There was nowhere to hide, no more excuses. Not after you’ve been field-rushed with cellphones shoved in your face, the rowdy unknown celebrating at your expense.
Not after that painfully silent three-hour flight from Dallas to Miami, stewing on the obvious staring back at them.
“We put ourselves in this situation,” Miami safety Keionte Scott said. “We were either going to lay down, or fight.”
Of all the culture change and roster building at Miami under coach Mario Cristobal, all the carefully crafted evolution from a program lost for two decades to one that could compete for national titles, no moment was more important than that Nov. 1 loss.
But how those very players responded to everything being called into question after an ugly overtime loss at out-manned SMU left the program perilously close to taking an ugly step backward.
For the second consecutive season.
“There were some hard truths laid out,” Miami running back Mark Fletcher said of the players-only meeting shortly after the plane touched down in South Florida. “Everyone looking in the mirror. Am I the problem?”
And that, everyone, is what Cristobal was waiting for, what he had been building toward since the day he returned home in 2022 as the prodigal son, the former Miami offensive lineman in the program’s heyday hired to find glory once again.
This wasn’t walking into the football offices on Day 1 and declaring the cheesy “305” turnover chain is out. Nobody wanted that thing, anyway.
