Highlights, snippets, thoughts on The U: Part 2, the UM documentary airing Saturday night on ESPN
The U Part 2 --- Billy Corben’s and Alfred Spellman’s sequel on the University of Miami football program through both dominant and disheartening times --- will stir up a tornado of emotions in Hurricanes fans: preening pride for UM constructing one of the most remarkable rosters in college football history at the turn of the century; joy from the team’s fifth national title; outrage from the unjustified pass interference penalty that cost UM a sixth; anger over the Nevin Shapiro fiasco and the NCAA’s mishandling of it, and disappointment over the program’s decline in the past decade.
The 102-minute documentary accurately and colorfully chronicles all of that, taking viewers on a guided tour of the Butch Davis, Larry Coker and Randy Shannon eras, and to an extent, the Al Golden years.
Some highlights and tidbits about the film, which, like the original UM documentary, gets the enviable post-Heisman show time slot at 9 p.m. Saturday on ESPN:
### The U Part 2 allocates about 20 minutes to the Shapiro scandal, and there is some fresh material: For the first time, we see Shapiro running through the tunnel and the smoke before a Hurricanes game.
Former safety Randy Phillips reveals that “I didn’t have to sell drugs no more because” Shapiro was helping him financially.
Phillips and former UM staffer Sean Allen deliver the keenest insight on Shapiro.
“I learned everything from Nevin,” Phillips said. “He was like an uncle to me, a big brother. That’s my mentor. He showed me a million in cash. I’m all about cash. I’m the slave out there running around,… concussions, shoulder surgery. Now I get to be around Nevin drinking free alcohol and eating free food. Of course I’m interested. What student athlete wouldn’t be interested in Nevin Shapiro?
“He was Robin Hood,…. helping me with family… Randy Shannon was the only guy that told me to stay away from Nevin.”
Said Allen: “He could flip from very calm to very angry very quickly. All that rage and frustration and anxiety, he would take it all out on me. So one day I stopped working for Nevin. I found out Nevin got arrested from a staff member at [UM]. My feeling at the time was relief.”
### Phillips said UM introduced him to Shapiro through the living scholar program and Phillips called that program “a joke. They put up money. They buy us.” (That program no longer exists at Miami.)
He said UM told him “to make sure I make him comfortable” because Shapiro was helping the university financially.
### The first part of the film focuses on the program’s brief decline --- the offshoot of NCAA sanctions that cost UM 31 scholarships in the mid-1990s --- and how Davis recovered to build a powerhouse roster. The positive portrayal of Davis assuredly will make some UM fans yearn for his return.
“The NCAA spoke to me specifically, said you’re the head of the program, you need to change the culture,” Davis recalled in the film.
Recruiting was “where Butch was a cut above,” then-assistant coach Don Soldinger said in his interview for The U Part 2. “He really became creative. We scoured the country trying to find walk-ons.”
Davis was able to stockpile talent partly by having some players, such as Santana Moss, come in on track scholarships.
### Soldinger, on the 1995 Sports Illustrated cover story calling on UM to drop football: “I saw that and I wanted to puke. I think people were kind of jealous of the University of Miami because of what we accomplished.
“Butch wasn’t real popular at first because Butch had to control that stuff. It made us look hard at the kids we recruited. It actually turned out to be a blessing in the long run.”
### The seasons that receive the most detailed coverage are 1998 (the early December win against UCLA “was the game that changed the university,” Ed Reed said); the 2000 season (despite beating FSU, UM finished third behind FSU and Oklahoma in the BCS computer poll and was denied a chance to play the Sooners for the national title; Davis said UM would have blown out Oklahoma and “you could see this program was a dynasty in the making”) and 2001, when UM capped a 12-0 season by routing Nebraska in the Rose Bowl for its fifth national title.
“You could have taken that 2001 team and put it in the NFL and without a doubt they would have made the playoffs,” Rolle said of a team with 17 first-round NFL Draft picks.
