How Alabama built a recruiting pipeline from Miami’s backyard

Build a fence, he said.

A new coach at an underachieving University of Miami program in the late 1970s, Howard Schnellenberger saw the elite talent surrounding the plush Coral Gables campus. So his personal challenge became constructing the metaphorical barrier around the land rich in football talent.

It worked. A former Bear Bryant assistant who helped bring Joe Namath to Tuscaloosa, Schnellenberger built the foundation of what became a two-decade powerhouse out of a once-sleepy program. The Hurricanes won five national championships between 1983 and 2001 largely with homegrown stars after Schnellenberger replaced, of all people, Lou Saban -- a distant cousin of Nick Saban.

They were The U and wouldn’t let anyone forget it. They claimed a patent on swagger and the goal wasn’t just to beat everyone but embarrass anyone foolish enough to stand in the way.

If only that fence didn’t rust.

For more than a decade, Alabama’s been among the power programs snatching the explosive talent from the three-county South Florida enclave, and winning titles that previously went to Coral Gables.

While Miami-based recruiting reporter Larry Blustein said that fence was never a realistic goal, the names who’ve helped Nick Saban’s programs to six titles in 11 years are unmistakable.

Amari Cooper, Eddie Jackson, Calvin Ridley, Jerry Jeudy and Patrick Surtain are just a few of the NFL stars wearing Alabama national title rings when they visit their South Florida hometowns.

The Crimson Tide will bring a roster with seven players from Miami’s backyard to Atlanta for Saturday’s season opener -- another reminder of where the two programs have been the past decade.

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The recruiting encyclopedic memory of Blustein is striking. He rattles off names of high school prospects going back to the 1960s who left the sunny southern tip of Florida for Tuscaloosa.

Before the recent run, Derrick Thomas was perhaps the most contemporary name who became a linebacker icon after leaving South Miami High School in the mid-1980s. The modern wave started when Cooper signed with Alabama in the 2012 class. Before becoming a Heisman finalist and No. 4 overall draft pick, Blustein remembers the Miami Northwestern High prospect didn’t have a five-star junior season. He flew somewhat below the traditional radar but Alabama coaches were blown away at camp that summer.

Growing up, Cooper said after catching the 2012 SEC championship game-winning pass for Alabama, he always wanted to play for Miami. He grew up just miles from the plush Coral Gables campus in nearby Coconut Grove and the Canes were still among the national elite when Cooper was a kid. But they had slipped in recent years, going 7-6 the year they fired Randy Shannon in 2010 and 6-6 in Year 1 under Al Golden.

Alabama had just won two of the last three national titles while dark NCAA investigation storm clouds were brewing in Miami.

“It wasn’t that close because (the Hurricanes) weren’t doing so well,” Cooper said at the end of a freshman season that ended with another Crimson Tide national title. “I wanted to be part of something like this — something great.”

They felt the shockwave of Cooper’s departure in Miami.

“Everybody in the city was looking at him, head cocked sideways,” said Kelvin Harris, a Miami offensive lineman who arrived from Fort Myers in the late 1980s. “How were you able to get out of here?”

It was the beginning of the chain reaction that brought a lineage of Alabama receivers away from the bright lights of Miami and straight into Saban’s machine. Where Michael Irvin, Andre Johnson and Santana Moss stayed home, Cooper, Ridley and Jeudy flew north.

And one of Miami’s own had a hand in it.

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Ridley had already been drafted No. 26 overall by the Falcons in 2018 when he told a story about his recruitment. Coming from Pompano Beach, the star receiver said he always figured he’d move down Interstate-95 to Coral Gables.

One day, however, an Alabama assistant came to his school and suggested making a visit to Tuscaloosa. Mario Cristobal was in his first year as the Crimson Tide offensive line coach and he knew his way around South Florida. A star at Christopher Columbus High in Miami, he went on to win national titles in 1989 and 1991 as an offensive lineman during the Hurricanes’ glory years.

His final collegiate game, interestingly, was Miami’s stunning blowout loss to Alabama in the 1993 Sugar Bowl that made the Crimson Tide national champs. He went on to coach for the Hurricanes and was FIU’s head coach before being fired in 2012. And after another brief stint on the Canes staff, Alabama hired him in February 2013. A few months later, he put a bug in Ridley’s ear and after visiting Tuscaloosa for the 2013 win over LSU, the star receiver wasn’t thinking much about Miami.

“I called my mom and I told her I wanted to commit,” Ridley said in the 2018 interview. And she was like, ‘That’s Alabama, that’s far.’ She was like, ‘Miami’s right here.’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s going to be better for me, winning championships.’ I (wanted) to be a champion, so I did it.”

