy Johnson’s defensive line coach at Miami in the 1980s and followed Johnson to Dallas where he eventually became his defensive coordinator for the Cowboys.
Now he was back. Back to a Miami program fresh off another national title game appearance (a loss to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl) but marching dreadfully toward NCAA sanctions expected to knee-cap the program. Some even wanted it killed.
The Pell Grant scandal, in which an athletic department employee helped athletes falsify federal grant applications, had hung over the program since the story of broke in June 1991. With an NCAA investigation underway, sanctions looming, and a head coaching vacancy so close to signing day, recruits were wary.
“I was recruited hard by UM and [assistant] Coach [Randy] Shannon,” defensive lineman and future sixth overall pick Corey Simon told the Miami Herald, “but there were all the coaching problems in addition to the possible violations, and I just didn’t want to get caught up in that situation.”
Davis cobbled together a respectable class in his measly one-week recruiting window and even flipped a few recruits. Top recruit Magic Benton flipped from Florida State. He also signed Duane Starks, a future first-round draft pick.
The NCAA slapped Miami with a one-year bowl ban in 1995 and stripped the Hurricanes of 24 scholarships.
Against the odds, Davis’ next recruiting classes were remarkable. With just 13 scholarships available in 1996, he signed future NFL first-round picks Bubba Franks, Edgerrin James, and Damione Lewis. He followed that up with Ed Reed, Reggie Wayne, Dan Morgan and Najeh Davenport. Santana Moss enrolled in 1997 on a track scholarship and walked onto the football team.
Year after year, despite the stink and restraint of NCAA sanctions, Davis stocked the program with talent reminiscent of the teams a decade prior.
Even for his recruiting prowess, Davis’ Hurricanes remained an arm’s length away from college football’s pantheon in the mid- and late-1990s. The NCAA sanctions had whipped up a powerful tide whose rip currents kept pulling the Hurricanes back out to sea.
Davis’ first recruiting classes attracted premier talent, but big scholarship reductions meant filling the rest of the roster with walk-ons.
Miami recovered from its postseason ban in 1995 to win its bowl game in 1996, but scholarship limitations caught up with them the following year and the program put forth its first losing season (5-6) since 1979.
Miami was on the ascent again by the end of the 1998 season. They beat third-ranked UCLA in 1998’s regular season finale (the Edgerrin James game), won their bowl game, and opened 1999 with a win over ninth-ranked Ohio State. But losses to #1 Florida State, #2 Virginia Tech, and #3 Penn State (and unranked East Carolina) again greased their ascent.
It took Davis five seasons to overcome the tide. The 2000 season marked the beginning of the Ken Dorsey era and an offense that would emerge as one of the greatest in college football history. It also marked the resurrection of Miami’s defense, which finished top five in points allowed after failing to crack the top 10 during the sanctions years.
Miami defeated #1 Florida State in October and #2 Virginia Tech in November, climbed to #2 in the AP and Coaches Polls, and finished the season with the second-best offense by points scored (42.6) and fifth-best defense by points allowed (15.5).
But the BCS computers, their rickety vacuum tubes devoid of logic as well as air, dinged the one-loss Hurricanes for an early-season loss to Washington and bizarrely deprived Miami a shot at the national title.
Davis accepted the head coaching position of the Cleveland Browns after the season and left Miami, its cupboards once again abundant.
Some call the 2001 Miami Hurricanes the greatest college football team of all time. Skim the roster and you might agree.
Imagine this backfield: Clinton Portis, Willis McGahee, Frank Gore, Najeh Davenport.
And these pass-catchers: Andre Johnson, Jeremy Shockey, Kellen Winslow II, Roscoe Parrish.
And this offensive line: Bryant McKinnie, Vernon Carey, Brett Romberg, Chris Myers
And this secondary: Ed Reed, Sean Taylor, Antrel Rolle, Mike Rumph, Phillip Buchanon.
And this linebacker corps: D.J. Williams, Jonathan Vilma, Rocky McIntosh.
