Mario Cristobal assesses how Miami handled playing in hostile environment in College Station

Miami suffered its first loss of the Mario Cristobal era last weekend in College Station. The Hurricanes fell to a rebounding Texas A&M team at home, 17-9, to earn their first tally in the loss column. The Aggies fell to Appalachian State in that same building a week prior, but were definitely far more locked in and focused in the primetime game vs. The U.

The crowd was also a much bigger factor in the higher profile game. As is often the case, A&M’s “12th Man” loomed large on the visiting foe, going bananas on defense to befuddle opposing QB Tyler Van Dyke while hyping their own defenders up. The result was a zero-touchdown, single-digit scoring output from Miami. Nine points by way of three field goals.

Yet, in wake of the game, Mario Cristobal believes the raucous environment had very little to do with the Hurricanes’ struggles. In fact, he thought his players handled the environment at Kyle Field very well.

You can watch Cristobal discuss Texas A&M’s environment right here or read his comments in full below.

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Mario Cristobal on Texas A&M crowd

“I think they’re an awesome environment. I think Texas A&M does a great job on game day. Their fans are behind it 100%. They do a really good job. But I don’t think it played a factor in the game. We did jump offsides one time. Whether that be due to noise or not, I don’t know. Hard to tell because we didn’t have any other ones like that.

“But in terms of handling the environment, I thought they did really well, especially at the line of scrimmage. I thought those guys, they handled it really well. And we’re going to have to get better. Because we’re going to play other talented teams in the conference. And one of the biggest messages to our team is…because we played a tight game on the road and gave ourselves a chance to tie or win at the end doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to play well going forward, right.

“A lot of lessons to be learned and, you know, you can’t get better unless you legitimately look at your mistakes and learn from them, right. And you certainly can’t get better if you keep living in the past. So we got to shake this off and get to work and get better at the things that make practice elite. Practice has been good and it’s been getting better. We got to make practice elite.”