Chris Whittingham

You know me, I'm inclined to entrench myself and be stubborn, but I do think that in the overall, Mario Cristobal has delivered on the best possible version of what he can deliver, which is if he gets the incredible resource that he's been backed with now, with his own salary, salary of a coaching staff, and the amount of money that you have to shell out to get a high-level group of players now, he has been backed in that way.

And by the way, that is a skill, because I don't think that every coach...

can walk into every university or every group of boosters and go, here, I need this amount of money, and you'll get it.

I imagine previous coaches at the University of Miami have thought, well, I could do with a bit more money.

And you don't have the juice in order to pull it off.

Cristobal has the juice to be able to pull it off.

So that is a huge part of the game.

I think he is obviously an unbelievable recruiter, has done it at every stop, and has done it again here.

He has assembled a very good team.

That being said, the one worry that I've always had from him

I just don't think he's a very good coach, a game day coach that can actually consistently deliver results.

You look at last season, last season you have the number one overall picket quarterback, you have an incredible offense, and they lost this 13 and 12 and a half point under favorites against Georgia Tech and Syracuse.

I am still that big skeptical of what he can do in big games or even honestly not in big games.

Can you go through an ACC schedule unscathed?

That might not necessarily be what you need to do now because of how forgiving the playoff format is, but I'm still skeptical that he can consistently deliver results game after game after game.

And I just don't think, this is a personal thing, but I would rather all of that effort be backed into someone I believe to be a good coach

rather than an elite recruiter who, for me, is an average to good coach.

And so that's my own personal preference.

But I think for the University of Miami, for the fans, this is about as well as it could have gone, especially relative to what it's been for 20 years.

Dan, I'm sure you have the context to remember, even from a physical standpoint of what it used to look like in the early 2000s, in the 90s and in the 80s as well.