Miami has done this before. Can Mario Cristobal bring The U back for good this time?
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Miami is weird.
I know this not just because the great Dave Barry told me as much, though as a kid who came of age in Jupiter, Florida, back when it was a sleepy beach and commercial fishing town, before half the PGA Tour followed Tiger Woods there, I have to admit Dave Barry helped with the realization that Miami is, in fact, a weird place.
I know this because I’ve lived it, coming from a family with long ties to the place and later working in Coral Gables, which is where the University of Miami is located but 27 miles and 40 minutes to 2 hours in traffic from where Mario Cristobal’s Miami Hurricanes, fresh off an impressive season-opening win over a top-10 Notre Dame team, play their home games.
Miami is a weird place, and not just because if you take an afternoon stroll through the Brickell neighborhood downtown, you’ll see men and women donned in the latest Parisian fashions and flashing frozen smiles on faces showcasing the work of plastic surgeons whose genius is directly traceable back to Ponce de Leon, the famed explorer who arrived in Miami in 1513, looking for the Fountain of Youth. The rumor is he found something more valuable: a parking space along the Miracle Mile. But that tale is for another day.
Miami also invented football.
I know this because I’ve worked with Dolphins fans who still open a bottle of champagne every year when the last undefeated NFL team loses and, though their hair is graying or long since gone, they pass the affliction of cheering for the team that sold its soul to go 17-0 to the NFL Devil in exchange for a half-century’s worth of misery and mediocrity on to the next generation.
But Don Shula invented football in the city of Miami just before he perfected steakhouses, and if he didn’t, well, Howard Schnellenberger and the U certainly invented college football. Just ask anyone over the age of 13 at a Hurricanes tailgate, which for “home games” occur closer to mortal Miami-Dade County enemy Broward County than they do the University of Miami’s pristine Gables campus, but that’s because Miami invented college football before it fully invested in classrooms, which the NCAA once upon a time deemed necessary to play college football, or so the story goes. Time will tell if that remains the case in the era of NIL.
In any event, it was Schnellenberger who drove from neighborhood to neighborhood in Miami and the surrounding South Florida area on Friday nights in the early 1980s and realized that athletes who grow up running from or chasing, in no particular order: hurricanes, alligators, venomous toads, bulldozers, traffic on expressways named for Don Shula, jackrabbits, pythons, parrots, sea level rise, flamingoes, and the occasional falling iguana might be faster, stronger, and better conditioned than the hog mollies and heathens who grow up around midwestern cornfields and boast about mystical things like seasons, buildings with good plumbing, or football existing before the 1972 Miami Dolphins.
Once Schnellenberger figured out this formula, Miami built an imaginary fence around the tri-county South Florida area and used those recruits, along with the occasional barbarian quarterback from Minnesota (Steve Walsh), Ohio (Bernie Kosar), or California (Ken Dorsey, Gino Toretta), to win 5 national championships in an 18-year span between 1983 and 2001. After that, well… as Thad, my old Gables barber who also worked as a cupcake maker at a bakery in Coconut Grove (Miami contains multitudes) tells it, the “referees conspired to rob The U of a title in 2002” and “The U hasn’t been the same since” but “when the U is back, man, it will be lit.”
As an aside, it is unclear when Miami became “The U,” but at an Art Basel event in 2019, I met a twitchy fellow named Paolo 4 cafecitos deep who told me that having Canes fans make a “U” sign with their hands was an easier method of paying homage to football excellence in the 305/954/561/786 than the more traditional holding up the No. 1, which is 1 index finger removed from the hallowed and timeless salute given by Miami drivers to other drivers, regardless of country of origin, on I-95 from the hours of 5 a.m. until 4 a.m. Monday through Sunday. That’s as reasonable an explanation as any you’ll get in the Magic City, I think.
I was thinking of Thad and Paolo on Sunday night, watching Miami win a game against a top 10 opponent for the first time since 2017, which, incidentally, was Year 2 of the Mark Richt era and the last time Miami was dubbed “back.”
Miami wasn’t “back” in 2017, but there’s also some truth in the Miami madness.
For example, 2017 represents the only season Miami played for a conference title since that fateful, feckless, preposterous, unconscionable, and likely unconstitutional (cruel and unusual punishment) pass interference penalty in 2002 that denied Miami a 6th national championship.
