How Mark Richt planted seeds for Miami Hurricanes’ run to CFP Championship Game

Mark Richt found himself chuckling last week as a picture of him and current Miami receiver Malachi Toney taken at a park several years ago began circulating.

“I loved seeing it, it was awesome,” said Richt, who coached at his alma mater, Miami, from 2016-2018 after his 15-year stint as Georgia’s head coach.

“There were so many kids we came across at the park, I didn’t know that was him or who he would become. I just loved all those kids, and he just happened to be next to me when we took that picture.”

Indeed, that youthful version of Toney has grown into a star receiver for the Hurricanes, who will play Indiana at 7:30 p.m. on Monday at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, in the CFP Championship Game.

Toney, who has been the top target for former Georgia quarterback and current Miami starter Carson Beck, was announced as the FWAA Freshman Offensive Player of the Year on Thursday.

Toney has 99 catches for 1,089 yards and figures to be pivotal to Miami’s hopes of winning what would be the program’s sixth national championship, and first since the 2001 season.

A story on the “Canes Warning” Fansided website celebrated Richt as “an unsung hero” in Miami football’s return to national prominence after the inroads he made in the community.

Richt explained his idea to hold youth football camps with his Miami players was intended to help the children while also establishing the brand so that players like Toney would continue their pursuits to play at the elite level at schools like Miami.

“We knew that there was a long-term pipeline to those parks in Miami, because a lot of our players had once played in those parks before their high school careers over the years,” Richt told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“I always asked our players to do community services, and the parks were one of the areas we would work. So when the players wanted to put on a camp for the kids at the parks, that’s what we did.”

Richt said he had a similar program in place at Georgia, where he worked with former Clarke County Sheriff Ira Edwards to introduce Athens youth to the University of Georgia.

“We’d bring kids on buses to campus, and our players would run a football camp with them,” Richts said. “There’s something about having your players wearing their jerseys, working the camps, where the kids can’t help but look up to them.

“We’d let the kids know it’s more than football, you have to respect your parents, have grades and you have to behave to make it to the college ranks.”

Richt, a first-ballot College Football Hall of Fame inductee in 2023, works as an analyst for the ACC Network when he’s not with his family in Athens.

In addition to his ACC Network role, Richt oversees the annual “Chick-fil-A Dawg Bowl” fundraiser, which raises money for Parkinson’s and Crohn’s disease research.

The money goes to UGA’s Isakson Center for Neurological Disease Research.