MIAMI — Mario Cristobal has just finished his first fall practice of his first football season back home as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes. Inside the emptying echo of UM’s indoor practice facility on campus, Cristobal stands under the banners of storied former players in the rafters, including stars from UM’s five national championships.
These are the ghosts Cristobal is chasing. The glory days he is trying to revive.
”Twenty-five years I’ve been at this now. Twenty-five,” he says, meaning the college coaching game.
A quarter century’s climb to get exactly where he always wanted to be. Maybe always was destined to be.
Big-time coaches are always going a mile a minute, especially as their season is upon them. Forever looking ahead to what’s next. I ask this coach if he can take a minute to say, at heart and gut level, what it means for him to be where he is right now, in this job.
There is a thoughtful pause.
“I can’t take the minute because it means the world to me and then some, and I can’t even delve into that mindset because that becomes emotional,” he says. “Emotions are dangerous because they go up and down. It’s the best thing in the world but I can’t think about that right now. Someday I will.”
If not him, then who? If not now, then when?
Never before in 87 years of University of Miami football have we seen a nexus of burden and opportunity quite like this, with one man at the center of it, alone.
Mario Cristobal arrives, comes home, as less a head coach than an appointed savior. He is here to lead a resurrection, to restore glory and make the Hurricanes national champions again for the first time in 21 years. He is here to make real again every scintilla of swagger once associated with the program but now a magic perfume lost.
“I am not a savior,” he demurs. “I’m a local kid that played high school ball right up the road. Next thing you know I’m [at UM] on a team winning multiple national titles. I’m a piece of this whole thing. But I’ve seen what’s possible when Miami is Miami, operating at a certain level and one of the elite programs in the country. The people, the energy, the diversity — I love Miami, and I remember the community changing, coming together. I don’t feel pressure. I feel a responsibility for doing everything possible for a community that helped raise us. ”
Others before him have tried and failed.
Randy Shannon had The U in his bloodline, too. Al Golden was so popular, for a minute, that the fratboys wore white dress shirts and orange neckties to games just like him. Mark Richt was family as well, an ex-Cane. Manny Diaz was born and raised 3-0-5, Cuban heritage out front in Miami’s most Cuban city.
All fell short to varying degrees.
None had what Cristobal has. What surrounds and empowers him.
Money. Commitment. Full support.
Right after the firing of Diaz, whom UM got on the cheap, somewhere within this private university in Coral Gables arose the decision to finally get in the game with the big boys. To spend whatever it took.
At the crucible of it all, on the throne, sits Cristobal, the most coveted, at-the-top-of-his-game coach UM has ever hired. And the costliest. Oregon tried hard to keep him, with a raise to $7 million per year. Miami pried him home with a 10-year, $80 million contract.
“I never saw myself going anywhere else,” Cristobal said of Oregon. “We left the best place in the conference behind. There was only one place that could have pulled me and I never though it would happen. When it did [and Miami called] it hit me squarely between the eyes. It was very powerful. That was emotional. Internal stuff.”
Thinking the call from UM would never happen certainly applied when Cristobal spent years so close yet so far from Coral Gables while the head coach at FIU earlier in his career.
Now, along with Cristobal, UM hired a pricey, star athletic director in Dan Radakovich from Clemson, the ACC football rival UM must catch and surpass..
And gave Cristobal a record budget to hire one of the best coaching staff of assistants in America.
Now Miami plans a further major expansion of its facilities. Soon, the indoor practice facility will be lengthened by 150 feet, and a new five-story building of football offices and meeting rooms will rise beside it.
“There’s a lot of catching up to do,” as Cristobal puts it.
Says Radakovich: “Boosters wanting to get involved look to us and say, ’What are you putting in?’ Now they’re seeing it.”
Coming off a 7-5 season, UM is poised for big improvement under Cristobal. Though preseason rankings are not yet out, ESPN’s Football Power Index ranks the ‘22 Canes No. 9 nationally. Sports Illustrated’s 2022 transfer portal rankings (yes, that’s a thing) ranked Miami 10th, tops in the ACC. ESPN’s 2023 recruiting class rankings have UM No. 11.
Cristobal gets to be a players’ coach because he’s been one of them, but also is a disciplinarian big on the small stuff.
Players may not wear hats inside the building. A 7:30 meeting means be there by 7:25. “Running on and off the field should be full throttle.”
Expectations are buoyed not only by Cristobal’s arrival but by the return of quarterback Tyler Van Dyke, who is coming off one of the best individual seasons (2,931 yards, 25 TDs) of any Canes QB ever.
Cristobal, 51, the same man who says, “Emotions are dangerous because they go up and down,” felt all of that himself this past March when lost his mother, Clara, after a long illness. He coached the Canes in a spring practice the day he buried her.
“I needed it. She needed me to do it. That day I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I had to be around [football],” he says. Then smiles. “She would have absolutely kicked my butt if I hadn’t coached that day.”
Cristobal bumped into his Little League baseball coach earlier this summer. And happened across an old high school teammate while filling his tank with gas one night. It struck him how excited they were that he was now coaching UM.
“That’s when it hits you. ‘Whoa, this is unbelievable!,' ” he says. “You couldn’t draw it up better.”
Cristobal looks up into the rafters. At all of those famous names. At the history that pushes him and the future now in his care.
“I love it. I love this right here,” he says. “Let’s work it into existence. Let’s take the next step.”
