Getty Image / Megan Briggs
Mario Cristobal’s Miami Hurricanes were on the business end of the most painful loss from College Football’s Week 6 slate of games.
The ‘Canes devastation came when they failed to take a knee and let the clock run out and instead opted to run the ball. That resulted in a fumble that Georgia Tech recovered. Tech then went 44 yards down the field for a touchdown with seconds left in the game and upset Miami.
In the immediate aftermath, Mario Cristobal’s history of clock mismanagement was called out by College Football fans. Cristobal then threw his own player under the bus instead of taking some ownership of the mishap as many coaches would.
Not kneeling on the final play of the game and then proceeding to fumble, allowing the opposing team to throw a game-winning TD pass is an ALL-TIME blunder pic.twitter.com/r3tHOpS1zs
— NFL Memes (@NFL_Memes) October 8, 2023
On Monday, Mario Cristobal appeared on Audacy’s AM 560 Sports WQAM in Miami and he took some responsibility for the failure to take a knee but stopped short of owning the mistake.
Speaking about the decision to run the ball instead of take a knee, Mario Cristobal said:
“There’s no way to rationalize it, Joe. It’s the wrong decision. We should’ve kneeled it and we didn’t do it. We got the first down. After that, again, there’s no way to rationalize it. It was just the wrong decision. We should have taken a knee and taken it out of the players’ hands… This entire program is based and founded on accountability. We gave ourselves a chance to win. Just gotta make that decision to take a knee, that’s it.”
Maybe I’m reading into this too much because it’s College Football and emotions run higher than in pro sports, but I see an overuse of the word ‘we’ in Cristobal’s admission of fault.
‘We should’ve kneeled’ … ‘We got the first down’ … ‘We should have taken a knee’ … ‘We gave ourselves a chance to win.’
At the risk of nitpicking, it would have been nice for Hurricanes fans to hear the coach say ‘I’ at least once. To hear him inject personal responsibility into the debacle would sit better than all of this ‘we’ talk.
The Hurricanes now face #12 ranked UNC on the road followed by Clemson. It will be a tough stretch of games.