And this defensive line: Vince Wilfork, Jerome McDougle, William Joseph.
The talent, the depth. It’s jaw-dropping, the culmination of years of recruiting prowess, roster-wide buy-in, and the player development that again turned Miami into an NFL pipeline.
That 2001 roster produced 38 NFL draft picks, 17 of them first-rounders. If you recall, Miami produced 15 first-rounders in the program’s most successful era, between 1982 and 1992. Now, from one roster, 17 first-rounders.
Between 1999 and 2011, 48 Hurricanes were selected in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft, more than any other program during that span. And of those 48 players, more than half were first-round picks, also more than any other program.
That’s where Miami stands apart.
The Hurricanes sent lots of players into the NFL. When The Streak began in Week 15 2002, there were 31 active Miami alums on NFL rosters, sixth among college programs. When it ended in Week 10 2011, there were 36, second among college programs.
But Miami stands apart not for the number of players it sent to the NFL. It stands out for its outsized proportion of top-caliber players in this era. Players who’d leave an indelible mark on the NFL, nine of them among the NFL’s all-time touchdown scorers, four of them already Hall of Famers.
The Streak was inevitable.
The Streak in Six Charts
Denver Broncos running back Clinton Portis was a rookie when he started The Streak. It was Week 15 2002 and, battling the flu, he broke off a 51-yard touchdown run in the first quarter against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Portis had retired by the time The Streak ended nearly nine years later.
New Orleans Saints tight end Jimmy Graham was in his second NFL season when he scored a touchdown in Week 10 of the 2011 season, the final week of The Streak.
Graham was just a sophomore in high school when The Streak began.
We love streaks, especially in sports. We rank sports’ greatest streaks. We chronicle them in film, legendary and obscure alike. We write books that send them off into prosperity, and we share them with our kids.
The mythical streaks get the proper noun treatment. Because why would we call them anything but “The Streak”?
Dig into the weeks comprising Miami’s streak and you’ll grow to appreciate why this particular streak earns its proper noun. That the Hurricanes who played in the 2000s era NFL were collectively comparable only to the likes of Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, and Usain Bolt in sheer superiority over the field.
It’s Woods winning the 2000 U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes in an otherwise tight tournament. It’s Phelps breaking world records a body length ahead of his closest competitors. It’s Bolt winning the 100 meters gold a full stride ahead of the field.
The talent to score at a volume far surpassing that of alumni from every other college football program. The consistency to do it every week for nearly nine years. And the depth that made The Streak not just possible but inevitable.
It’s difficult to put it into words. So let’s put it into charts.
Volume
Volume usually accompanies a lengthy streak. Do something every day, and you’re bound to do it a lot.
Joe DiMaggio had 91 total hits during his 56-game hitting streak in 1941, 19 more than the 72 hit by Lou Finney and Terry Moore over the same span.
Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for most consecutive NBA games with at least 30 points, hitting that mark 65 times between November 4, 1961 and February 22, 1962. His 3,260 points during that span were about 1,300 more than those scored by the second-highest scorer, Walt Bellamy.
Chart 1: Touchdowns by Hurricanes
The Miami Hurricanes scored at least one NFL touchdown for 149 consecutive weeks, and more than one touchdown in 139 of those weeks. Six-hundred sixty-eight (668) touchdowns in all.
In all, 35 Hurricanes contributed at least one touchdown to The Streak. Portis led with 73, then Reggie Wayne (68), Willis McGahee (63), Santana Moss (53), and Andre Johnson (52).
Chart 2: Touchdowns Relative to Miami
The alumni group that produced the most NFL touchdowns after Miami was Tennessee with 558, followed by Michigan with 521, USC with 487, and Purdue with 381.
Take a look at the range plot above. Those are the 20 alumni groups that produced the most NFL touchdowns during Miami’s streak. The Hurricanes are a remote island, a few alumni groups inching closer but still miles away.
Miami alumni scored 16.5% more touchdowns than Tennessee alumni, 22.0% more than Michigan alumni, 27.1% more than USC alumni, 43.0% more than Purdue alumni, and nearly double the touchdowns of Virginia alumni.
