Yet, it doesn’t seem to faze him and it almost surely doesn’t strike a resonant chord with any of his players.
“Truthfully, they probably don’t know any of the people on that wall,” Martin said the other day as he did a quick study of the RedHawk royalty. “Anybody that’s not on ESPN right now, they don’t know.”
Then again – until now – their head coach has had little in common with the Cradle crew. Instead, his kinship was with Edward John Smith.,
If you’re drawing a blank, it’s because he’s not from the football fraternity. He was the captain of the Titanic, the British luxury liner that sank in the North Atlantic 104 years ago.
When Martin left Notre Dame and got on board in Oxford three years ago, Miami already was pretty much the Titanic of college football.
Once it had been one of the game’s luxury programs and it remains No. 19 all time in NCAA Division I winning percentage and No. 30 all time in victories. It leads the Mid-American Conference in both categories.
But after a decade of demise, RedHawks football had sunk to unprecedented depths. Martin inherited a program that had just had an 0-12 season and as in the midst of a 16-game losing streak that would extend to the nation’s-worst 21 games under his early watch.
The roster was filled with many players who either didn’t have Division I talent or had made football a back-burner priority in college. Home attendance was sagging and many of the support facilities were the worst in the MAC.
“Part of the challenge was taking something that was at the bottom of the ocean and making it special again,” Martin said. “To me, that was very intriguing.”
And also challenging.
Once on board – and as the losses continued in what would amount to a 5-19 record the first two years – Martin said he had moments where “I thought, ‘OK, what did you get yourself into? How the hell did you chose to make this your life?’
“Yeah, there were moments I thought about jumping off a bridge…but they only lasted about 30 seconds.”
He said that with a bit of a laugh, signifying, I believe, that he was joking.
Regardless, those kinds of jokes are all gone.
The program is no longer a punch line.
While salvagers have never been able to come up with a feasible plan to raise the Titanic from 12,000 feet of water, Martin suddenly has Miami football sailing high as it takes on Ball State in the regular season finale tonight at Yager Stadium.
After an 0-6 start this season, the RedHawks – who have one of the youngest rosters in all of college football – have won five games in a row and now are tied with Ohio University for first place in the MAC East Division.
A win tonight against the 4-7 Cardinals would have Miami bowl eligible and, in the process, make NCAA history.
No Division I team has started the season 0-6 and then evened its record at 6-6.
And should Akron upset OU tonight, Miami would advance to the MAC title game in Detroit next month. If OU wins it gets the berth since it holds the tiebreaker over Miami following a 17-7 victory over the RedHawks in early October.
It’s all pretty mind-boggling, but then that’s the sign of the times.
As Martin said last week: “The Cubs won the World Series. Donald Trump in the President and we would become bowl eligible.”
Championship pedigree
Martin knows people scratched their heads in disbelief when he took over the floundering Miami program before the 2014 season.
“It was either I’m a genius or the dumbest guy in the world,” he remembers. “It was going to go one of two ways here.”
After winning national titles in 2005 and 2006 as the head coach of NCAA Division II Grand Valley State – and compiling a 74-7 record in his six seasons there – he had become the offensive coordinator at Notre Dame and helped guide the Irish into the national title game.
When the Miami job opened – rather than use it as leverage in South Bend or even wait on a more promising college position elsewhere – he accepted the RedHawks offer, even though it meant a $200,000 pay cut from his Notre Dame salary.
His first team opened with five straight losses – including a 17-10 flop against lower division (FCS) Eastern Kentucky – and that leads to a Martin admission now that he was part of “the worst team in college football” back then.
Miami had had only one winning season in the eight years before he came and he said in order to recruit he believes his predecessors had to “sell the heck out of the school.”
And that is a good sales pitch. A degree from Miami is valued, the school has considerable connections among its graduates and Forbes recently named Oxford the top college town in America.
All that draws students, though not necessarily good football players.
Even so, that first year – which ended up 2-10 — Martin talked about how he foresaw the RedHawks as the top program in the MAC by 2018.
While it sounded crazy then, it now appears he’s on schedule.
It has not been an easy journey though. There were several disheartening losses and the crowds at Yager Stadium were some of the worst in Division I football.
Last season the average home attendance was 15,707, which is just above the 15,000 the NCAA requires for a program to keep Division I status.
Martin though said he didn’t fault the fans then.
“If it has been up to me I wouldn’t have come either,” he cracked. “People want to spend their time, energy and money on something that’s worthwhile and early on we played some bad football.
“Many times at halftime I thought I would leave if I knew I could keep my job. It wasn’t fun to watch.”
Quips aside, he told his bosses when they hired him to have patience. He had a plan that had worked through 21 years of previous coaching and he was going to stick to it.
He had to turn the roster over, by bringing in new recruits rather than temporary-fix transfers and by weeding out players already there who either didn’t have the talent or commitment for the titanic lift to come.
‘You know how to coach’
Through it all he was buoyed, he said, by people who knew him best, especially his wife, Dulcie.
“Look, she might not think I’m the greatest husband all the time,” he said with a grin, “but there are two things she believes: That I’m a good dad and that I’m always gonna win.
“When we were losing, even when we started 0-6 this year, most wives would be a wreck. But she was like be-bopping along. She’d say, ‘I don’t know what everybody is worried about. You’re going to figure this thing out. You know how to coach. That hasn’t changed.’”
And that’s just what happened.
Martin and his assistants landed two of the top recruiting classes in the MAC the past two seasons and with the talent upgrade there has been a change in the culture and the pride in the program.
In conjunction with that, Miami has made a multi-million dollar upgrade of its facilities and now they’re the best in the league.
Early in the season the RedHawks were hit with injuries and ended up playing a fourth-string quarterback for a while. The team still showed an aggressiveness and physicality it hadn’t in years and afterward opposing coaches commended Martin on that.
Then – with the return of redshirt sophomore quarterback Gus Ragland ,who had been out with a knee injury — came the first victory of the season, an 18-14 triumph over Kent State. That was follow by wins over Bowling Green, Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan and Buffalo – three of them on the road.
Now Martin is mentoring his team on “how to handle success,” – a foreign topic around RedHawk football for years – while talking up the subject on the road.
“I’ve been off recruiting the last two days,” Martin said. “This is the first time I didn’t have to go out there and sell how we’re going to win. Now I walk through the door and people are talking to me about our winning.”
And that’s changed the tenor of some of his other conversations, too.
“I had a couple of nasty emails early in the year from parents,” he admitted. “They said, ‘Look, we believed.., we thought …and it’s just not happening.’
“All I could say then was, ‘Hey, I’m with you. I’m frustrated, too.’
He started to laugh: “Now I’m getting some apologies. ‘People are saying ‘Hey, I’m sorry I sent those messages. I see it now.’”
All it took was raising a program that, as Martin said, was buried “at the bottom of the ocean.”
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