That Hurricanes team, propelled by a high-level recruiter and alum from the Miami glory years, started 10-0 before faceplanting in their final 3 games and missing the College Football Playoff.
Will Mario Cristobal’s team this season do the same? Are they capable of arriving at what looks like a critical November 1 ACC showdown with SMU unbeaten, holding their conference championship and Playoff fates in their own hands?
On Sunday night at Hard Rock Stadium, everything about The U looked the part of a Playoff team and title contender.
First, there’s the veteran quarterback. Carson Beck isn’t Cam Ward, the star of last year’s 10-3 Canes team that, like the 2017 group, fell short of the Playoff with crushing losses in November. But Beck is an immensely coachable SEC champion from the University of Georgia. Against Notre Dame, he largely eliminated the risky throws that plagued parts of his 2024 campaign with Georgia. The lone hospital ball Beck tossed on Sunday resulted in a touchdown, thanks to a spectacular catch by CJ Daniels.
While Beck can’t count on that type of catch all the time, a headier, more efficient, safe Beck is what Shannon Dawson, one of the sport’s better offensive minds, needs, along with the steady veteran leadership he’s already gotten since Beck set foot on campus.
Second, the team around Beck is more talented than any in the Richt era. The Canes rank 15th in the 247Sports talent composite and the team’s overall rank of nearly 875 in that composite is the highest in the Cristobal era. What’s more, after beating Notre Dame, the only remaining opponent on Miami’s regular season schedule more talented from a 247Sports composite standpoint is Florida, and that game will be played in front of a friendly crowd, just off the Florida Turnpike in Miami Gardens.
Third, the bulk of Miami’s talent is on the line of scrimmage, a testament to Cristobal’s intelligence and the lessons he learned from Nick Saban at Alabama, where he was a key recruiter and offensive line coach in the middle of the Saban dynasty. With 5-star talent across the offensive line, the Hurricanes should be able to run the ball on almost any occasion, making them a tough out on the road, where the run game matters more because of the need to control tempo and the crowd. On defense, a healthy Rueben Bain looked unblockable on Sunday night, and if you double Bain, Akheem Mesidor remains one of college football’s most underrated ends. The interior, a question mark in camp, looked capable, and highly touted Justin Scott looked ready to take a leap.
Finally, there’s the matter of who Miami already beat and what it tells about this team’s character.
This wasn’t some overrated giant or blueblood in decline. This was an ascendant Notre Dame, the program with perhaps the best coach under 45 in the sport, loaded with talent and less than a calendar year removed from playing in the national title game. When the Fighting Irish rallied from 2 scores down to tie the game late in the fourth quarter, other Hurricanes teams, ones deemed capable of bringing The U “back,” may have wilted. This group didn’t. It went and seized the game from Notre Dame again instead, and the much-maligned Hurricanes defense came up big on the game’s final drive.
It is, of course, just one game. And Miami did this last season, too, blasting what proved to be a decent Florida team in The Swamp in Week 1 before faltering down the stretch with losses to Georgia Tech and Syracuse.
If Miami slips up against the hated reptilians in 2 weeks, this win, shining like a summer sunset over Key Biscayne, will be forgotten quickly.
After all, Miami is weird.
As Jimmy Buffett so rightly said, there’s an “impromptu” to the place, a laissez faire, what have you done for me lately, TikTok generation attention span sentiment befitting a city that started as a trading post.
Win now, and Hard Rock will stay full. Miami fans will flood the turnpike on Saturdays, sporting makeshift turnover chains and Tommy Bahama tops and pumping Pitbull and Rick Ross as they dance in convertibles stuck in gameday traffic on the Golden Glades interchange. Win now, and a city whose sports fans are too hot and bothered to be hot and bothered by defeat will coalesce and rise up to become the roaring cauldron of sound that made Hard Rock an incredible place for football last Sunday night. Win now, and Mario Cristobal will become nearly as immortal as the 2 national championship teams he played on, a legend forever known as the man who brought Miami “back.”
Lose?
Miamians will find something better to do, like trying to park a golf cart in Dadeland, picking a fight with the city commission over the 42nd Miami International Airport renovation in the last 41 years, or traveling to outside Miami to see Leo Messi play soccer in Fort Lauderdale for a team called Inter Miami or buying season tickets to see the world champion Florida Panthers play ice hockey in the Everglades because well, what’s more Miami than a sports team that doesn’t play in Miami?
Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
