Canzano: Setting a date with destiny
How about Oregon-Miami in the College Football Playoff, someday?
Four seasons ago, I was watching the Civil War in the Autzen Stadium press box when a pick-up football game broke out down the hallway behind me.
Mario Cristobal’s two sons, Mateo and Rocco, apparently got bored with the Ducks-Beavers rivalry game. In the second quarter, the kids slipped out of the fifth-floor suite they were in with their mom and stepped into the hallway with a football.
Mateo, the older son, tossed the ball toward his kid brother. Rocco fielded the football on a hop, took a couple of hopeful steps upfield, and immediately found himself pinned against the wall by his big brother.
That’s how it goes, right?
It was the final football game Mario Cristobal would coach at Autzen Stadium. In fact, after beating Oregon State, 38-29, that afternoon in 2021, the UO coach hopped a plane to Miami to visit his ailing mother, Clara.
“I gotta go see her,” Cristobal told me.
He coached Oregon in the Pac-12 championship game the following week, and three days later, Miami announced it was hiring Cristobal as its football coach.
Ducks fans understood that Cristobal was going home and mostly wished him well. Oregon moved on and made a great hire. Dan Lanning is 36-6 since taking over. Still, it was interesting to see Cristobal surface on Labor Day weekend, beat No. 6 Notre Dame, and bask in the glow of his biggest victory since leaving Eugene.
Oregon got Lanning, who fits seamlessly at the controls of the edgy, innovative, Nike-fueled football operation. He’s recruited at unprecedented levels and won more frequently in his first 42 games than any Ducks’ head coach in history.
Meanwhile, Miami got the son of Cuban exiles who escaped Fidel Castro’s regime in the 1960s. Mario Cristobal was born in Miami, went to elementary school there, learned to drive his first car there, and played college ball for the Hurricanes.
The trade worked for both sides, didn’t it?