Miami’s football team climbed into the College Football Playoff ended exactly where its whole argument began: with Notre Dame. The committee finally nudged the Hurricanes ahead of the Irish for the final at-large berth, leaning hard on Miami’s 27-24 win in Week 1 as the decisive tiebreaker between two 10-2 teams. Inside the program, Mario Cristobal had insisted all along they were “really confident” they’d get in if the committee stayed loyal to its own criteria, and Selection Sunday proved him right.
Once the bracket was set, Cristobal went back to a lesson from his Alabama days under Nick Saban. He told ESPN he kept thinking about one Saban line in particular:
“If you want to make everybody happy, don't coach and get involved in football. Go sell ice cream, because the ice cream man makes everybody happy. In football, not everybody’s going to be happy.”
A year ago, at 10-2 and left out of the CFP, Miami definitely wasn’t happy. This year, at 10-2 and headed to Texas A&M as the 10-seed, the anger is coming from South Bend instead.
The difference now is that the committee was asked to rewatch Hurricanes–Irish and, by its own description, saw Miami’s receivers out-athlete Notre Dame’s secondary and a defense that choked off the Irish run game in a way nobody else did.
Not everyone agrees. A reconstruction of the old BCS formula reportedly would have had Notre Dame ahead of both Miami and Alabama, even with the rest of the field unchanged. This first 12-team bracket also squeezed in two Group of 5 programs, Tulane and James Madison, adding more fuel to debates about who really deserved to be in.
Instead, players like Carson Beck, Rueben Bain Jr., Akheem Mesidor, and CJ Daniels now have a real shot to chase something bigger. Cristobal said he’s just glad the process didn’t “punish the student-athletes who actually laid it on the line on the field,” especially in a sport he described as chaotic, with coaches changing jobs midstream and flying back to coach bowl games.
The passion, he said, is at an all-time high, and for once, that passion is burning in Miami’s favor, not against it.
