The Deep Miami Bonds Powering Mario Cristobal’s Quest for a National Title

For the South Florida native head coach, putting the Canes back atop college football was decades in the making.

Mario Cristobal (left) has made Miami relevant again on the national stage. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Everybody is trying to get a piece of Mario Cristobal these days, but not Matt Britton. He knows his old friend is busy trying to win a national title at Miami, and, “I don’t want to bother him,” so he waits until Cristobal wants a piece of him.

The last time this happened was late December, a few days after Miami beat Texas A&M in the first round of the College Football Playoff. It was late in Miami. Most people in the program had gone home. Cristobal was on the turf practice field. He decided to FaceTime Britton.

“We told each other we love each other, and we’re brothers,” Britton said.

When the call ended, Cristobal returned to trying to win this season’s national championship, knowing, as he always does, that he can always go back to Britton, to Carlos Huerta, to Christopher Columbus High School and to 1987, when the world was theirs for the taking, and all they wanted was to take it together.

Football takes a piece of everybody who plays it, but only a few get injured like this: September 1989, California at No. 2 Miami. Hurricanes linebacker Matt Britton was running after a quarterback when his knee exploded. Huerta, speaking the language of the ’80s, calls it a “Joe Theismann-type injury. Just grotesque.”

It was so bad that when the play began, Britton was on track for an NFL career, and when it ended, he told medical personnel on the field, “Get me out of here. I’m done.” He meant for good.

People said the right things. You can come back, Matt. You’ll work and show ’em, Matt. At first, he did not believe them. Then he started rehabbing, and … well, he still did not believe them.

“The only reason I came back,” he says now, “was to hang with my two boys.”

His boys were Huerta, a kicker, Columbus High class of 1987, and Cristobal, an offensive lineman, Columbus High class of 1988. They were not just teammates They were forged together. Cristobal was not just his roommate. Their relationship, Britton says, is “almost closer than blood.”

All five Miami national champions had at least one starter from Columbus High. This year’s Hurricanes would make six: Defensive back Bryce Fitzgerald started four of the last five games and shares the team interceptions lead with four. But in a twist, the best Columbus alum on the field will be the opposing quarterback: Indiana Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza graduated from Columbus. His dad, Fernando Sr., played at Columbus with Cristobal, Britton and Huerta.

Columbus High Alum Part of Title Game	Role
Mario Cristobal	Miami head coach
Alex Mirabal	Miami assistant head coach
Fernando Mendoza	Indiana quarterback
Alberto Mendoza	Indiana quarterback
Bryce Fitzgerald	Miami defensive back
Ryan Rodriguez	Miami offensive lineman
Daylen Russell	Miami defensive lineman

Cristobal and his high school buddies have the kind of bond that is hard to forge later in life, when people have kids, spouses, jobs. It came from their high school coach, Dennis Lavelle, and their college coach, Jimmy Johnson, but mostly from the all-consuming intensity of the whole experience. It was uncontaminated by perspective.

“I have worked super hard in my life but I can’t say I ever worked harder,” Huerta says. “In between, there are moments when you are desperate, you are vulnerable, and the laughter is uncontrollable at times. You’re exhausted.”

Britton says: “Our high school, and our high school coach—that’s the realest thing I’ll ever know.” When his knee exploded, his high school career was over, and his NFL career was over. But what he still had, he would never really have again. He wanted to keep it going as long as he could.

Britton returned to the field, somehow, and “made tackles. But I was on one leg. I used to destroy people.” This was frustrating. It was also worth it.

“We were so tight, me and the boys,” Britton said. “I was like, ‘Give it a shot.’”

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Mario Cristobal (center) has Miami just one win away from its sixth national championship. | Rob Schumacher/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Everybody is trying to get a piece of Mario Cristobal these days, but Britton and Huerta saw the pieces before they were fully assembled.

So much goes into running a college football program. You have to make people feel the way you want them to feel; Cristobal could make anybody laugh, regardless of their background.

You must believe in yourself: 

“He doesn’t roll with much,” Huerta says. “He is going to do it the way he feels is the right way. He’s got high conviction.”

You have to get people to to believe in you:

“I’ve been in real estate for a long time,” Huerta says, “He is an unbelievable salesman. I don’t know if he realizes that’s what it is. It’s just natural. They’re witty, they know what to say at the right time. He’s a closer. I don’t think he took courses in it. He’s just a closer.”

You have to be a CEO and know when to delegate. But you also have to love the game so much that you want to understand every crevice of it. Huerta says when Cristobal and their high school teammate Alex Mirabal would get together, “it was like (Apple founders) Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak … they were talking football all the time. They weren’t talking ‘Let’s get together and work for Goldman Sachs.’” Today Mirabal is Cristobal’s assistant head coach.

You have to be one of the smartest people in any room you enter, but you can’t act like you're the smartest, or you will lose people. Cristobal was on the Dean’s List in high school. Yet Huerta says:

“I didn’t realize how smart he is, back then. He was a little bit of … I don’t want to say a goofball. But he was always messing with people and joking. I didn’t really think of him as an intellect.”

You have to work like the day is 40 hours long, and you need that work ethic to be so ingrained that it doesn’t even strike you as unusual. Huerta lives in Nevada these days. When Cristobal coached at Oregon, Huerta would go to games, stay at Cristobal’s house, hang out with his kids. Then the Miami job opened up, and Huerta had two thoughts: No, and no way.

Huerta had seen Cristobal rebuild Oregon into a Rose Bowl champion: “I work very hard. I’m lazy compared to him. It was 5:15 a.m. every day, talking to recruits on [the] East Coast, home at 10:30, 10:45 [p.m.] every day. Why would you leave after all that hard work?”

You have to be willing to take risks. When Cristobal left for Miami, his alma mater had not finished in the top 10 in two decades. Huerta says:  “I’m like, ‘Why would you go to Miami? That place is dysfunctional at this point.’”

Cristobal loved the place, sure, and he believed in it, but he went back, in part, because his mother Clara was sick, and he wanted to be near her. He believed he could do that and also lead Miami to another national title.

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Christopher Columbus High School in Miami continues to churn out football talent, as evident in Monday’s national championship game. | Rick Jervis / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Everybody wants a piece of Mario Cristobal these days. Former Hurricanes want to be on the sidelines, but Cristobal can’t have 500 alums down there. Critics want to minimize Cristobal’s coaching chops, and he can’t spend time worrying about them. Recruits want his attention; donors want his appreciation; his players want his direction.

Clara Cristobal died in the spring of Mario’s first season at Miami. Surely, a piece of Mario died that day, too. But pieces of Clara remain inside him. Huerta says when he hears Cristobal do interviews these days, he does not just hear Mario. He hears Clara: “She was always the type to put the bad stuff behind,” he says. Britton says of Mario’s parents, “I loved them like they were my own.”

Britton and Huerta talk or text every day, and have for more than a decade. They speak to Cristobal when he has time. Britton says “some day, we’re hoping—when we’re old guys—we’ll just be fishing together.” In years, Mario Cristobal seems far removed from Columbus High. Geographically, he is nearby. On some level, he is always there. He is always theirs. They are always his.

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