How Mario Cristobal is preparing Miami Hurricanes for first road game of season vs FSU
The No. 3 Miami Hurricanes are riding high to start the season, with a perfect 4-0 record and a pair of ranked wins already as they prepare to open Atlantic Coast Conference play on the road against the No. 18 Florida State Seminoles on Saturday.
But Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal knows the dangers and challenges that come with their game this weekend.
It’s an in-state rivalry, and those games always have amped up intensity, especially when it’s a top-20 matchup.
It’s Miami’s first conference game of the season, and the Hurricanes look like the ACC’s top team as they eye their first conference title since joining the league in 2004.
And it’s Miami’s first road game of the season after playing their first four games in the comforts of Hard Rock Stadium, where they have enjoyed the majority of their success the past few years.
That’s three tests wrapped up in one for the Hurricanes as they continue their quest to prove they’re College Football Playoff contenders this seasons.
“It starts with preparation,” Cristobal said Monday during his weekly radio appearance on WQAM’s The Joe Rose Show. “When you go on the road, you pack everything. You pack your toughness, your communication, your resiliency, your physicality, and you do your absolute best.”
They’re expecting to get the absolute best out of FSU (3-1, 0-1 ACC), especially after the Seminoles continue their resurgence from a debacle of a 2024 season in which they went 2-10. Florida State won its first three games, headlined by a 31-17 win against Alabama to open the year to rise up to No. 8 in the AP poll before falling 46-38 in double overtime to Virginia on Friday to begin conference play and falling 10 spots in the rankings in the process.
It was one of 11 games last week featuring teams in the top 25 of the AP poll that was decided by one score, including one of four that went to overtime. FSU was one of four top-10 teams to lose last week, with then-No. 3 Penn State losing in double overtime to Oregon, then-No. 4 LSU losing to Ole Miss and then-No. 5 Georgia losing to Alabama.
“Conference play is in full swing, and it is playoff football,” Cristobal said. “The margins get smaller and smaller as you press forward, and that is what you see across the country.”
That message gets amplified as the Hurricanes head away from South Florida to play a game for the first time this season. UM only has four road games this regular season — Saturday at FSU, Nov. 1 at SMU, Nov. 15 at Virginia Tech and Nov. 22 at Pittsburgh — and will need to prove they can play quality football away from home if they want to live up to their postseason aspirations.
Miami is 15-2 at Hard Rock Stadium since the start of 2023 but just 6-7 away from home during that same time span. That includes losing their final three games away from home last season — at Georgia Tech, at Syracuse and in the Pop-Tarts Bowl against Iowa State — to turn a 9-0 start to the season into a 10-3 finish and on the outside looking in of both the ACC Championship Game and the College Football Playoff.
Cristobal’s main message to the team leading into the FSU game has been stressing that “this is a business trip.”
“There is a job to be done,” Cristobal said, “and nobody, nothing, no noise should ever get in the way of doing that job. It all starts with the Greentree practice field. The rest I can’t get into ... but we get into it pretty good. We set a plan, we set the mentality of what we want to do and how we’re going to do it, and we carry out that plan throughout the week so that we have confidence when we hop on the plane.”
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