We see footage of Reed imploring teammates at halftime of a 49-27 win at FSU that season because, as Bryant McKinnie said, “we were winning but we weren’t winning by enough points.”
### Playing on those great Canes team early this century "was like getting initiated into a gang," center Brett Romberg said.
“It was like the prison yard," D.J. Williams said. Said Phillip Buchanon: “Back then, hazing was not OK. But it was OK.”
### McKinnie tells the story about how several players (including Romberg, Reed and others) told then-athletic director Paul Dee that he needed to promote Coker when Davis left for the Cleveland Browns after the 2000 season.
“I don’t want to play for Barry Alvarez,” Clinton Portis said of the Wisconsin coach, who players believed had the inside track for the job before they approached Dee.
As Jeremy Shockey said in his interview: “We felt it didn’t matter who was coaching us [in 2001]. We were going to win a championship.”
Said Williams, of the players wanting Coker: “We had a good thing going here. We just needed a chaperone.”
Davis, in the film, said leaving for the Browns “was a decision I regret. I wish I would have stayed at Miami.”
### Several minutes are spent on the 31-24 double overtime loss to Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl following the 2002 season, including replays of the suspect pass interference call that cost Miami a second consecutive national title.
After that call, Jonathan Vilma said he was asking himself: “Why am I still playing? That’s the only thing I could think about. Why am I still on this field?”
Sinorice Moss recalls “seeing seniors, grown men, crying” afterward.
### The chronicling of the last decade of Canes football is filled with a justified focus on the negative: the murder of Bryan Pata (Phillips said he always carried a gun and wishes he had “gotten there earlier” before Pata was killed); the Shapiro scandal, the brawl against FIU, the 40-3 loss to LSU in the 2005 Peach Bowl (“a lot of things were going wrong [that season],” Olsen said. “The more we tried to correct it, the more things were going wrong. We just couldn’t stop the leak”) and players being reprimanded for composing an obscenity-laced rap song (“It sounded like a good idea at the time,” Olsen said. “Some people were bent out of shape by it. If you had told us it would get out of this room, we probably wouldn’t have done it.”)
### Some players link the decline of the program to the demolition of the Orange Bowl: “Once your tore down the Orange Bowl, you tore down 50 percent of the heart of the University of Miami,” Rolle said.
### The film ends with a reference to UM’s season-ending losses to Virginia and Pittsburgh, an Adam Kuperstein sound bite (from WQAM) about the state of the program and video of the fire-Golden banner, then swivels back to some past UM standouts recalling the program’s halcyon years.
Romberg calls UM the “most diabolical program ever assembled.” Rolle calls UM “the real inventors of swag.”
### Corben and Spellman interviewed 22 people, with Vilma, Williams, Phillips, Olsen and Davis among the most compelling subjects. Arkansas did not respond to Corben’s multiple requests to interview Shannon.
Corben said he would have liked to interview Shapiro but Shapiro’s attorney, Maria Elena Perez, said they could not because Shapiro’s email privileges were revoked at the time, and Corben said he wasn’t permitted to do on-camera interviews because of federal prison restrictions.
UM refused to allow Corben to interview anyone he requested –-- Golden, president Donna Shalala, offensive line coach Art Kehoe or strength and conditioning coach Andreu Swasey. But ultimately, “that didn’t matter,” Corben said.
### The film, like the first, has no narrator. Besides comments from former players and coaches, we hear clips from old press conferences and interviews and sound bites from broadcasters, plus fresh perspective from Dan Le Batard.
### After “The U” aired in 2009 and became ESPN’s most-watched documentary at the time, Corben twice pitched a sequel. ESPN declined but came back to him early this year with an offer.
Filming didn’t start until May, and the turnaround time (less than seven months) was much shorter than the year and a half spent crafting the first one.
"The fact we always wanted to do it and to come back with this opportunity is amazing and really gratifying,” Corben said. “It’s the first 30 for 30 sequel. I hope we make it a trilogy.”
*
. Getting to Dorsey with ease
, containing McGee before he got hurt 
, showing those Miami boyz that OSU can ball too 
.