All the more remarkable, aside from Miami, the top alumni groups during this period were led by a prolific, usually Hall of Fame, passer. (Just wait until we remove the passing touchdowns from the analysis. That’s Chapter 8.)
Chart 3: Touchdowns by Week
Miami didn’t need a prolific passer. That’s because The Streak didn’t slink along, one Hurricane scoring this week and another the next. Miami alums scored in bunches.
The week after Portis and Kenny Holmes kicked off The Streak in Week 15 2002 with five touchdowns between them, four Hurricanes combined for six touchdowns in Week 16. Four combined for five touchdowns in Week 17. Two combined for three touchdowns to start the 2003 season. Six combined for six touchdowns in Week 2. And then four combined for six touchdowns in Week 3.
It wasn’t until the sixth week of The Streak, Week 4 2003, that only a single Hurricane scored an NFL touchdown. And that was a nail-biter, but more on that in Chapter 3.
Tennessee, Michigan, and Purdue alums outscored Miami alums here and there, but never consistently. Combined, Hurricanes alumni averaged 4.5 NFL touchdowns per week during the 149 weeks comprising The Streak, nearly a full touchdown more than the 3.7 touchdowns per week averaged by Tennessee, and about two full touchdowns more per week than Purdue and Virginia alums.
Consistency
Consistency is the hallmark of any streak. Its definition, really. To do every day what most are capable of doing only occasionally or, at best, merely most days.
For Wayne Gretzky to earn a point in 51 consecutive NHL games, a mark not approached for decades. For Jerry Rice to catch at least one pass in 274 consecutive NFL games, nearly 20 games more than the closest challenger.
For Miami Hurricanes alums to score at least one NFL touchdown every week…for nearly nine years.
Chart 4: Consecutive Weeks With a Touchdown
Other alumni groups scored with similar regularity. In the 149 weeks comprising Miami’s streak, Tennessee alums scored a touchdown in 146 of them, Michigan alums in 140, USC alums in 135, Virginia alums in 133, and Purdue alums in 132.
But no alumni group remotely challenged Miami’s consecutive streak.
Tennessee’s longest NFL touchdown streak during this period was 52 weeks. It ended in Week 16 2005 as the Indianapolis Colts rested Peyton Manning ahead of the playoffs.
Michigan’s longest was 46 weeks. It ended Week 6 2006 when Tom Brady and his New England Patriots were on a bye week.
Purdue’s longest was 73. It ended the same day as Miami’s streak, in Week 11 2011. Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints were on a bye that week.
When the big fish sat, other alumni from those programs scored far less reliably.
Chart 5: Touchdowns by Alumni by Week
Miami didn’t have that problem. Because in the 2000s era NFL, Miami Hurricanes were everywhere.
Jeremy Shockey on a bye week? No worries, we’ve got plenty of tight ends: Bubba Franks, Kellen Winslow II, Greg Olsen, Jimmy Graham. (More on Tight End U in Chapter 4.)
Willis McGahee sitting out his rookie season with an injury? Don’t sweat. Portis and Edgerrin James were each top ten in rushing touchdowns that year.
Offensive players not feeling it this week? All good. About a third of the Hurricanes who scored touchdowns during The Streak were defenders. In fact, Ed Reed’s 107-yard interception return for a touchdown in Week 12 2008 kept The Streak alive; he was the only Hurricanes alum to score a touchdown in the NFL that week.
Collective consistency only works if there’s plenty of players contributing. And there were plenty of Miami Hurricanes scoring every week during The Streak.
An average of 3.62 Hurricanes scored every week, a full player more than Tennessee’s 2.37 players per week. Michigan averaged 2.26, USC 2.13, and Purdue 1.38.
It took a myriad of bad luck to end Miami’s 149-week streak. Injuries. Bye weeks. ‘Cane-on-’Cane offensive pass interference in the end zone. But more on that in Chapter 11.
