Miami Hurricanes Football: Miami HC Mario Cristobal
Postgame Press Conference Transcripts: North Carolina
Sat., Oct. 8, 2022
Hard Rock Stadium
Opening Statement…
“Obviously, we came up short. Disappointing. We played hard, showed resiliency, good responses. Critical errors, obviously, typically tell the tale of a game like this.”
On the run game not working as well…
“The quarterback sneak didn’t go in. The wide zone, running back cut inside, the three technique versus bare endzone with a wing is not supposed to happen. You’re supposed to stay outside. The pass at the end, obviously, they had eyes for it.”
On the run game…
“I have to get on the film and see what’s up. You know, some things look like they’re there and all of a sudden, it’s one yard or no yards or two yards. You know, you run power and you’ve got a good double team and you feel like you have a good kick out and it should be a successful play. Wide zone versus some of those things should be good, but we’re short. We’re short on something. Sometimes, the double team is too thin. Sometimes, a guy allows penetration. Sometimes, we’re not reading it the right way. We’re out of sync in the run game. It’s not a matter of effort, but we’ve got to do a better job. We tried every which way to get the ball going on the ground – split zone, counter, power, wide zone. I mean, you name it. Then, Tyler got so hot that said, ‘let’s just go with it,’ and he did a really good job.”
On how to get the team on track…
“I’ll just go right to it; we knew we had work to do getting here at Miami and that’s what we are all about. Like you mentioned, moral victories aren’t it, especially when you have opportunities. We gave ourselves an opportunity in the fourth quarter to have the ball and potentially tie or win the game. We came up short there as well. Do we see effort and better resiliency, yes? Are there very fixable, should not go sideways type situations? Yes. And do you address those directly and bluntly? Absolutely. There’s no sugarcoating it. Just really upset. But I’m proud because the guys were grinding and they kept coming, no matter what. They really had the right attitude and right mentality, a really good pregame and really good physicality. They’re a good football team and especially up front on both sides of the ball. We threw the ball well, but we didn’t run it well. They did some things on third down. I think they were about 50 percent on third down and we were about 5-of-14, almost 36 percent.”
On the pass game…
“Will [Mallory] did a great job. Frank [Ladson, Jr.] continues to do really well. Brashard [Smith] is a guy who has really stepped up, particularly in his habits. In sitting down and meeting with him and his family, it’s obvious he is an awesome young man. And he just started putting in the time and the work and has cut out all the nonsense and the BS and has really stepped up in a big-time way. I’m proud of him and fired up for him going forward. He’s a young guy and he has a world of football ahead of him and expect him to be a good player maker for us. It was good to see Colbie Young step up and do well. Jaleel Skinner is a great player. Obviously, he is in a bad place right now, mentally, because he was trying to get out of bounds, and he didn’t. Lesson learned, but he is a great competitor. The bottom line is that we have to continue to work on issues that are preventing us from being really good and not sidestep and those things.”
On the second-half defense…
At the beginning we jumped the hook in cover two and we weren’t supposed to, right? We made a mistake. We thought we had a bead on what they were doing and sometimes players do that. We have to have a little bit more discipline when it comes to that. They played extremely hard, especially up front. I know they got out of the cage a couple times, but more times than not we got him on the ground. He’s a really good player; he extends plays and finds a way to get in and out of stuff. I thought we got tackled a couple times, particularly on the touchdown that was thrown. I thought Akheem Mesidor got tackled but that’s alright. That’s part of the game sometimes; it gets sticky and muddy in there. We just started playing assignment football and we stuck to it, and we showed discipline, which goes with it. That’s probably the best way to describe it. We showed more discipline in the second half and started executing at a higher level.”
On injury updates on the team…
“Elijah [Arroyo] will not be returning for the rest of the year; he had a pretty significant injury. Justice [Oluwaseun] hurt himself pretty good, so he did not return. I think Jakai [Clark] is going to be okay. Tyrique Stevenson, they were checking him out, just being safe and using protocol. Cyrus [Moss] had a dental thing, so he couldn’t dress, but he’s fine. Laurance Seymore should be back by next week; he should be a full-speed player.”
On the play of Daryl Porter, Jr…
“Anybody who is playing really [well], we are going to see more of. Obviously, I haven’t seen the film yet, but I know he played really well and he’s a guy who, I think we mentioned last week, that we would count on more. So, it was good to see him go out there and make plays. He’s a great young man and a great player.”
On performance of Andres Borregales…
“He was 2-for-3 and he kicked the ball deep. He missed one. I thought the snap was high. Getting that snap down and trying to kick that thing throws the timing off a little bit. He’s always been excellent; he’s been really good. I thought his onside kick was on point. We stepped out of bounds; we’re not supposed to do that. We’re supposed to stay on the field of play unless you’re getting pushed out of bounds. We’ll have to look at that on film. He’s been accountable the entire year. I’m sure he’d like to have that one back.”
