Mario Cristobal did an incredible job for Miami this year, guiding the Hurricanes back to the national stage and restoring belief in a program that had spent years chasing its past. The season ended in heartbreak with a 27–21 loss to Indiana in the national championship game, but the progress was undeniable.
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Miami played with an identity again. Physical, confident, and resilient. And much of that transformation mirrored the perseverance of its head coach. However, Cristobal’s journey at Miami has never been smooth.
Back in 2022, only nine games into his tenure, he sat in a sparsely decorated office after a humiliating loss to Florida State. The Hurricanes had already fallen to Middle Tennessee and Duke, and outside noise was growing louder by the week. Rather than retreat, Cristobal leaned into the adversity.
“I don’t get down. I get pissed and determined to use it in a healthy, productive manner,” he said then. “I feel the obligation to get Miami right. Call it a labor of love.”
That mentality carried Miami through this season. Even after a November loss to SMU, its second defeat to an unranked team, Cristobal used the backlash to galvanize the locker room. His wife Jessica received cruel messages questioning his leadership, yet the Hurricanes responded by winning seven straight, including two College Football Playoff games as underdogs, before falling just short on the final stage.
Long before this run, Cristobal faced a far more personal turning point. In November 2021, while coaching Oregon, he was preparing for the regular-season finale when a staffer pulled him aside with devastating news: “your mother had to be intubated.”
Intubation meant his mother, Clara, might not have another chance to speak with him. She was battling lung and congestive heart failure and had begun to crash. Cristobal immediately flew to Miami. “It’s the most brutal thing I’d seen,” he said of walking into that hospital room.
Two weeks later, the University of Miami offered him the head-coaching job. Accepting meant more than a career move. It allowed him to remain near his mother in her final months. Clara knew he had taken the job and that he was home again, a comfort the family still holds close. Three months later, she passed away at 81.
Cristobal threw himself into rebuilding Miami the way he believed his mother would have wanted.
“It was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done professionally,” he said, “but with faith, the right people and hard work, Miami will become Miami again.”
The Hurricanes didn’t finish the story the way they hoped, coming up six points short of a championship, but Cristobal has already changed the trajectory of the program. Asked what his mother would tell him before the title game, he smiled and answered simply:
“Get it done.”
