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This is the exit interview that he never gave. Randy Shannon had driven off into the dark that night a year ago, maybe the toughest of his four-year reign as the University of Miami's football coach, and had disappeared.

His phone rang. It was the athletic director, Kirby Hocutt, who had just convinced Shannon's greatest supporter, Donna Shalala, the University President, to replace the coach after a disappointing loss to South Florida. Just like that, Miami's reclamation project was over. Randy Shannon was fired by his alma mater.

Everything Shannon had done in his adult-life had revolved around Miami. He grew up on the streets of Miami. He played college ball at Miami. He cut his teeth as a coach at Miami. Even when he left for three years to go broaden his football knowledge in the National Football League, it was at -- Miami.

Then Shannon brought all that wisdom back and helped the Hurricanes win the 2001 National Title and play for it all again in 2002. He was named the nation's top assistant coach, hailed for his ability to recruit not only in South Florida but all over the country as far west as California. And in 2007 he was hired as head coach, because Miami had begun sliding despite his top 10 defenses and the program was a total mess known for on-field brawls, off-the-field shootings, even deaths. Players weren't going to class because the program's level of discipline wasn't strong enough. Nobody wanted the job.

"Being an alumnus and having a lot of pride in the University, I knew that I was the right guy who could change it around," Randy Shannon says now.

Shannon recruited the nation's top class his first year, built around a high school national championship team from, you guessed it, Miami. And then Shannon set off on a rebuild that was supposed to have a happy ending, with a parade down the streets of downtown, not with a lonely ride home on the Saturday night after Thanksgiving of 2010 and a phone call that would change everything.

The Hurricanes had just lost to South Florida to finish the 2010 season at 7-5, the same team they face again this Saturday in Tampa. Shannon was unable to get his team to stop giving away football games, and that one was a glowing example. He could get his players to go to class. He could get them to stay off police blotters. But he couldn't get his quarterback to stop throwing interceptions or his defense to stop committing mental errors.

It was the fourth year of his tenure, the time in Shannon's master plan that he expected Miami to begin turning the corner back toward national prominence. Miami had gone 5-7, 7-6, and 9-4 in his first three seasons. Now came the hard part, getting to 10, 11 or 12 wins. The season unraveled with a humiliating 45-17 home loss to Florida State and then losses to Virginia, Virginia Tech and finally South Florida.

Shannon knew he had to make more changes if it was going to all come together for the Hurricanes in years five or six.

The wheels were turning in his head that night as he drove home from the stadium. How could he personally get better? What staff changes could he make? What procedural changes would help his players perform better on game day?

And then Randy Shannon was not heard from again.

Until now.

Shannon smiles, freshened from what he turned into a 12-month long working vacation.

"I didn't disappear. I just haven't been in the paper," Shannon says. "I went off to school to make myself better."

He still lives in Miami; the AD that fired him does not. Two months after removing Shannon and replacing him with Al Golden, Hocutt left for Texas Tech. Golden has been universally accepted at Miami, but has struggled through many of the exact same on-field problems this year that brought Shannon down, trying to alter the DNA of a team that most excels at helping its opponent win football games.

"I didn't win the conference title or the national championship. That takes time," Shannon said. "But I changed everything at Miami and that was what I was hired to do. I have no regrets. I left it a better place."

Shannon feels so refreshed and empowered now because he understands the world that he toils in so much better. A year off gave him time to take a step back and study the real game that gets lost among all the Saturday battles on the gridiron. He reinvested in Randy Shannon, traveling the country to observe universities and coaches and their programs, dissecting what was working and what was not, comparing it all to his way of doing things.

He has emerged from it with a firm conviction that a lack of patience is crippling his profession.

"Schools need to give coaches more time," Shannon said. "You can't win in two or three years anymore and then when you do get it done and win you are going to have some up years and some down years.

"If you look at Alabama with a great coach, they were able to win a national championship quickly. But they also have had a couple seasons where they lost some games. Look at LSU? What did they have, five losses in 2008 and four in 2009. Where are they now? Look at Clemson and Florida. College football is different. There is so much parity. When they cut to 85 scholarships from 105 that changed the game. Now they are thinking about 80. You can't take as many chances on kids. The talent is more spread out. So it's going to be like this where teams bounce back and forth."

