How UM football has changed with Cristobal, as told by players here from Day 1
Anez Cooper has seen the evolution firsthand.
The offensive lineman has been at the University of Miami for the entirety of Mario Cristobal’s tenure as head coach. He’s one of now a small fraternity on the football team able to make that claim.
That group — which includes fellow offensive linemen Ryan Rodriguez and Matt McCoy, linebacker Wesley Bissainthe, defensive linemen Akheem Mesidor and Ahmad Moten Jr., linebacker Chase Smith and defensive back Markeith Williams among their ranks — are the standard-bearers for what Cristobal has hoped to establish at UM since taking over the program at his alma mater.
“When other guys come in, we just tell them how things should be and like, what coach is telling us,” Cooper said Wednesday. “Coach actually trusted us first, because we’re the first class he recruited. So I feel like us, just when all the new guys come in, we just show guys how things will be running around here.”
Cristobal had reservations about that initial class. It was a “salvage class” as he called it. Cristobal was hired in early December, right before the early signing period began, so his goal was to keep any players he could from the recruiting class that was already in place.
“You have nine days,” Cristobal said. “If you can find yourself a handful of players who are going to be big-time contributors, it’s a win knowing you have a full cycle to get the next year’s class.”
Six of these eight players — all but Rodriguez (who was actually here the year before Cristobal) and Mesidor (who transferred in from West Virginia) — came from that 15-player 2022 recruiting class. The other nine all transferred out at various points over the past three years.
Those that stayed saw Miami make strides year over year — from 5-7 in 2022 to 7-6 in 2023 to 10-3 in 2024.
Now entering Year 4 with most of that group set to play their final season of college football — Moten and McCoy have one more year of eligibility after each took a redshirt — the hunger to finally get Miami over that final hurdle and be a championship-contending team is palpable.
“It gives me motivation, just seeing what we can do,” Bissainthe said. “I feel like this team is very special. I feel like it’s just a very special group of guys, very special talented guys, and I feel like once we put it all together, then we’re going to take off from there.”
So how did things change?
Cooper pointed to the players inside the locker room, the ones who stayed and the additions that came each subsequent year.
“A big thing was just getting the people out the building who didn’t really want to be here or who didn’t fit in, for real,” Cooper said. “I feel like we just brought in a lot of guys that actually wanted to be here and wanted to rep the U. It’s a big change.”
McCoy said there are “a lot of things that are not tolerated whatsoever” anymore that maybe players tried to get away with early in Cristobal’s tenure.
“Guys being late. Guys not showing effort. There was a lot of that in Year 1,” McCoy said. “Now, going into Year 4, it’s a whole different culture. Everyone’s expected, at a bare minimum, to give your best.”
And that commitment is seen through the players who toughed it out and waited their turn. In the age of the transfer portal and even more recently players being able to get paid for their name, image and likeness, leaving a program for whatever reason has become much easier for players.
Moten, for example, knows he could have dipped at any point in his first two seasons at UM after getting minimal playing time in the first half of his Hurricanes career.
But he chose to stay and got rewarded for it. He became an integral part of Miami’s defensive tackle rotation as a redshirt sophomore in 2024 and figures to have an even more increased role this season.
“Everything is not always going to be peaches and cream,” Moten said. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, let me go here because they’re not liking me.’ That’s not how I go in life. You can’t do that with your job. You can’t say ‘Oh I don’t like my job no more. Let me hit the portal.’ It doesn’t work like that. You gotta dig it out.”
Bissainthe, who starred at Miami Central High before signing with UM, also said he never wavered in his decision to stay at Miami even after the team’s rough first two seasons.
“It was Just believing in coach Cristobal and the vision he had set for Miami,” Bissainthe said. “And I’m a Miami guy. Like, why would I want to leave? Just, let’s make the crib great. Let’s do what we have to do to be where we want to be. Running or going to the transfer portal, that’s not gonna fix anything. Stay where you’re at, put the work in, and you’ll get where you want to be.”
Miami appears to be finally getting to that point. The 10-win season in 2024 was the team’s first since 2017. There’s still work to do, but they have seen the progress and that has them focused on getting the Hurricanes that much closer to its glory days.
“Coach Cristobal is definitely turning this place to where it’s supposed to be,” Moten said. “That’s all him, and that’s all us in the locker room. I feel like the relationship we have with coach Cristobal, how we can come to him about anything, and how he can tell us about anything and we fix it right then and there, that’s what helps our culture. We have a brotherhood.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2025 at 1:28 PM.
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