Cote: Old ghosts, new glory center stage as Miami hosts Notre Dame | Opinion
More than the din of sonic noise will be in the air Sunday night at Hard Rock Stadium. College football history will be, too. All the old ghosts will be out as two of the sport’s most storied — and starving — programs and fan bases try to find their way to long-elusive new glory days.
Miami Hurricanes. Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
There is magic in the words, still. But the memory must reach to recall it. These two premium national college brands have spent the past 61 years, combined, trying to live up to their past. Trying to prove they are “back,” back to a standard set by their own ghosts that does not accept 10 wins and top 10-good.
National championship is the standard in Coral Gables and in South Bend. Miami last met that demand in 2001 with its fifth and most recent crown. For Notre Dame it was way back in 1988.
They Canes and Irish both are close now.
Sunday night will reveal who’s closer in not less than a coast-to-coast announcement.
Miami carries a preseason No. 10 ranking after narrowly missing the 12-team College Football Playoff last year, and Notre Dame is No. 6 after reaching the CFP championship game but falling ... which means failing.
The mammoth season opener — Miami’s first between two top-10 teams since 2004 — is an obvious barometer on where both teams stand, how close to back each is.
The Canes’ Mario Cristobal, the fourth-year head coach, won’t let himself see it like that. He understands that to play 16 games (you get to 16 if you reach the CFP final) requires holding each important.
“If you play great but then not so well in games five and six, it doesn’t matter,” he said Friday. “For us to become what we want to become, every game has to be treated as a Super Bowl. You’re being judged, moved up and down, every week.”
It also is true that, to CFP voters, losing Game 1 to a quality foe is more forgivable, more survivable, than a brutally timed late-season loss. Heck, Notre Dame lost its second game last season to lowly Northern Illinois, a stunner, but recovered to reach the championship game.
Still, the stakes at play in Notre Dame at Miami are inarguably enormous, and it isn’t just about the polls. It’s about the perception. Dozens of potential Miami recruits will be at the game, watching along with a national prime-time TV audience.
The winner will have made a statement, no, a declaration.
It has been two decades since this this level of excitement ushered in a Canes season.
Inter Miami and Lionel Messi play for soccer’s Leagues Cup title Sunday night. The Dolphins open their NFL season next Sunday. But both curtsy and bow right now to the grip the Canes have on South Florida.
When I spoke with Cristobal on Friday he became playfully annoyed as I pressed him to describe his level of confidence entering Sunday night.
“I’m never gonna talk predictions,” he said, but soon after noted, “I live my life as a confident mother[******]. It’s been relentless and intense preparation all the way through. I’m, like, manic.”
He wants that same intensity from Sunday’s home crowd.
“Our fans, man, this is their opportunity to show exactly what this university, this city, is feeling. Make that place as much like an asylum as you can,” he says. “You come to Miami to play in monster games.”
You know Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman feels privately his team will win Sunday night, just as you know Cristobal feels the same about his team.
Hopes are sky-high for new UM quarterback Carson Beck, Miami is better where it needed to be, and this roster looks airtight. Canes should be a playoff team with a big chance once in it. As for Sunday night, Cristobal won’t share a prediction, but I will: Miami, 31-16.
Cristobal and Freeman are the two caretakers of the tradition, the past. The two men charged with making their pedigreed programs champs again. The old ghosts are watching.
High on my list of most memorable road trips in a long career was the one to South Bend, Indiana, on Oct. 15, 1988. It was the deepest heart of the glory days. Irish would win their last national title that year. The mid-dynasty Canes were then reigning champions and would win it all again in 1989, and again in ‘91.
That day, Miami was ranked No. 1 and Notre Dame No. 4, both unbeaten. The Irish would win, 31-30. Walking through campus toward the stadium I would see a bedsheet hanging from a dorm window, with large words spray-painted on it.
CATHOLICS VS. CONVICTS. The phrase was on T-shirts all over the stadium as Irish fans mocked Miami’s bad-guy image that percolated on swagger, on battle fatigues worn on road trips. Then-coach Jimmy Johnson loved it all, nurtured it. The Hurricanes booed savagely on road trips was music to the ears.
Cristobal’s first season as a UM offensive lineman was 1989, so he inherited the passion of what Canes vs. Irish meant.
“Growing up you wanted to come to Miami, and games like this had a ot to do with that,” he says.
In 1985 UM had crushed Notre Dame 58-7 in Gerry Faust’s final game as coach, and Johnson reveled in the noise as accusations of running up the score surrounded him.
“They accused us of running it up, but we didn’t run up the score. They did [because] they played so poorly,” Johnson said, backing down not a centimeter. “We emptied the bench. We played every substitute we had throughout the whole second half. They criticized us for blocking a punt — and they only had 10 players on the field when we blocked the punt. It wasn’t our doing that ran up the score, it was their poor play.”
Ah, the glory days.
Decades later, Sunday night, all of those memories and old ghosts will be there among the sellout crowd as fans of each team cheer for the very same thing:
Fresh memories, new dominance ... and the next championship.
This story was originally published August 29, 2025 at 3:10 PM.
