A surprising Nov. 1 upset ignited Miami's championship run. SMU's victory galvanized the Hurricanes, turning a potential end into a playoff ignition.
DALLAS - The University of Miami’s run to a possible national title should’ve ended back on Nov. 1, in Dallas, on The Hilltop.
SMU pulled off the upset that day, and the Canes looked nothing like the team that on Monday will play “at home’’ in the College Football Playoff finale against Indiana.
But it seems the UM players were actually galvanized by the outcome.
As Mac Engel of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently noted, “Two days later, Miami coach Mario Cristobal did his best sales job in front of players at a team meeting in an effort to convince them that their season was not over, even though they had two losses with four games remaining.’’
Engel quoted Miami senior defensive lineman Akheem Mesidor.
“(Cristobal) said, ‘We can still win out, but we have to win out every single game. We have to go 1-0 every week; that’s what we need,” Messidor said. “Once we lost to SMU, our chances to make the playoffs were 3 percent. We needed stuff to happen around the country. We needed certain teams to lose, and we needed to win out. The dominoes fell in the right position, and we ended up here.”
That quote is from just before “The U’’ won its playoff semifinal game over Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl in Arlington, a path that also included a playoff win before that at Texas A&M.
So, yes, the Hurricanes owe a debt of gratitude along the way to the Aggies, too …
But Miami’s loss at SMU was not a season-ender … it was a season-igniter.
As Engel writes of that Nov. 1 meeting in Dallas, “Some older SMU fans had tears in their eyes to celebrate something they never thought they would see, SMU defeating a top-ranked team on The Hilltop. …
“Some Miami players had tears of their own.’’
As it turned out, SMU finished 9-4 with a year capped by a win over No. 17 Arizona in the Holiday Bowl. So maybe it was a “quality loss.’’
Indeed, the SMU success can be seen as a building block in the ACC; that is a story for another day.
But in Miami? SMU knocked them out of the ACC title game, meaning they had to hope for the at-large bid that they eventually received into the playoff tournament.
No. 10 is Miami’s semi-modest ranking, and the ‘Canes will face No. 1 Indiana for the national championship in the friendly confines of Hard Rock Stadium.
Oh, nd the Hurricanes are an 8.5-point underdog, though as a defensive lineman Rueben Bain Jr. said, that has been Miami’s “story the whole playoffs.”
In fact, it’s been the “story’’ ever since Nov. 1, when the Mustangs gave UM a loss - and, weirdly, a boost.