Mario Cristobal

Mario Manuel Cristobal (born September 24, 1970) is Cuban-American head football coach of the Miami Hurricanes football team at the University of Miami. Cristobal previously was the head football coach at Florida International University (FIU) from 2007 to 2012 and the University of Oregon from 2017 to 2021. He was an all-conference offensive tackle on the Miami Hurricanes football team that won national championships in 1989 and 1991. Playing career High school and college Cristobal played high school football at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami and then went to play for the University of Miami, where he was a four-year letterman between 1988 and 1992. Cristobal played under Hall of Fame coaches Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson during the rise of the University of Miami as one of the nation's elite collegiate football programs. During his four seasons at the University of Miami, he was a member of two national championship-winning teams (1989 and 1991). In 1992, Cristobal earned First-team All-Big East Conference as an offensive tackle. Cristobal graduated from the University of Miami in 1993 with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Miami School of Business and later earned a master's degree there in 2001. Cristobal is one of several University of Miami players from the late 1980s who appears in the documentary The U, which premiered December 12, 2009 on ESPN, and chronicles the program's rapid ascent and national championships and the era's associated scandals that proved costly to it. The documentary drew 2.3 million viewers, making it then the most watched documentary in ESPN history.