Cote: Title-game loss doesn’t erase success of Canes’ watershed season | Opinion
It is now 8,782 days since the Miami Hurricanes last won a national championship game in football on Jan. 3, 2002. The number will get bigger and the near quarter century wait longer for Canes fans.
That number might have ended in celebration at home in the College Football Playoff title game at Hard Rock Stadium on Monday night. The game might have delivered UM’s long-elusive sixth national crown. Instead, the night ended in heartache for coach Mario Cristobal and his team in a thrilling 27-21 loss to Indiana that fell 44 seconds short of a miracle finish in a game Miami never led.
Cristobal after called his team, “The best things that happened to the University of Miami in more than two decades,” adding, “They had the guts and the faith and trust to look at a place that was a complete mess and change the culture. That’s not easy. The fact [some of them] leave without a national championship is really hard to deal with. These guys won 13 games this year, got to the playoff, beat four top-10 teams, won the Fiesta Bowl, won the Cotton Bowl. I’ll take complete blame for falling one win short. It’s a tough [loss] to have to eat, but we will.”
Miami aimed to flex its size and physicality, and make its running game a battering ram for ball control. Except the unbeaten Hoosiers were not having that, mostly demonstrating why they had been a 7 1/2-point favorite and completing the first 16-win season in the sport’s modern era.
“This one hurts, and it’s supposed to hurt,” said UM running back Mark Fletcher. “We gotta go back to work. It’s what we do.”
The night did end up in celebration at home, but it was ultimately by the other home team, the joyful noise only making worse the Hurricanes’ pain. It was a home game, too, for Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, the pride of Miami Columbus High and the first player of Cuban-American heritage ever to win a Heisman Trophy, his personal triumph also one embraced by many Cuban Miamians who fled here for freedom just as Mendoza’s grandparents had.
“The most special moment of my life!” shouted Mendoza afterward over fans’ cheers.
It earned Indiana’s first-ever national title.
“One of the great sports stories of all time,” said Hoosiers coach Curt Cignetti.
It is that, 16-0 proclaims it, although to some Indiana is the dubious face of the new era of college football embodied by buying teams with legal cash and myriad transfers. The newly minted champions raided another school, James Madison, for a chunk of its roster.
“Our NIL is nowhere what people think it is,” said Cignetti. “You can throw that out.”
It was strange, almost jarring, to see confetti falling and hear most fans cheering in the Hurricanes’ home stadium as Canes players and fans fought tears.
I don’t think the indigestion of this defeat will ever quite leave Cristobal. The late interception on what could have been a history-making drive, the punt-block touchdown given up, the missed field goal -- this was a game Miami had in its sight even in never leading.
Even with that, though, lost in the Hurricanes’ crushing disappointment, or at least temporarily buried in the hurt, will be the overall success of a season that ended 13-3, the fourth straight year better than the previous one for Cristobal, who returned to his alma mater he helped make champions hell-bent to create new glory days for The U.
He came close enough for it to hurt all the more.
Miami never led, but outgained Indiana 342 yards to 318 despite running far fewer plays, 70-53. Indiana followed a field goal late in the first quarter with a 1-yard touchdown run and 10-0 lead after the kind of assert-yourself drive Miami had imposed on other teams in its three-win playoff run: 14 yards and 85 yards chewing almost seven minutes.
That was the score at the half as Miami saw a 50-yard field goal try carom off the right upright in the final minute.
Finally Miami rallied its fans and drew within 10-7 on Mark Fletcher Jr.’s 57-yard scoring run with 11:06 left in the third quarter. A sack of Mendoza had forced a punt to give Miami the ball.
Was momentum making a U-turn toward the Canes?
Not for long. A devastating special-teams collapse saw a Miami punt blocked and recovered in the end zone by the Hoosiers’ Isaiah Jones to make it 17-7 with 5:04 left in the third.