Depth
If consistency is the very definition of a streak and volume often follows naturally, depth is what gives this particular streak its nuance. And Miami’s talent ran deep.
Chart 6: Top Scorers’ Share of Totals
Touchdowns by Miami alumni were fairly evenly dispersed compared to the touchdown dispersion among other alumni groups.
Miami’s max share was 10.93%. Max share simply means the percentage of the whole contributed by its largest part. In this case, Portis’s 73 touchdowns comprised 10.93% of Miami’s 668 total touchdowns.
Manning accounts for 49.28% of Tennessee alumni’s NFL touchdowns. Brady accounts for 47.41% of Michigan’s, Carson Palmer accounts for 33.68% of USC’s, and Brees accounts for 66.14% of Purdue’s.
Miami’s max share was not only lowest among the most prolific alumni groups. It was lowest among all alumni groups. Next is Ohio State (12.70%), Florida (14.85%), and Notre Dame (16.58%), whose alumni scored less than half of the touchdowns as Miami alumni.
The Greatest NFL Team of the 2000s
When streaks fall or end, we wax poetic on their enormity as we attempt to make sense of what is, at least for most of us, an unhuman accomplishment.
After Cal Ripken, Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak at 2,131 consecutive baseball games played in 1995, Ken Rosenthal of the Baltimore Sun found the enormity of Ripken’s achievement in its simplicity.
“He’s just always there, you know? That’s what was so celebrated, that’s what this was all about. He’s there when his team needs him. There now that his sport needs him. And there for a city that lost its football team and baseball glory long ago.” - Ken Rosenthal, Baltimore Sun, September 7, 1995
And when Ripken ended his Iron Man streak three years later at 2,632 games, Rosenthal reflected on the fortitude and circumstance that made Ripken’s streak possible.
“What people will remember is the physical stamina, mental strength and incredible fortune it took for one man to play so many consecutive games.” - Ken Rosenthal, Baltimore Sun, September 21, 1998
The Streak embodies all the things that fixes Miami among college football’s greatest programs: an NFL pipeline, a factory for top-tier talent, even a model of collegiate success (16 of the 35 players who scored a touchdown during The Streak came from Miami’s famed 2001 national title roster).
It represents the immense talent of Miami’s offensive players, but it’s also revealing of Miami’s immense defensive talent in the 2000s. More than a third of the players who scored touchdowns were defenders, after all.
Admittedly, relying solely on touchdowns by alumni to compare college programs is a narrow way of looking at it.
For one, it’s biased towards offensive players. And even then, most players don’t score touchdowns. They protect the quarterback, block for the running back, set screens. Defenders sack the quarterback, defend passes, tackle ball carriers. Special teamers kick field goals, punt the ball, return kicks.
Touchdowns are a counting stat, much maligned by modern statisticians whose metrics aim to boil player value down to a single figure. Pro Football Focus has its player grades, the NFL its Next Gen Stats, Pro-Football-Reference its Approximate Value, and Nate Silver his QBERT quarterback rating system. Even Stugotz has his rings-in-a-box test.
But if your goal is to measure a college program’s NFL footprint, you can do a lot worse than counting its alumni’s touchdowns. It’s the play worth the most points, for one, and it directly affects the game’s outcome.
And in this particular case, we find a good deal of meaning in those touchdowns. What’s most impressive about The Streak is not that it happened, but how it happened.
The prevailing thesis of the 149 Weeks series is that the University of Miami was the 2000s’ most consequential college football program. It states with a wink that the Hurricanes were the NFL’s best team of the era.
Maybe we don’t need the wink.
The Miami program was an institution in the NFL during the 2000s. Hurricanes alums famously called out “The U” in their primetime player introductions, and they’ve often spoken of their shared brotherhood.
Miami didn’t produce the era’s best quarterback (Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees), running back (LaDainian Tomlinson), wide receiver (Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Larry Fitzgerald), or even tight end (Tony Gonzalez, Antonio Gates). You might argue it did produce the era’s best linebacker (Ray Lewis) and safety (Ed Reed), but it’s not about a single player.
