MIAMI GARDENS, FL – All Carson Beck could do was raise both hands and place them on either side of his helmet.
The journey that brought the quarterback to South Florida, united him with Mario Cristobal and the Miami Hurricanes, died with one inexplicable, puzzling pass that came no where near its intended target and fell into the hands of Indiana’s Jamari Sharpe.
The Hurricanes ran into a buzzsaw, one of the greatest stories, not just in college football, but all of sports, and did something no other team could do in this playoff … take the Indiana Hoosiers down to the wire.
But, still, falling short 27-21 in the college football championship game in their home stadium will sting.
And sting bad.
Miami’s heroics in a season in which it was able to overcome two midseason losses and catch lightning in a bottle in the playoffs fell one game short.
‘For it to end like that, it’s hard, it’s really tough,’ Beck said. ‘For a group that has faced so much adversity throughout the season. To face adversity early on (in the championship game) and battle our way back to even have that opportunity to have a chance to win the game at the end says a lot about this team and about us.’
Beck will take heat for that last pass, a heave that came on first down from the Indiana 41-yard line and was intercepted six yards short of the goal line with 44 seconds to play.
Miami never lead and fell behind by 10 points three times, the last two in the second half on backbreaking, demoralizing plays.
But even after Isaiah Jones recovered Mikail Kamara’s blocked punt in the end zone to make the score 17-7, and after Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s 12-yard touchdown run on fourth down in which he pinballed off Hurricanes defenders and flew into the end zone to make it 24-14, Miami never wavered.
And there the Hurricanes were, 75 yards from a national championship with 102 seconds remaining.
Red and white confetti falls as Indiana fans celebrate
And about a minute later, Hard Rock Stadium turned into Memorial Stadium South, with red-clad Hoosiers — who by the way outnumbered the fans from the team playing in its home stadium — soaking up the red and white confetti and partying like they were at a John Mellencamp concert.
While Indiana (16-0) became the first team to win 16 games in a college football season since Yale did in 1894, Miami (13-3) is the first Hurricanes team to win 13 games in a season.
And although those numbers are skewed because of the expanded playoffs, it still says something about what the Hurricanes, a proud program with five national championships, accomplished after more than two decades of irrelevance.
Cristobal isn’t one to pay attention to the ‘The U is Back’ chatter that started during Miami’s greatest season since the early 2000s.
Miami’s coach has first-hand knowledge as a player of the program’s heyday in 1980s and early 1990s when it won four titles in an eight-year span. When this program was as good as it gets in college football.
Those days are gone. Never to be replicated.
And Cristobal understands the landscape is so different now. The blueprint to building a program in the 2020s in nothing like it was four decades, or even two decades, or a decade, ago.
Not even close.
Now, it takes money, first and foremost. And more money means more talent. And Cristobal has been able to parlay his ability to recruit and a collective that invested more than $20 million into the 2025 roster to build a team with enough talent to overcame any adversity or coaching shortcomings.
The challenge now for Miami is not to become a one-hit wonder. Not be like 2023 Florida State that followed its 13-1 season with a stunning nose dive that has resulted in two losing seasons since.
So, is The U Back?
It takes more than one magical run to the national title game. Consistency can be fleeting now more than ever with open free agency, every year.
College football truly is a fluid business.
‘I think that’s the biggest misconception in sports; 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.’
We will find out soon if this was a fluke. Or if The U is Back.
Tom D’Angelo is a senior sports columnist and reporter for The Palm Beach Post. He can be reached at tdangelo@pbpost.com.