Cristobal, who was on the Alabama staff through 2016, was also credited as a lead recruiter for Deerfield Beach star Jerry Jeudy. Before enrolling at Alabama in January 2017, a last-minute visit to Miami and a “thinking hard” tweet led to speculation of a flip but he stuck with the Tide.

A 2016 story in the Palm Beach Post headlined “Miami Hurricanes coach Mark Richt knows he can’t keep every South Florida star home” included a blunt assessment from the head coach.

“Not everybody’s going to stay in Miami,” Richt said. “There’s just too many of them. So the key for us is finding the ones that we want the most and fit all the criteria we’re looking for, but also guys that want to make things happen where their families are close by and bless them, too. The big thing is, I don’t want any young man or any parent to think that there’s a better place to be than the ‘U.’ That’s the goal.”

Miami had another receiver in the 2017 class it hoped to land from outside the perimeter who ultimately landed in Tuscaloosa. DeVonta Smith was once committed to Richt at Georgia and had a trip planned to Miami after his firing in Athens led to a new job with the Hurricanes. That visit, USA Today reported, never happened since Smith had a basketball game that weekend and he signed with the Tide a few weeks later.

The longtime voice of Hurricane football, Joe Zagacki, is familiar with the frustration that comes with Alabama picking off the high-profile talent that once stayed home at Miami.

The formula isn’t complicated, he says.

It begins and ends with a long-time South Florida nemesis named Nick Saban.

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Sitting in the bleachers at Fort Lauderdale powerhouse St. Thomas Aquinas, Zagacki remembers overhearing a football parent beaming with pride telling people Saban was coming for a visit.

His clout precedes any living room chat much like Jimmy Johnson had with Miami in the late 1980s, Zagacki said.

“And it’s a badge of honor when Nick Saban’s recruiting your kid,” Zagacki said. “Every parent loves it, is the thing, you know, it’s if Nick Saban is coming to see your child play. He’s only won the parent. It’s validation for the parent. My kid is going to go to Alabama.”

They see the championship rings but there’s a reason more wall space in Alabama’s recruiting rooms and lounges is dedicated to the 106 draft picks in the Saban era (when Miami’s had 64) that began with his departure from the Dolphins that still irks some in the area.

The Miami program produced eight Pro Football Hall of Famers in the 80s and 90s but the first-round pipeline is down to a trickle. Where Alabama has had 39 first-rounders since 2009, the Hurricanes produced six.

Harris, the former Miami linebacker and teammate of Cristobal’s, said Saban changes everything about making Alabama attractive to South Florida kids. Coming out of Fort Myers in the 80s, Harris knew Tuscaloosa well, visiting often to see family as a kid and described it as being “in a time warp.”

“I’ll be honest,” he said in a phone interview, “that wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to go to. I’d been to the University of Georgia, and I knew right away it wasn’t for me. I’m a South Florida kid and we’re different.”

Saban’s ability to keep them “in a bubble” and focused on the business of the game is his greatest accomplishment pulling talent from places outside the deep south.

“And when he comes into South Florida,” Harris said, “he usually gets what he wants.”

A lot of the time, he said, the Hurricanes make top 10 or top-5 lists of blue-chip recruits to “appease the locals.”

The 2021 class was somewhat of an exception, Blustein said, but the COVID-19 pandemic likely had something to do with it. Miami signed the No. 11 class in the 247 Sports composite with 18 of the 21 enrollees coming from the state of Florida. Before the restrictions on recruiting visits, Miami signed players from nine states to the 2019 class ranked 17th.

A few of the highest-rated members of that 2021 class -- namely five-star guys like defensive lineman Leonard Taylor and safety James Williams -- had Alabama among their finalists before they opted to stay home.

“But my point is, those two 5-star kids are from South Florida,” Blustein said. “Normally they wouldn’t have stayed there, to be honest with you, they would have been somewhere else and because of COVID and the familiarity of the area and the parents, not really knowing what’s going to happen, they kept them closer to home and (Miami) benefited.”

To escape the cycle of playing in the Pinstripe, Independence and Cheez-It bowls, Blustein said they need to string a few of those classes together. And even with the visit moratorium, Alabama signed two of the top 30 recruits in the 2021 class from South Florida in St. Thomas Aquinas linebacker Dallas Turner (No. 9 overall) and receiver Ja’Corey Brooks, the No. 27 overall recruit from Miami who visited Coral Gables a few times before the pandemic hit.

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Manny Diaz was Miami’s defensive coordinator under Richt when Braylen Ingraham was a top target for the 2019 class. In fact, Diaz made a home visit to the defensive lineman from Fort Lauderdale in the fall of 2018, according to his 247Sports timeline. Like Turner, Ingraham came out of St. Thomas Aquinas, a national blue blood that once famously banned Saban from recruiting on its Fort Lauderdale campus.