But, as Shannon prepares to search for his next opportunity in coaching, he knows that universities, their fans and boosters don't like the bouncing, that they will not give their coaches more time.

If home-grown Randy Shannon can get fired from Miami after four years, where does that leave everyone else out there? Dozens of head coaching jobs are about to come open in the next few weeks. Shannon hopes to land one of them. But even if he does, he will know the reality that he is in a race against time to win.

Shannon interviewed for coordinator jobs at UCLA and Maryland last winter, but decided that he was better off taking a year off from coaching and going back to school. He went to North Carolina and Iowa State. He went to Alabama and Minnesota. He went to UNLV, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and TCU. He went to Oregon and Arizona State.

Some schools he visited had successful programs, some did not. Shannon paid very little attention to schemes and game plans. Instead he focused on the infrastructure of football programs. He studied coaching staffs and how head coaches went about putting them together. He studied the operations side of programs.

"Being at Miami all my life, I had never seen anything else," Shannon said. "If you don't know anything else you get stuck in ways.

"It was time for me to go see something new as a coach. In this time and age, you don't have time to go see places when you are caught up in running a program. You watch film. You see Xs and Os. But when you can actually go there, you can see things that might help you in the future.

"I talked to athletic directors, strength coaches, performance enhancement people, compliance directors. It was about getting a perspective on the whole program. I watched how practices were organized and how people were doing their jobs. I was like a student. I went right back to school. I learned the things that I was on the right track about and the things I needed to get better at."

One of the areas where Shannon really struggled at Miami was assembling an organization for the first time. It's the kind of thing that outsiders take for granted, but is the core reason why so many coaches fail in their first shot at being a head coach. For example, Shannon offered his offensive coordinator position to five guys who turned it down before landing his sixth interviewee, Patrick Nix from Georgia Tech, who only survived two seasons. Shannon had five different coordinators in four years, disrupting the continuity of the program he was trying to build.

"I have learned that you have to hire slow when you hire your staff because you have to make sure you don't hire coaches with hidden agendas," Shannon said. "You want guys who want to come there and work and who want to be champions, not guys trying to work for you to get another job. When I traveled around, I saw the difference between coaches who were willing to sacrifice and worry about nothing else but winning games and coaches always on the job market.

"As a rookie head coach, these were things I had to learn. You learn on the job. I learned to hire slow, be more thorough. What sounds good right now, wait another week. Make them sweat. Then you will see things, see who is really committed to wanting to be with you rather than who just wants to get a title or a raise."

Shannon says that the list of things he learned on his educational tour is quite long. With all that knowledge, Shannon feels more at peace and ready for another opportunity than he did the night a year ago that he was dismissed and branded a failure after just four years.

"When I get back into coaching again, I will be a lot better," he said. "I will be totally different. I will be so prepared because of the time I took off this year to learn."

When the job interviews begin in the coming weeks, people will look toward the future with the coach and hear about his vision. But they will also want to know all about Shannon's time at Miami. It may have had an unhappy ending, but once you get past the agony of defeat it really is a fascinating story.

Miami was reeling in the final days of Larry Coker's five-year tenure in 2006. An on-field brawl with FIU had tarnished the team's image. Players were not performing in the classroom. Defensive lineman Bryan Pata had just been murdered.

Shannon took over and laid down some specific laws. A believer that nothing good happens to kids after midnight, Shannon threatened his team with suspensions if anybody got so much as a traffic ticket after the witching hour. He would suspend not just the guy getting the ticket, or getting arrested, but everyone else who was with him too. That made teammates accountable to each other. Guns were banned, permit or no permit. Classroom attendance and participation was mandatory or else. Shannon would even regularly show up at class and sit next to his players.

"You go out to recruit and you have just had all of those things happen, a murder, a brawl on national TV. How are you going to get the parents to trust you and let their kids come to the program?" Shannon said. "We were able to do that, but I had to change the culture first. I had to fix the academics and get to a point where nobody was getting in trouble. We had to change the entire perception of the school.

"It isn't easy and you have to try to win 9-10 games while you are doing it because that is what is expected of you. Miami was just named the 38th best University in the United States. I like to think we had something to do with that."

