Despite losing the College Football Playoff National Championship, Miami had an impressive 2025-26 season, cementing its place back among the best in the sport.
There’s plenty of reasons to believe that the Hurricanes will be able to ride their momentum into next season. A standout high school recruiting class is one of them.
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Earlier this month, head coach Mario Cristobal and Co. officially landed the No. 8 class in the 2026 Rivals Industry Team Recruiting Rankings. The class, which features 31 signees, sits atop the ACC and is also No. 1 in the Sunshine State, ahead of Florida (No. 14) and Florida State (No. 15).
It’s the fifth time in the last six cycles that the Canes have sat above the Gators and Seminoles in the team recruiting rankings. Cristobal joined ‘The Hard Count’ with On3’s J.D. PicKell and discussed the importance of in-state recruiting and how he and his staff deal with other programs negatively recruiting against the Hurricanes.
“In recruiting, you always want to win your state,” Cristobal said. “We provide very tangible proof of the direction of our program and what we’re doing. We don’t get into negative recruiting, but people always negative recruit us and that’s fine, no one should ever take that personally, let’s just let it play out. People have a lot of data, they have a sample size to compare how our program is doing versus the rest of our competitors in the state and the direction of our program as well.”
Miami is now 35-19 in four seasons under Cristobal and is now riding back-to-back double-digit-win campaigns. FSU is now 30-21 in the last four years of the Mike Norvell era, winning just seven games in the last two. Florida is 23-27 in that span and fired Billy Napier in the middle of last season.
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Cristobal: ‘We’re not satisfied’
The Miami head coach remained stoic amidst his team’s run to the CFP National Championship. Focused on one win at a time, he nearly took his alma mater to the promised land.
Nearly. It didn’t happen, and that fuels Cristobal moving forward. He knows there’s another step to take and he feels that his mindset is shared by the rest of the program. That resonates with recruits.
“I think players and parents realize that not only is our program — we’re not satisfied. We were a participant in the national championship, we didn’t win it. We look at that dead on and say let’s go get better so we can put ourselves in a situation to win that game as well and win a conference and get better as a program,” Cristobal said.
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“I think that hunger is felt, I don’t think over here it’s a sales pitch, it’s a way of life and a vocation. At the end of the day, unless I’m crazy, I think I’m the only head coach in Florida who actually played at the school he coaches at.”
Miami’s 2026 recruiting class is headlined by Five-Star Plus+ offensive tackle Jackson Cantwell, the No. 1 overall prospect in the Rivals Industry Ranking. He’s one of 20 blue-chip signees in the class.
Of those 20, half are from Florida. The Hurricanes signed four more in-state four-stars than Florida and five more than FSU.
“At Miami it’s very different. It’s a whole different level of meaning, a whole different level of purpose and intent. Live and die a Hurricane, man,” Cristobal said. “That means I’ll do anything and everything possible to make sure our players and our program continues to have success both on and off the field.”