It’s not about the consistency of consecutive weeks or the volume of touchdowns either. It’s not even about the margin by which Miami surpassed other alumni groups in touchdowns or any other metric, although those margins tell a helluva story.
The depth of Hurricanes alumni is why The Streak is the most impressive thing the University of Miami has ever done.
It wasn’t one or two Hurricanes scoring all those touchdowns. It was 35 of them, nearly half with double-digit touchdowns.
Here’s one more chart.
It shows the coefficient of variation (vertical axis) of touchdowns scored by each of the top ten touchdown-scoring alumni groups.
Coefficient of variation is a measure of dispersion. Like standard deviation, it measures how much your data points vary one to the other. But unlike standard deviation, which is an absolute measure of dispersion from the mean, COV is a relative measure of dispersion, which lets us compare datasets with vastly different means, as is the case here.
A low coefficient of variation indicates less variability. In other words, the alumni’s touchdown totals are closer together.
Look at Miami. Its coefficient of variation was 115.33%. Now look at Tennessee, Michigan, USC, and Purdue. Coefficients of variation of 237.92%, 259.55%, 210.75%, and 269.69%, respectively. Each more than double that of Miami.
If you want a metric that says Miami was an unrivaled producer of NFL talent, and thus the most consequential program in the 2000s, that’s it.
Why? The peaks created by those prolific quarterbacks (Manning, Brady, Brees, Palmer, Aaron Rodgers, Brett Favre, you name ‘em) is massive, and that introduces tremendous variability in their alumni groups’ respective datasets. It also dulls the shine of those alumni groups’ overall total touchdowns.
Let’s say Testaverde threw all 668 of Miami’s touchdowns. We’d never claim Miami as an unrivaled producer of NFL talent or the most consequential program of the era based solely on a single contributor. He’d be a fluke. A fluke who’d go down as the game’s greatest passer of all time, but a fluke nonetheless, not indicative of the Miami program’s importance.
The same goes for Tennessee, Michigan, USC, and Purdue. A single player contributed a large plurality, or in Purdue’s case a majority, of those alumni groups’ NFL touchdowns. They’re flukes relative to the rest of their schools’ alumni. We wouldn’t call Tennessee the most consequential program of the era because it produced Peyton Manning, would we?
Harken back to max share for a moment. Peyton Manning’s share of the Tennessee alumni group’s total was 49.28%. His 275 touchdowns dwarfed that of the second most prolific Volunteers alum during the span, Jamal Lewis with 49.
Hence, the Tennessee alumni group’s COV is more than double that of Miami, whose most prolific touchdown scorer produced just 10.93% of Miami’s total. Clinton Portis’ 73 touchdowns were only five more than the next highest Hurricanes alum, Reggie Wayne with 68.
Take Manning’s 275 touchdowns out of the picture and Tennessee’s COV drop precipitously. It’s 109.37%. But Tennessee’s left with just 283 touchdowns.
It’s the same story for the other most prolific alumni groups. Remove Tom Brady’s 247 touchdowns from Michigan’s total, and its COV drops to 130.00% but its touchdowns drop to 274.
Now do that with Miami. Remove Portis’ 73 touchdowns, and Miami’s COV actually rises to 115.81%. Its touchdowns remain high, 595, and still exceed the Tennessee alumni group at full power (558).
Do you want to know what’s even wilder?
You’ll get to the 19th most productive alumni group (Oregon State with 250 touchdowns) before you find a COV lower than Miami’s 115.33%, and that alumni group had just 37% of the total touchdowns as Miami. Even when compared to alumni groups with more “normal” touchdown totals (not the aberration that Miami’s 668 represented), Miami’s touchdown dispersion was more balanced.
Volume. Consistency. Depth. Other alumni groups might’ve managed one or two of them, but never all three, and never at Miami’s scale.
It’s why The Streak happened. A ‘Canes thing if there ever was one.
There’s more to this story. Next up: Chapter 3: September 28, 2003