But Shannon was able to get to nine wins only once and in the end that is why he is no longer Miami's head coach. That top rated recruiting class turned out to be more of a developmental group than all the experts thought. The fallout of tough times was showing up all over the roster, it's just that nobody realized it until it was too late, until Miami began stocking NFL rosters with mid-round draft picks as opposed to first-rounders that make the difference between mediocrity and championships.

"Did I get difference makers?" Shannon asked, repeating the question. "If you go by people drafted in the first round I didn't get difference makers those first few years when everything was stacked against us. We got guys like Leonard Hankerson and Orlando Franklin who we had to develop and then we had to do things like move Sam Shields from receiver to corner and get Jimmy Graham off the basketball team. We did it and we were making progress. But four years? No. It wasn't going to happen in four years as badly as I wanted it to. We couldn't recruit enough guys that quickly to where winning was easier because of all the things that we had to overcome."

But Shannon admits that he expected to win more than seven games in 2010.

"I knew we needed to get some breaks, but you want to keep getting better and better," Shannon said. "I was shocked to only win seven games. I expected more. We were still a young football team, moving guys around and having to replace some guys like you always do. But I felt we could win. Of course I did. You ask any coach in the country and they think they can win.

"We had won nine games the year before and I thought we could get to nine wins again in year four and then in the fifth or sixth year we could get to 10-11 wins. I felt like parents were seeing that everything had changed at Miami and that they could believe and trust in us. We were starting to get bigger kids and more athletes. We weren't playing with a 240-pound center anymore or 250-pound defensive tackles like we were the first two years.

"We needed more quarterbacks and needed to fix the defensive backfield. But the offensive line was fixed, the tight end position was set for the long term. The running back position when Storm Johnson was still there was fixed, we had five good ones. We had two fullbacks. We had a bunch of defensive linemen and had just recruited a bunch of linebackers. We had guys. So from where I took over the program, it was not even close. I felt like it was the same as when Butch (Davis) was here and we started to win in years four, five and six."

Shannon has obviously watched Miami struggle through the 2011 season in much the same manner that it did 2010, with costly mistakes resulting in losses that maybe didn't have to happen. He won't comment on any of it, though he feels for Golden having to work through the Nevin Shapiro controversy that resulted in suspensions to start the season and all the distractions through the entire NCAA investigation process.

"No coach should have to go through that," Shannon says.

Shannon was stunned to hear the allegations by Shapiro that Shapiro provided 72 Miami players with improper benefits over a decade. Shannon hasn't been implicated in the investigation because his disdain for Shapiro and refusal to even talk to him was always widely acknowledged throughout the athletic department and was even a source of contention between him and Hocutt.

Shannon warned his players to stay away from Shapiro, had no idea Shapiro was stalking them as they bowled on South Beach or that Shapiro was seducing them with free drinks every chance he got. He also instructed coaches to stay away from the man who always was angling for inside access to the program.

"All I said was 'Wow,' "Shannon said when he heard of Shapiro's claims. "Everybody knows what kind of person I am. I don't like a lot of distractions. And we did extensive education when I was at Miami, telling kids where they need to go, who they need to be with, who they needed to watch out for.

"I had so much help from the law enforcement community in South Florida in my four years at Miami. They would tell me the places to make sure my players stayed away from. But nobody knew about Nevin Shapiro, what he was doing. I did everything I could."

That is all Shannon will say about the matter in deference to the ongoing NCAA investigation.

But make no mistake, Shannon has reemerged from his self-constructed coaching lab an armed and ready candidate primed to find his next opportunity. He will miss Miami when he finally moves away, though he can probably land the job up the road at Florida Atlantic in Boca Raton, a Sun Belt Conference team, if that is the path that he chooses. Miami has been a part of him his entire life.

"I have no regrets today because of what I know I have done for that program," Shannon said. "Did I change the public perception of Miami? Yes. Did I clean the program up? Yes. Did I get the academics right and did I raise a lot of money? Yes. Did attendance go up while I was coach? Yes it did. The things I did at Miami were great.

"But in four years, did I win a national championship or a conference title? No I did not. Nobody wants to get fired. You get down, but you don't get mean. It's not personal. It's business. That's the business that I am in right now, and you know what, I love it.

"I don't have anything to be embarrassed about. If I had left Miami in the same place as when I took it over, that would have been an embarrassment. Did we finish the job? No, I didn't get to finish the job. Everybody wanted Miami football to be where it was in the past. That's going to take time."