It will probably be replayed all week, debated on sports talk shows, and written about on platforms like this one about how the Miami Hurricanes football team, under Mario Cristobal, made one of the most catastrophic, mind-numbing calls of all time on Saturday against Georgia Tech.
In the final minute of the game, instead of taking a knee, which would have ended the game, Miami made the decision to run the ball on a 3rd-and-10, where then-running back Don Chaney fumbled the ball away. The play was close, where it looked as if Chaney's arm could have been down, but the official ruling was a fumble on the field, and there wasn't enough to overturn the call through replay.
The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets football team then drove down 74 yards in 24 seconds to score the game-winning touchdown on a 44-yard Haynes King pass to Christian Leary.
It was beyond a disastrous outcome for what has been, up until when Cristobal and offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson decided to go for it and Chaney fumbled, a promising year for the Hurricanes football team. Now, it looks just like another typical Miami Hurricanes football team of the past 20-some odd years: overrated, embarrassed, and outcoached.
This will cost Mario Cristobal and Miami football
Miami's center Matt Lee, who transferred from UCF this season, summed up everyone's reaction to Cristobal and Miami's staff deciding to go for it instead of kneeling. An emotional, crying Lee was shown saying, “What the f— are we doing?”
Cristobal's post-game press conference didn't do much to either explain or alleviate the situation.
“We were moving the pile, and we had a pretty good drive going,” Cristobal said, per The Athletic. “I am not going to make an excuse for it and say we should have done this or that. Sometimes we can get carried away. But I should have just stepped in and said, ‘Hey, take a knee.’
“We should have taken a timeout there at the end,” Cristobal continued. “We thought he [Chaney] could get the first down, and we talked about two hands on the ball, but that isn’t good enough. That’s it, we fumbled the ball, and they went 75 yards in two plays. There is no excuse.”
There's no other way to spin this for Miami and Cristobal. This is just bad. Really bad. Really bad for Cristobal and really bad for the program that has tried so desperately to pull itself out from the basement of irrelevancy. But this wasn't even irrelevancy. This was flat-out embarrassment. This was the blunder of all blunders. This was and has been Miami football for too long now.
Whether the final call was on Dawson or Cristobal, the onus will fall on Cristobal. That's what happens when you're the head coach. The awareness is what is most concerning. To not know the situation, the possibilities, or even just overthink the entire situation makes Cristobal and Miami feel inferior. And that's exactly what they were against Georgia Tech.
Miami football continues to feel inferior
Miami was a three-touchdown favorite against Georgia Tech. It's excusable for a team that just had a bye week the week before, to play on a wet field, going into conference play for the first time against a team that just changed their defensive coordinator to struggle some. It's not a great excuse but still excusable to some degree. Every team has struggles with teams they shouldn't throughout the year. Look at Georgia. This quickly moved past a sluggish, ill-performing team to one substandard of all others, starting with the coaching staff.
If Miami kneels to run out the clock and win the game, this is only looked at as an ugly Miami win. But instead, it's a catastrophic Miami loss that carries a massive weight leading to further regression for the program. It also further exacerbates the woes of last season.
No one believed Miami football could finish 5-7 like they did last season. Upon further review of where the program had been for the better part of two decades, it felt excusable that Cristobal had to make a mess of things to clean them up. But now looking at the 2022 season and seeing the losses to the likes of Middle Tennessee State — that loss and the six others look so much worse.
The room for error now is razor-thin, where every loss and even every win will be heavily scrutinized. There will be no excuses worthy of valuable explanation for anything moving forward. It's now an uphill battle for Cristobal and his staff where now it will be interesting to see just where the dominoes may fall. Because a loss of this magnitude makes everyone question the leadership, which in turn could completely damage your roster. But not only your current roster, but the ones who you are hoping will make up your future one in recruits.
Cristobal is one of the best recruiters in the country, but he'll have to put on his best loafers to get his way out of this one.
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