Then head coach and AD George Smith wrote the infamous letter after Saban spurned the Dolphins to replace the fired son of Miami legend Don Shula at Alabama. That ban had long since lapsed a decade later as Smith was in his final years as athletics director after already turning in his coaching whistle.

As Zagacki remembers it, Miami felt like they had Ingraham locked in before Alabama swooped in.

“The guy,” Zagacki said, “that made Mark Richt pull his hair out.”

A few weeks after making the last of a half-dozen Miami visits, Ingraham committed to Alabama and signed two months later. His St. Thomas Aquinas classmate, Jordan Battle, also signed with Alabama and is set to become a breakout star in the Tide secondary this fall. The safety who was once committed to Ohio State said Miami recruited him “very hard.”

“My dad grew up a Miami fan, so I used to always grow up watching Miami,” Battle said with a smile last week. “Of course, they have a great tradition over there, great history. So all love for Miami.”

While Diaz, who replaced Richt as head coach in 2019, wants to fill his rosters with local talent, he also understands the math. There are a few college rosters full of talent in the area every year and there are only so many spots on each campus. Still, everyone is eyeing the elite who live within a 30-mile radius of Miami.

“We don’t think of it as defending. We look at it as attacking,” Diaz said in a phone interview with AL.com. “You have to do a great job of creating great relationships when it is your home area. You have to be who you say you are because you have to go into those same schools every year and ultimately you have to put a product on the field that players think will maximize their abilities and help them win games.”

A win over the defending national champions would certainly help get some of that recruiting swagger back. He acknowledges recruiting and college football are barely the same sport as it was in the glory days of the 1980s and 90s as “the internet made the world a much smaller place.”

They’ve improved football facilities decades out of date until recently. An indoor practice field joined the recruiting tools in 2018 but Zagacki acknowledges it’s a long way from equaling the palaces that are Alabama’s football facilities.

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Two decades removed from its last national title, Miami knows its program isn’t on the pedestal it once built. There have been fleeting moments of success in the era Alabama sustained its empire with the help of its local stars.

Alabama’s a nearly a three-touchdown favorite to beat the Hurricanes even with Heisman candidate QB D’Eriq King and almost the entire Miami offense back from a team that started 8-1 last fall.

The fact most recruits today weren’t even alive when Miami was competing for national titles is a factor in the pursuit to get back there, Blustein said, but there’s a New York Yankees/Notre Dame factor involved. The glory years talk remains and pop culture touchstones like the 2009 documentary “The U” bridges some of that gap.

Fort Lauderdale five-star Brandon Innis is among the next crop of NFL-caliber stars coming out of the region. A junior at the same American Heritage High School that produced three-year Alabama starter and All-American Pat Surtain, Innis visited Miami twice in July when the nationwide ban on recruiting visits ended.

“At the end of the day,” Blustein said in mid-August, “Brandon Innis isn’t going here.”

The longtime recruiting guru projected Innis to Alabama before the No. 9 overall recruit committed to Oklahoma on Aug. 22. That said, Blustein said Miami isn’t winning a recruiting battle over Alabama for practically any reason other than a more realistic promise of instant playing time resulting from a more pliable depth chart.

The sheer depth of South Florida talent creates the potential for even the second tier to change a program.

It just hasn’t been Miami’s, or at least not to the level it once flaunted.

Blustein scoffs at the idea of the South Florida fence ever existed even when the Hurricanes lorded over college football. There are just too many of them.

But in the era of Saban, Alabama’s ability to surgically strike the game-changing talent it wants from Palm, Broward or Dade county is the difference.

“Whoever they want,” Blustein said bluntly, “they get.”

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.

Alabama signees from South Florida under Saban

2008

197. (overall ranking) QB Star Jackson, Lake Worth

2009

296. DL Ed Stinson, Homestead

2012

45. WR Amari Cooper, Miami

2013

350. DB Eddie Jackson, Fort Lauderdale

2015

12. WR Calvin Ridley, Pompano Beach

2016

584. DB Aaron Robinson, Deerfield Beach

2017

21. WR Jerry Jeudy (Deerfield Beach)

78. LB VanDarius Cowan (Palm Beach Gardens

122. DB Daniel Wright (Fort Lauderdale)

2018

6. DB Patrick Surtain (Fort Lauderdale)

143. WR Xavier Williams (Hollywood)

2019

7. OL Evan Neal (Okeechobee)

43.DB Jordan Battle (Fort Lauderdale)

164. DL Braylen Ingraham (Fort Lauderdale)

2020

144. WR Thaiu Jones-Bell, Opa Locka/Miami

2021

9. LB Dallas Turner (Fort Lauderdale)

27. WR Ja’Corey Brooks (Miami)