But the Canes answered for 17-14 on Fletcher’s 3-yard TD run to open the fourth quarter, finishing a drive that saw QB Carson Beck bust out of a quiet game with completions of 24 yards to C.J. Daniels and 22 to Malachi Toney. UM had been 0-for-8 on third downs before Daniels’ catch.
That’s when Indiana fashioned another long drive that ended with Mendoza’s snaking 12-yard touchdown run to make it 24-14 with 9:18 left. His passing stats were modest this night, but Mendoza -- voted offensive player of the game -- reminded why he won the Heisman on that one play that came on 4th-and-4, rewarding the bravado of Cignetti. A 19-yard fourth-down completion to Charlie Becker let the drive live.
“I had to go airborne,” Mendoza said of his crucial score.
His lip had been split on a hard hit by a Miami defense that sacked him three times.
“I would die for my team,” said the quarterback.
Again, though, the Canes answered, making it 24-21 with 6:37 left on Toney’s 22-yard TD pass from Beck, after the pair combined for a 41-yard play earlier in the drive.
Then Mendoza answered back, too. Another 19-yard completion to Becker on the very same route worked this time as well, and led to a 35-yard field goal for 27-21, leaving Miami with 1:42 left to conjure a late miracle.
It fell 44 seconds short on the late Beck interception by Jamari Sharpe on a deep pass meant for Keelan Marion.
“Like to have that last one back,” Cristobal said of Beck. “But he got us here to this moment and got us to the end.”
Across the decades, little in sports consistently sells as a motivator better than “us against the world,” the underdog nobody believes in. Disrespect. And Cristobal had been eating that up this week. Feeding it to players hungry for it.
Indiana favored by more than a touchdown ... in Miami!? The pregame speech was all but written for Cristobal heading into Monday night.
And how’s this? The Hurricanes were officially the visiting team and UM fans were hugely outnumbered in their own home stadium. The indignity!
Indiana University is said to have more living alumni than any college in America, and I think all of them made the trip for this game. Hoosier red made up at least two-thirds of the crowd over Canes orange and green. Famous alum Mark Cuban led the crowd in a pregame “Hoo-hoo-Hoosiers!” chant, and most of the crowd loved it.
(The crowd reaction when President Trump was shown at the game was either mixed, or what many are calling the greatest reaction ever, depending on one’s point of view.)
Unlike every UM championship team except the very first one in 1983, this one rode that underdog motivation all the way back home, to the national championship game.
Who believed that a team ranked No. 18 after falling to 6-2 might run the table to reach the title game?
Who believed a team sweating to be the last of 12 invited by the CFP selection committee could go all the way?
Who believed the Canes would beat favored Texas A&M in College Station? And then shock reigning champion and heavily favored Ohio State? And then beat a higher-ranked Ole Miss?
And then who thought Miami could beat a No. 1-ranked Indiana and its Heisman-winning QB — a team given a 68.3% chance of winning by ESPN’s Football Power Index computers?
Only Cristobal and the Canes themselves believed, is the short answer.
Back in the glory days that Cristobal was a part of as a national-champion offensive lineman, the Canes had a largely negative reputation outside of South Florida. Renegades. Battle fatigues. In your face. Swagger personified. Think Michael Irvin.
Cristobal saw it differently from the inside.
“Miami was made up of a bunch of guys that nobody believed in,” he recalled this week. “And we outworked the world. Changed history. A little over the top. Some edge. Some of them were a little bit wild, a little bit edgy, but what can never be questioned in any way, shape or form was that brotherhood.”
The persona of this Canes team was “a little bit boring” by comparison, Cristobal admitted.
But this much hadn’t changed from those glory-days teams to this one.
“A bunch of guys nobody believes in” still fit.
That underdog role fit and its motivation worked right until the very end, until Indiana made it not quite enough 44 seconds shy of the miracle ending.
This story was originally published January 19, 2026 at 11:26 PM.
