Why Miami is facing its ‘most challenging’ offseason yet of the Cristobal era

IT HAD BEEN more than a month since Miami‘s season ended, since the Hurricanes slumped off their home stadium field after a raucous come-from-behind drive was upended by a Carson Beck interception that handed the 2025-26 college football national championship to Indiana, and Mario Cristobal was finally ready to look back.

The whirlwind of the modern college football calendar had taken immediate precedence after Miami’s title game loss, with Cristobal plunged directly into roster management mode, pushing to land a few key transfers late in the process and recruiting his own players to stick around for another go-round. But finally, in late February, he had some time to sit back and relive the ride — albeit in the form of abridged 60-minute game films. Cristobal watched his team blossom, from the misery of a midseason loss to SMU to the chaos of the final playoff selections to the unbridled joy of Miami’s run through the postseason — past Texas A&M, Ohio State and Ole Miss before running headlong into the Hoosiers’ juggernaut and coming up just short.

“Neat,” he called it.

That’s a bit short of the adjectives most observers used to describe Miami’s run — “shocking,” “improbable” or “astounding” might’ve fit better — but Cristobal isn’t one to waste a good sales pitch on anyone he’s not actively recruiting to his program.

So, yes, Miami’s run was neat — neat is how it finally seemed to shed the burdens of a program mired in a two-decade slump; neat in how it reenergized a long dormant fan base in the city; neat in how Cristobal’s plan to build Miami back into the dominant force it had been during his playing days in the 1980s and 1990s had finally shown real results.

But, most of all, it was neat to witness a team blossom in real time.

“To see us get to a point where we came so close to pull that out at the end — I’m just proud of our players and staff, and I’m more motivated than ever because all that work paid off in a ton of progress,” Cristobal said.

Still, Cristobal isn’t chasing “neat.” He wants more. He saw the mountaintop, and he’s ready to climb again — faster, more deliberately, more intensely than before.

In his first team meeting after the title game loss, Cristobal offered a refrain he’ll repeat again and again in the months to come. That was last year. This is a different season. The foundation must be laid anew. Getting back is harder than getting there.

Witness TCU.

Witness Washington.

Witness Notre Dame.

They all made the title game, celebrated the success, then didn’t get back the following year.

Cristobal’s Miami is no flash in the pan. Last year was neat. This year needs to be something more. The road back up the mountain begins March 24 as the Hurricanes open spring ball and begin the next chapter of a story Cristobal believes has just started to be written.

“That positive anger that burns because we didn’t finish it the way we wanted to is there,” Cristobal said. “This will be the most challenging offseason of our tenure at Miami. A lot of the makeup of last year’s team were 5-7 upon arrival, and 7-5 before things started turning. A lot of these guys arrived here and were already practicing with a playoff team. That’s a different starting point.”

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MIAMI ATHLETIC DIRECTOR Dan Radakovich lived in this space a decade ago. His former employer Clemson went to a national title game to close out the 2015 season. It played a dominant Alabama, and it nearly pulled off a shocker. It wasn’t exactly a turning point for the program, but it was a critical building block. Clemson went on to win the 2016 national championship, and the Tigers won it again in 2018, making the four-team playoff six years in a row.

So, clearly Radakovich has a blueprint for how Miami will follow suit, right?

“It’s a different era,” Radakovich said.

Back then, Clemson was in the midst of building a state-of-the-art football facility designed to signal the Tigers were ready to play with the biggest brands in the sport and lure elite recruits to Clemson. Miami, too, has a new football facility under construction but, for as much as the new digs figure to be a perk for future Canes, it’s not Miami’s priority.

“Facilities are still important,” Radakovich said, “but we’re in a world where we have to continue to look at opportunities for our student-athletes to maintain compensation.”

That has meant a roster that reportedly cost Miami more than $30 million a year ago has to be rebuilt with millions more — via revenue sharing and NIL deals — including a coup late in the portal process in which Miami landed QB Darian Mensah in what several insiders suggested might be the biggest contract of the NIL era.

That Miami took home $32 million in playoff revenue distribution from its run to the title game certainly helps, but Radakovich told ESPN that money doesn’t scratch the surface of last year’s investment in football. To make another run — one that takes the Canes a step further and helps set the standard for the future — requires even more money.

That, Radakovich said, is the biggest boon of last season’s playoff run. Donors are engaged. They see the return on their investment. That helps open checkbooks for 2026 and beyond. The key now is finding a few more checkbooks.

“It’s a never-ending search,” Radakovich said. “Our collective is working on new leads and opportunities, but we have to continue to feed the necessary dollars to help keep us moving forward.”

