IMO, Coker gets more criticism than he deserves.

Coker won the national title with an undefeated season in his first year at Miami in 2001. In 2002, Miami was a controversial pass interference penalty away from winning it again with another undefeated season. Only '94-'95 Nebraska won B2B undefeated titles that I can recall in my 42 years on the Earth. So Coker's first two years were just one play shy of being as good as you can possibly do.

After that, Miami went 11-2 in 2003, 9-3 in 2004, 9-3 in 2005, and 7-6 in 2006.

Since then, Miami has had one ten win season, three nine win seasons, and a bunch of seasons around .500 across four coaching tenures. Not a helluva lot of success.

And even though Butch Davis built the team that Coker inherited, consider this:

1. Davis should have won the national title in 2000. He had all that 2001 talent plus Reggie Wayne and Dan Morgan. I think they kick the shite out of Oklahoma if they had played at the end of the year. So that was a missed opportunity that Davis screwed up. Davis is a defensive guy, Coker was OC, and the one game they lost was 34-29 to Washington. Coker didn't give up 34 pts.

2. Davis has no track record of being able to recruit that well for the long haul, like Saban has done. That 2000 team was Butch's sixth and the 2001 would have been his seventh. Was it just a couple of really good years recruiting or would Butch have fielded future NFL teams for another ten years if he hadn't left Miami? We don't really know that. He hasn't done anything else at another program to suggest he can recruit future NFL Hall of Famers on the regular and if AD's around the country believed he could he wouldn't be at Florida frickin' International.

3. I think Miami's days as an elite program were numbered regardless of Coker, Davis, or most anyone else. Money has become such a huge part of winning in CFB and Miami just doesn't spend like other programs. Things are different now than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Now was Coker a good head coach? No, probably not. But I don't think he was as awful as he's made out to be and he won a good bit on the front end with a program that was full of talent but (IMO) was on an inevitable downward trend to mediocrity.