On the 35th anniversary of the 1987 team…
“They’re one of the reasons I came to Miami, yes sir. I’ve been watching Miami football since I can remember, going to the Orange Bowl. That’s why we are here. We’re all about it. We’re all about the work and the lumps that come with it. It stinks and it’s painful to deal with but, you know what, that’s what we are here for. And we’re gladly ready for whatever comes with it to make sure we get back to a certain level and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Miami Hurricanes Football: North Carolina HC Mack Brown
Postgame Press Conference Transcripts: North Carolina
Sat., Oct. 8, 2022
Hard Rock Stadium
Opening statement…
“Obviously very excited about the win. You have to congratulate Miami. It’s amazing how young people fight so hard to win a football game. I’ve often said, whoever made scoreboards in some cases didn’t make it fair, because Miami didn’t lose the game, they just ran out of time. It was that kind of game. Both teams played so hard. It’s probably two even teams if you look at it. Two great quarterbacks with a lot of skill. Neither one running the ball as much as they would like. Defenses that really stepped up and played well in the second half. I was really, really proud of our defense. Proud of the goal-line stand. I think it was five plays because we had a facemask penalty. The interception to finish the game, three or four other fourth-down stands in the game, which you have to have now if you’re going to win. A strip-fumble as they were going in to score. So, the defense played a second half like we’ve been wanting them to for an entire game. And I’m really, really proud of them. Offensively, we were hot the first half. We gave three points up because we were still being aggressive. We’re going to do that. At half, we just threw the ball too far downfield. Got a little greedy because it worked so easily last week. We went for the fourth-and-three, the first of the game, because we felt like we were going to have to score touchdowns to win. When you start looking at analytics on the fourth-and-two at the end of the game, it says it’s your choice. I really thought about going for it because Drake [Maye] is so good at that and that would have absolutely put the game away. But after our Appalachian fourth quarter, no game is ever away. So, we felt like let’s kick the field goal and put the pressure on them. It’ll be a two-score game with a little over three minutes left to go in the game. Disappointed that we didn’t make a first down and finish the game on offense. That’s where we still have to get better. We’ve said we’ve got to run the ball when they know we’re going to run it and we know we’re going to run it. And that game should have been finished on offense. Give them credit that they tackled great on third down and three, short, and then forced us to punt. Proud of the kids tackling the guy inbounds with 22 seconds left. They had no timeouts. It put their quarterback in a position where he had to go really fast and just sling it. Then that led to the interception. Was that ‘Ced’ Gray? I think Ced keeping him in bounds was such a heady play that was bigger than even the interception at the end of the game. We still have got to mature some. We had too many penalties when we go up by 10. Immediately we got a facemask on the kickoff. We’re not kicking the ball in the endzone, out of the endzone like we did with Jonathan Kim. So, we’ve got to do a good job of covering and we did a great job other than that one. Then the game’s over with the interception but ‘Ced’ Gray got called for the interference. Then I thought that Kamari Morales did a tremendous job on the onside kick. There was some drama there, but it was right in front of me so I didn’t see how there could possibly be drama. But he did a good job and the guy was all the way out of bounds when he batted it back in. But good for the officials, they took it upstairs and looked at it. You’ve got to win close games to have a good year. We didn’t do that last year. You’ve got to win road games to be good. We were in a position where we didn’t win any last year. Now we’ve won three in a row. So really, really just proud of the kids. William Barnes got hurt in the first half and Jonathan Adorno played every snap of the second half. That put us in a bind, but it’ll help us when William gets to come back because Jonathan got so much work. Our running game was good. We had 161 yards. But stopping the run is what you have to do to win games. They had 41, I think, and that is so different than the Notre Dame game. They put a tremendous amount of pressure on their passing game. You’ve got to stop one or the other and I guess Notre Dame we didn’t stop either one. So, it’s good that you stopped the run and forced turnovers on fourth down and forced some turnovers. It gives you the best chance to win.”
On the play of the defense…
“I’ll get to watch it on the way home, see it all, but it seems to me like we played really good defense the second half, most of the time. We looked like we were in the right place and we’re getting more pressure on the quarterback. And we’re tackling people short of the sticks. I think we held Florida A&M to 21 yards rushing, we held Virginia Tech to 99—under 100—and then 41 tonight. You’ve got to stop the rub and we’re starting to do that better. I really believe it’s a combination of our coaches knowing the kids better, the kids buying into the coaches and the kids playing with more confidence. I think those are the three reasons we’re playing better on defense. We played a lot of defensive linemen tonight. It was really hot and really humid, so we were rotating defensive linemen from the first of the game.”
On the importance of the goal-line stop followed by the 99-yard touchdown drive…
“You’ve got to respond. You leave it on the one-and-a-half-yard line. Their punter is one of the best in the country. He kept us with bad field position all night. So, we had a couple of 90-yard drives, I think. Then they had a 92-yard drive, I think, on the one that we stopped them. So, they had it way down there. But absolutely, responding when you’re ahead, responding when you’re behind, responding to the other side of the ball when you get an energy boost with that fourth-down stop. And then, Miami, what I would be saying and what Mario [Cristobal] was saying is, ‘Alright, we left it at the one-and-a-half. Stop them, get a short field, we’re still going to score.’ We just took it right down and scored and that’s just a heartbreaker. It just breaks their momentum and their confidence and just sends a very strong message.”
On Drake Maye’s two interceptions and if there was any conversation afterwards…
“No, I told him to keep his head up. He’s one of the best players in the country. Everybody’s going to have a bad throw every now and then. After the game, I was walking out to come and see you all and – he’s such an unbelievable young man – he goes, ‘I’ve got to get better, had some bad throws tonight.’ So, he knows it. When we cannot play our best and still win on the road against Miami, that’s a good sign. That just means we’re getting to where we want to go. And you think about it, we’ve had four games with Miami since we’ve been back. Three of them have come down to like the last play of the game and then the one was a blowout down here. So, these games have been just unbelievable. The throw in the corner to Dazz Newsome the first year and then the missed field goal late. And then last year, the tipped ball that ‘Ced’ intercepted late. I think there were six seconds left or seven. And then tonight where the last throw of the game ends the game. So, these games have just been outstanding.”
