How do Hurricanes build on run to title game? ‘Shut up and work,’ Cristobal says
Mario Cristobal has the screenshots.
Ten games into the 2024 season, when his Miami Hurricanes were 10-0, projections gave Cristobal’s team a 95% percent chance to make the 12-team College Football Playoff. And then they lost their final two games. They didn’t get in.
Meanwhile, eight games into the 2025 season, after the Hurricanes lost twice in a three-game span to fall to 6-2, projections gave Cristobal’s team just a 5% chance to make the postseason field. Miami ran the table the rest of the regular season. The Hurricanes not only made the field as the last at-large team; UM marched all the way to the College Football Playoff National Championship Game.
Those juxtaposing results, and the opposing emotions that came with them, are a reminder of why Cristobal stresses that his team avoids the external talk around his team.
Even as that external talk angles in Miami’s favor, with UM seen as a consensus top-10 team, the clear front-runner in the Atlantic Coast Conference and a team poised to at least make another postseason run and potentially get back to the national championship.
“We’re winning more, and we feel like we’re just getting started,” Cristobal said Wednesday during the ACC’s Football Kickoff in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We feel like our best teams are coming up down the road, but we also feel that we just got to shut up and work because we haven’t proven anything yet.”
They will find out in earnest soon enough. Practices start up in two weeks. The season begins Sept. 4 at Stanford. Year 5 of the build under Cristobal is about to fully get underway.
And no matter how close that build appears to being finished, Cristobal will assure you there’s more work to be done.
“I think if you’re ever content to say ‘Hey we’re there,’” Cristobal said. “I think it’s over for you.”
That’s the message he imparted on his team during spring practices and the one he will reinforce ahead of this season. The Hurricanes as a whole accomplished something massive last season. Many players on this current team were part of that playoff run.
But this team, as currently constructed? It hasn’t accomplished anything yet.
They can’t rest on the laurels of the 2025 team because none of that success carries over into how the 2026 team will be defined.
“We’ve done a great job emphasizing that message of staying right where we are,” said senior running back Mark Fletcher Jr., one of the main veteran leaders on the Hurricanes’ roster. “We could take a lot of the good things that we did last year to help us this year, and we could take a lot of the bad things we did and try to fix those mistakes as much as possible. But it definitely starts right now. It doesn’t start the first game. It starts right now in the offseason before fall camp. That’s where you develop these good habits and get rid of the bad.”
Added linebacker Mo Toure: “Last year’s team isn’t this year’s team. We’ve got a new team. That 2025 team, we’ll never have that team again. ... We’re learning our new identity and understanding ourselves.”
Cristobal has a firm understanding of how he wants his Hurricanes to look. They’re physical in the trenches. They don’t take plays off. They communicate. They lead from within the huddle. They play complementary football.
He has spent the past four years assembling rosters — both with players and coaching staff — that meet those standards.
The results have shown — from 5-7 and missing a bowl game in 2022 to 7-6 in 2023 to 10-3 in 2024 but collapsing at the end to 13-3 and a run to the national championship last season.
“You’re in a dogfight when you play Miami,” Cristobal said. “Our levels of competitiveness have improved drastically. Schematically, we’ve evolved. Level of talent, the way that we call and manage games, we just keep getting better and better.”
The goal is to keep that going. And to do that, the Hurricanes are blocking out the noise, putting their heads down and getting to work.
“In 2022 when we were not winning many games, we didn’t say anything,” Cristobal said. “Well, now that we’re winning games, we want to say less. We want to just work, and we want to get better, and we confidently feel that we can. But we don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to predict it. Let’s go find out.”
This story was originally published July 15, 2026 at 1:59 PM with the headline "How do Hurricanes build on run to title game? ‘Shut up and work,’ Cristobal says."
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