Cristobal knows those donors are out there. He has met them, talked to them, shaken hands and hugged them as they celebrated this Miami run that helped change the narrative around the program. So now, he’s eager to talk about those teams who came close then disappeared — to remind everyone of the possibility that, without enough support, 2025 could easily become the high-water mark.

He talks, too, about Clemson, Alabama and Georgia — the teams that have kept their foot on the gas after falling short in a title game, only to return bigger and better.

Miami isn’t at the mountaintop, Cristobal said. It’s at a fork in the road.

“We understand you can quickly deteriorate as a program, and Miami’s already lived through that,” he said. “We have no intention of going back.”

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STAYING ATOP THE college football universe meant finding a quarterback, and Miami landed arguably the best option on the table for 2026 when it signed Mensah — who also brought his top receiver from Duke, Cooper Barkate, with him.

The story of how Mensah arrived in Coral Gables, however, lives in a gray area between competitive vigilance and dancing through every loophole of the current college football landscape.

Just a day before the 2026 portal window closed, Mensah announced he was leaving Duke — in spite of a contract he had signed with the Blue Devils and assurances, just weeks earlier, that he was sticking it out in Durham for another year. That the whole world seemed to know Mensah was headed to Miami in spite of rules that prevented any direct contact between the player and the school only underscored the murky waters of college football’s portal world. That Mensah ultimately did exactly what the world expected after settling a lawsuit with Duke seemed ample proof that this was all inevitable.

For Cristobal’s part, however, he isn’t offering any apologies. He wants to win, and he’s chasing talent every way possible within the rules as they’re written.

“Our process is, if there’s a player available we feel can help our football program, we’ll aggressively pursue him and abide by whatever needs to be abided by,” Cristobal said. “That’s how we operate.”

Miami had to be aggressive, after all. They were, along with Indiana, the last teams standing, so by the time their season was over, the portal had been largely picked clean, and the only new blood was coming from the Canes’ and Hoosiers’ rosters.

“All the fish in the barrel have been shot up and taken,” Cristobal said. “Now your guys are the fish in the barrel that everybody’s taking a shot at.”

So, Miami was ready with an offer Mensah couldn’t refuse, and the Canes’ offense — with Malachi Toney and Mark Fletcher Jr. back, among a host of other talent — figures to be exceptional in 2026. Cristobal’s aggressive and refined recruiting philosophy meant that Miami had fewer portal needs this year than in the past because a host of young talent appears ready to ascend the depth chart.

If 2025 showed a Miami team growing up in real time, then 2026 is supposed to be the year everyone sees Miami coming and, like the Mensah signing, they simply can’t stop the inevitable from happening.

“The approach we took was to layer the roster in a manner we could keep building from that would upgrade everything,” Cristobal said. “I think this is sustainable and will continue to elevate year after year.”

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CRISTOBAL WAS ON the dais after Miami’s loss to Indiana, bridging the gap between celebrating Miami’s massive success and acknowledging that his team fell short of its ultimate goal, and it felt like the reporters in attendance were prodding him to accept a consolation prize.

He wouldn’t do it.

“I think that’s the biggest misconception in sports is, ‘Well, they almost got there, they’ll be back next year,'” Cristobal said. “That’s a bunch of bull. You’ve got to improve from a roster standpoint, a regimen standpoint, discipline, everything and move forward. And these guys have set the standard to help us get there.”

Cristobal is used to fighting these battles. He has engaged donors, drawn a vivid picture of his vision for the program, then delivered results. He has pushed to get funding for that new facility and for his roster and a coaching staff that’s among the best — and best compensated — in the country. He has sold his players on a work ethic that was instilled in him during his playing career at Miami — “built on Greentree” is the regular refrain, referencing the Canes’ famed practice fields — and he has seen the fruits of that labor.

What Cristobal hasn’t yet had to do is convince a team that has already tasted greatness to erase the blackboard and do the whole thing over again.

That’s the job now.

“There’s a recognition that we got there, we belong there, and we need to have that hunger and focus, that’s important for us to keep rising through the ranks,” Radakovich said. “And Mario is great at that.”

It’d be nice to win an ACC title, Radakovich said. Miami missed that mark last year because of a fluky tiebreaker.

It’s essential to make another run at the playoff. The window closes quickly in this new era. The money that’s sustaining the program dries up when the losses start to accumulate.

And then there’s that feeling Miami had walking off the field at Hard Rock Stadium in January, as Indiana celebrated behind them.

Cristobal can look back now and appreciate how enjoyable the ride was. It was so much fun, in fact, that the only logical thing to do is take it again.

“We’re winning,” Cristobal said, “and the appetite for winning has never been higher.”