- The Miami Hurricanes are one game away from winning their first national championship since 2001.
- Coach Mario Cristobal and former players emphasize the importance of the Greentree practice fields to the program’s success.
- This year’s team is said to embody the intense, competitive practice culture of Miami’s past championship teams.
It’s there off San Amaro Drive, rows of oak trees rustling in the South Florida breeze and paving a path on the pristine Coral Gables campus.
Right into Greentree.
‘It’s everything,’ Cristobal says.
It’s the foundation of all Miami championship teams of the past, the one undeniable link to this year’s team that’s one game away from winning it all ― and bringing the national title back to Miami for the first time since 2001.
Or as former players proudly declare, when you officially join the club.
“This offseason, I was talking to Mario and he said they were finally practicing like we did,” said former Miami All-American offensive lineman Leon Searcy, who along with Cristobal, were bookend tackles on the Canes’ 1991 national championship team. “I told him, ‘Be careful saying that.’ When we practiced against each other, we tried to kill each other. Good on good, All-American vs. All-American.
“I told him, ‘You’ve got something if those guys are doing that.’”
And here we are, days from the College Football Playoff national championship game against No. 1 Indiana, and Miami — the program lost in mediocrity for more than two decades — is still standing. Still trading blows, still persevering through a win-or-go-home hole it dug itself in early November.
Still getting closer and closer to reaching the rare national championship air that five previous Miami teams breathed and bathed in. So many teams since 2001 have talked about winning it all, and reviving the Cane Thing.
None could replicate it.
All of those coaches who desperately tried to follow Howard Schnellenberger and Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson and Larry Coker. All of those players who talked the Miami talk, who acted like Jerome Brown and Jesse Armstead and Andre Johnson and Jeremy Shockey — and always finished the season in some meaningless bowl game.
So when Cristobal told Searcy this offseason it looks like the days of old at Greentree, it was like a bolt out of the blue. Especially after the Canes tanked in 2024, losing two of three to finish the season and missing the CFP.
After Miami wasted an elite talent at quarterback in Cam Ward, and after the failed two-year run of defensive coordinator Lance Guidry — who became the only person who could stop All-World edge Rueben Bain and the rest of the high-level talent on defense.
If you’re making comparisons to Greentree, it’s about to get serious. And then it did.
They’re now a game away from ending a 24-year drought for the program that once owned the sport. A near quarter century in the college football hinterlands for the program’s players that once bled for each other in Greentree.
“It’s all business at Greentree,” says Canes safety Keionte Scott, who arrived in Miami this year after spending three seasons at Auburn. “That was very clear from the moment I stepped on the field.”
They fight on Greentree, they love on Greentree. They push each other to unheard and unseen limits.
There was a time, early in his career at Miami, when Canes legend Ed Reed finally realized what Greentree was all about. The team was going through its annual preseason conditioning in the 1999 fall camp, running a timed test of 16 110s .
That’s 110-yard runs, 16 times, with 45 seconds in between runs. And every position had a time limit — or everyone in that group ran again.
Reed was a sophomore, recruited a year earlier by Butch Davis to help return Miami to its rightful status among the college football elite after NCAA sanctions crippled the program. He and the defensive backs finished one of their 110s, and turned to watch the offensive linemen.
There was freshman Vernon Carey, who would grow into one of the best linemen in the game, 50 yards shy of completing the 110 and struggling to stay afloat. It was then that the foundational ideal of Greentree hit home.
The rest of the offensive linemen ran back to Carey, and ran back to the finish line with him — encouraging him to dig deep and find it.
“That’s Greentree, that (expletive) is real,” Reed said. ‘We aren’t just talking about what we did, we’re telling you how it was. You need to hold yourself accountable for those players who came before you, and what you do now. It’s different when you wear that orange and green, and walk around Miami when you’ve actually done something.”
It should come as no surprise then that Michael Irvin and Ray Lewis — among many other legendary former Canes — have been stalking the sidelines this season. It’s not just about this Miami team, it’s about all the champions of the past and the sweat equity they paid.
“If you want to fit in with the greats,” Searcy said, “You’ve got to be great.”
They’re one game from the pinnacle moment, one game against white-hot Indiana strolling into Hard Rock Stadium to take what’s rightfully Miami’s. You better believe that’s how these Canes are treating it.
Just like the old Canes would. It’s their home, it’s their party.
They paid for it on Greentree.