Hurricanes ‘didn’t take care of business’ vs. SMU. Is there time to salvage the season?
Carson Beck’s voice was low as he tried to maintain his composure. The veteran quarterback was clearly emotional following the Miami Hurricanes’ 26-20 overtime loss to the SMU Mustangs on Saturday.
“It’s hard,” Beck said.
It’s the type of loss the Hurricanes (6-2, 2-2 Atlantic Coast Conference) were hoping to avoid — and probably needed to avoid. It’s one that puts them on shaky ground for the 12-team College Football Playoff with four games left in the regular season.
And it’s one that once again exposes so many of the narratives that have been given to Miami over the past few years.
They can’t finish games when it matters down the stretch of a season.
They can’t stay disciplined in key moments.
And now, Miami’s season is hanging on by a thread.
“We didn’t take care of business, and that’s completely on us,” said Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal, whose team dropped eight spots from No. 10 to No. 18 in the latest AP top 25 poll following the loss. “If you’re raised the right way, and you got the right stuff inside you, you go right back to work. You don’t know how things shake out. This is certainly a wild college football season, and the focus has to be on us taking care of our business.”
The Hurricanes’ only saving grace is the parity seen around the sport this season.
After Georgia Tech and Navy lost on Saturday, only four teams remain with perfect records: Ohio State and Indiana in the Big Ten, Texas A&M in the Southeastern Conference and BYU in the Big 12. Seven other power conference teams — Virginia, Louisville and Georgia Tech in the ACC; Texas Tech in the Big 12; Oregon in the Big Ten; and Alabama and Georgia in the SEC — have just one loss. BYU and Texas Tech play each other on Saturday and Georgia is at Georgia Tech on Nov. 28, meaning at least two of those seven one-loss teams are guaranteed a second defeat.
And the race to make the ACC Championship Game is still pretty wide-open, too. Virginia is the only team undefeated in league play. Five more teams — Georgia Tech, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Duke and SMU — only have one loss in conference play. And then there’s Miami with two conference defeats.
It’s not a perfect or easy path by any measure, and Miami certainly needs help from teams around it, but the Hurricanes aren’t counting themselves out just yet.
“You don’t sit around, throw your hands up and say I don’t know,” Cristobal said. “You just go to work. Like I told the guys, you’ve got to be a grown man and face it. When things go wrong, that’s when all the rats start to come out and try to peck at you and all that other stuff. And you’ve got to go tell them to go you-know-what. And go to work and do it emphatically, and do it with some guts, and go fix the things that we have to fix so we can go get better.”
There’s plenty to fix.
Saturday showed just that.
Start with the dozen penalties, including four false starts and an illegal snap on the offensive line. Five of the offense’s nine penalties came on third down. The backbreaker of them all, though, was the unnecessary roughness call on Marquise Lightfoot on fourth and 9. Lightfoot appeared to have a game-sealing sack on the play, but Miami called timeout before the play. That extended SMU’s eventual game-tying drive in the fourth quarter.
Continue with the offense’s stagnation late. Eight first-half penalties stopped Miami from finishing more often than it should have in the first half, but the Hurricanes still outgained SMU 227-121 in the opening two quarters on their way to a 10-7 lead. They led 17-14 midway through the third quarter after a nine-play, 75-yard touchdown drive capped by a 4-yard throw from Beck to tight end Alex Bauman.
After that? Miami had just 114 yards on 27 plays — an average of 4.2 yards per play — on its final three full drives and managed just a field goal. UM had the ball with 25 seconds left in regulation and one timeout, but Cristobal opted for a kneel down to send the game to overtime instead of a chance to win in regulation with the drive starting at the Miami 25.
“We felt that if we could get a return to pop it out past 35, it gives us a chance,” Cristobal said. “In our charts, anything inside the 25 under 30 seconds is more risk than actual reward. We felt good about taking the game to overtime.”
But in overtime, Beck threw his second interception of the game — with Mustangs safety Ahmaad Moses jumping a route on a pass intended for Malachi Toney — and then SMU scored a touchdown six plays later for the win.
“It’s really tough to lose like that,” Beck said.
Now, UM has to make sure it doesn’t make the final month tougher than it already is. If the Hurricanes want to keep any slight chance of making the playoffs alive, they first have to win out the rest of their schedule — Saturday at home against 3-6 Syracuse, Nov. 15 at home against a 5-4 N.C. State team that just beat Georgia Tech, Nov. 22 at 3-6 Virginia Tech and Nov. 29 at 7-2 Pittsburgh.
“Just stay together,” Beck said. “We can’t separate. We have to do what we’ve said that we are the entire year. That’s having a connection, that’s playing as a team and that’s staying in unity regardless of what happened. That’s all we can do.”
Nickel cornerback Keionte Scott put the approach UM must take much more succinctly.
“[Return to] practice Monday,” Scott said. “Game on Saturday.”
This story was originally published November 2, 2025 at 12:35 PM.
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