Greg McElroy claims Miami missing a bowl game would reflect culture under Mario Cristobal

There is hope that Miami will be much improved in Year 2 under Mario Cristobal, but if not, Greg McElroy believes there needs to be a chagce. No, the ESPN analyst doesn’t believe Cristobal should be fired if the Hurricanes struggle again in 2023. However, he does believe Cristobal needs to change the way he puts his roster together if Miami misses out on a bowl for a second straight year.

“It’s going to really point to culture, probably, more than anything else, because we knew Miami had some talent last year, but the culture wasn’t quite there,” McElroy said recently on the Always College Football podcast. “They’d really gone after and attacked the portal, they’ve prioritized the portal. They’ve gone out and they’ve upgraded at certain positions that they felt like they needed to upgrade at. The roster wasn’t dismal last year. It’s just that they didn’t play hard all the time. They didn’t play together all the time. It felt like a bunch of guys that just put on a uniform and they didn’t really have a lot of continuity.”

Miami finished last season 5-7, going 3-7 in its final 10 games, after opening the year 2-0. The Hurricanes were blown out by two of the top teams in the ACC in Clemson and Florida State and also lost at home to Middle Tennessee.

If there are more inexplicable results in 2023, McElroy believes something has to be done differently.

“I think if they don’t get to a bowl game this year it’s going to force Mario Cristobal… people will say he’s on the hot seat. I don’t agree with that. I don’t align with that. It takes a little time to get things going,” McElroy said. “But I think he’s probably going to have to look internally at his program and say, ‘Is going after the transfer classes and the portal players every year a recipe for success?’ … I don’t think you can live by the portal and die by the portal. I think you have to supplement your high school recruiting with portal additions.”

Cristobal has taken a different approach thus far, choosing instead to load up on portal players since taking over in an effort to reshape the roster quickly.

The talent may improve when that happens, but McElroy believes it can be tougher to build a winning culture.

With all of that said, McElroy isn’t giving up on Miami. It’s possible that they bounce back and have a much better 2023 season and this whole conversation is for naught.

“They could bounce back. Last year it was kind of easy to pin the failures on the offensive coordinator Josh Gattis, because he tried to take a square peg and a round hole and said, ‘Tyler Van Dyke, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to run some RPO stuff and we’re just going to do things that I’m more comfortable with and you’re just going to have to learn how to play it.’ … He knows how to do things a certain way, but doing it that way was not good for the development of Tyler Van Dyke. It just wasn’t a good mix,” McElroy said.

“If it doesn’t happen this year, it’s going to fall on Mario Cristobal. And it’s going to fall on how he’s putting the roster together. And it’s gonna force him to probably look internally and say, ‘Hey, maybe we need to adjust how we’re doing things. I want to jump start this thing, but maybe a homegrown effort to secure players at the high school level and develop them up through the program might be better for the long-term prognosis and health of the program.'”