Miami opened the season against Notre Dame and jumped out to a 21-7 lead midway through the third quarter. As the Hurricanes tried to put the game away, they surrendered 17 more points, allowing the Fighting Irish to tie the game at 24 before UM won on a late Carter Davis field goal.
Fast forward to Saturday. The Hurricanes dominated rival FSU for three quarters, building an insurmountable 28-3 lead. But the Seminoles made things interesting late, scoring 19 points to make the final score of 28-22 look more respectable.
“I would say three quarters of dominant football and one quarter that wasn’t up to the standard,” Miami coach Mario Cristobal said Monday. “Looking back and reflecting on it and analyzing it, we called it to win. We called it to be able to extend our lead. And up 28-3 with the ball, we had a chance to do so.”
Fans watching the game howled on social media during and after the win, blaming the coaching staff for calling conservative running plays instead of putting the game away on offense. But Miami drained the clock while also taking some shots to end the game that just misfired.
Over UM’s final three complete drives, as the lead slipped away, the Hurricanes ran the ball 10 times and passed it six times.
The rushes went for an average of 2.6 yards, slightly below the average of 3 yards per carry in the game. They picked up one first down on the ground and would have had another, but a Marty Brown 1-yard run was taken off the board when FSU was offside, giving Miami the first down anyway.
Of the six pass attempts, four were incomplete, and the two completions were for 3 total yards. One came on a third down after two runs to start the drive.
“You do switch your mindset when you’re up, when you’ve got a healthy lead, 28-3, our defense is playing really well,” offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson said. “So you want to still be aggressive, but I call it cautiously aggressive. We’re built in a way where we can grind out those games. We’ve done it. In the 80-yard drive against Florida to win the game — or to put it two touchdowns up — we ran it almost every time.”
Dawson said the team’s execution on offense was lacking late in the game, and that can dictate the calls he makes. On the first play of the fourth quarter, tight end Elija Lofton was penalized for holding, setting UM up with a first-and-18. With a lot of yards needed and a big lead, the Hurricanes ran the ball once, threw a short pass to CJ Daniels and threw a 10-yard pass attempt to Keelan Marion.
“We try to get half of it back, and we got a little less than half,” Dawson said. “Then it becomes third and 16. Third and 16, we’re backed up. I don’t want to do anything stupid in that situation to maybe create a short field for those guys. So that one was more the penalty put us into a situation that was unworkable.”
On Miami’s last full offensive drive following a three-and-out where UM ran the ball twice and passed once, quarterback Carson Beck came out throwing. On second-and-6, he threw a pass over the middle to Marion for what would have been a first down, but the pass was behind Marion, and an FSU defender broke it up. On the next play, Beck tossed a short pass to Alex Bauman, who caught it and came up just short of the first down.
Miami kept the offense on the field for fourth down and converted when Florida State lined up offside. The Hurricanes ran the ball three more times, draining the clock some more and forcing FSU coach Mike Norvell to burn his last timeouts.
On fourth-and-8, the Hurricanes made an aggressive decision to run a play instead of the conservative choice to kick a field goal. A 40-yard field goal in that situation would have put Miami ahead by 12 points and required Florida State to score two touchdowns instead of just a field goal and a touchdown.
The Hurricanes elected to try to put the game away with a first down. Beck lofted a pass to star freshman Malachi Toney. Toney had room to run for the first down and end the game, but he bumped into offensive tackle Markel Bell, slowing him down and keeping him from catching the pass.
“Ultimately, it really is about execution in those situations,” Dawson said.
“It’s not like we ran it every time,” Dawson added. “We threw it a handful of times; we just didn’t connect on the throws. And so we were slightly off on the throws. So that’s the chances you take in those situations.”
FSU drove down the field on the subsequent drive and kicked a field goal, closing the gap to six points. But the Hurricanes recovered the ensuing onside kick and kneeled the game out.
“I ultimately trust our guys up front,” Dawson said. “I have a lot of trust in our guys up front. I have a lot of trust in our running backs. And I do feel that we can grind games out in those kinds of situations. Now it didn’t work out necessarily exactly as I had planned, but we had a big enough lead, it didn’t matter.”
Cristobal has been criticized for his game management in the past, most notably in 2023 when Miami ran the ball late against Georgia Tech when UM could have ended the game with a quarterback kneel. The running back, Don Chaney Jr., fumbled, and the Yellow Jackets came back to win the game.
The veteran coach said Monday that he uses multiple information sources to make late-game decisions. He leans on his instincts as well as his staff and his players’ feel for the game in addition to analytics that recommend certain decisions at certain times. So far this season, it’s paying off. The Hurricanes closed out tight games against Notre Dame, Florida and Florida State, winning all three.
“You lean on both,” Cristobal said. “Analytically, you always look at what does it say? And then you think right away, present moment in time, what is the tone of the game? Is it a defensive struggle? Is it a shootout? Is one side of the ball gassed? Is one side of the ball injured? Are you not going to be able to do this because a certain player is missing or is not having a good day?
“You take those things into account, and then you make a decision, really, before it actually happens. You should have something in mind before you get there. And we had a similar situation the other day and went with what we thought was the right call.”
