SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — Miami quarterback Darian Mensah is a bit superstitious.
He has two ways to exit his house; he only uses one, never the other. The route he drives between home and Miami's campus is always the same. He puts on his uniform the same way, every time. He always gets taped up by the same member of the football staff. His pregame meal, without fail, is steak and mashed potatoes.
And at the end of practice, when most of the other players
on the Hurricanes' roster have left the field, he almost always calls receiver Malachi Toney over for a few extra reps, a little game of throw and catch between Heisman Trophy contenders.
“We're just trying to be great,” Mensah said.
After a day of prepping for Notre Dame, Mensah wound up zipping maybe a half-dozen passes Toney's way long after practice, each ball going 15 yards or so. They were all fastballs. Toney caught them with ease, one of those grabs one-handed. Mensah and center Ryan Rodriguez shook hands when it was done, and Toney went to go through one last individual drill — some hand-to-hand combat, jousting with a staffer with orange pads on his arms.
“These guys, man, they're always working,” running back Mark Fletcher Jr. said as he looked toward Mensah and Toney inside the team's practice facility.
That was Tuesday.
Wednesday was different, and not in a good way.
The trajectory of Miami's season changed during a series where the starters were going against scout-team players. The team wasn’t even in full pads, just the lighter version called shells, and the day wasn’t about heavy contact. Mensah zipped a pass toward Toney, much like the ones they were working on after Tuesday’s practice. Toney went up for the ball. A member of the scout team did, as well. Toney came down screaming in pain. Before long, he was in a golf cart and getting driven to an on-campus medical center at Miami for evaluation.
The word came down a couple of hours later. High ankle sprain. Out for multiple weeks. The Hurricanes — who were No. 1 in the country, unbeaten and flying high — had just taken a massive hit.
“You know how much Mali means to us,” Miami coach Mario Cristobal said. “He means the world.”
They were unbeaten when Toney got hurt. They're unbeaten no more.
Toney wasn't at Notre Dame Stadium on Saturday night. He missed the biggest game on Miami's schedule, and the Hurricanes lost 31-24 to the Fighting Irish to fall from the ranks of the unbeaten. Miami got down 24-3 in the third quarter, then nearly tied the game in the final minutes after eventually figuring out how to get going without their best offensive weapon.
Toney was home in South Florida, recovering from ankle surgery. Tightrope, they call it. The hope is that it'll shave a couple of weeks off the time Toney will need to get back on the field after suffering the high ankle sprain.
“Here, the standard is the standard,” Mensah told The Associated Press during the week, sipping a post-practice smoothie from a plastic cup with his name scrawled on the lid. “Just because it’s Week 10 now, you can’t shy away from the work. We go out, full force, head on, because at the end of the day you’re trying to get better.”
That's all they were trying to do on the play where Toney got hurt. It didn't go as planned.
“I've seen Malachi for a long time,” Cristobal said. “He's like an alley cat. He always lands perfectly on his feet, no matter what body position he contorts himself into. ... Unfortunately, he got a little bit tangled up.”
Around sunrise on Thursday, Toney was at a hospital for surgery — which was deemed successful. He addressed the team before it left for Notre Dame, giving words of encouragement and telling teammates he'll be fine.
The plan is that he'll play in December. When in December is anyone's guess.
All football teams say they try to limit distractions and Cristobal preaches the same. He wants to keep travel plans private, for example, just to ensure the Hurricanes get wherever they're going as easily and smoothly as possible.
Then again, flying a Boeing 787 into a smaller airport like South Bend tends to get noticed.
A few fans — some in Notre Dame gear — were waiting in the hotel lobby when Miami arrived Thursday night. A couple of people cheered, a couple of people jeered and a few got photos for social media. Cristobal, wearing a suit while most of the others in the travel party were in sweats, marched through the lobby, headed upstairs and went right to work.
“For our process, man, we keep it to having a nameless opponent. We've got to attack and get better each and every day on Greentree," running back Mark Fletcher Jr. said, referring to the name of Miami's outdoor practice fields. “That’s just our process. We just let everybody else worry about all that big-game stuff and all that. We prepare the same way. We only do things one way, and that’s just to go 1-0 each and every day on Greentree.”
Miami sent some staffers to South Bend ahead of the team to set things up and get a few amenities ready. There were some Miami flags hanging in the hotel when the team arrived, and they stayed up through Sunday morning, long after the team was gone.
When the team would leave for walkthroughs or the game, lines of buses were outside the front door. About a dozen security guards formed a human wall of sorts, making sure players and staff could get from the elevators to the doors without any issues. There weren't any.
These weren't new touches for Notre Dame week. It's just how Miami operates.
“If you freak out like, ‘Oh, it’s a huge game,' it messes our process up,” offensive lineman Matt McCoy said. “We're not changing anything. We're not doing anything new. We stick to the same process.”
It was almost freezing — 34 degrees Fahrenheit (1 Celsius), to be exact — as Miami's players and coaches headed to the buses that would take them back to the airport shortly after the clock pushed past midnight and went into Sunday.
Nobody seemed cold. They were too angry to be cold.
The Hurricanes, as would be expected, argued long into the night that Elija Lofton caught what would have been a touchdown — and could have tied the game with an extra point — with just under four minutes left. Referees ruled he didn't complete the catch, and that was Miami's last good chance at completing the comeback.
“I wish it had been a touchdown,” university President Joe Echevarria, wearing a lapel pin of the school's famed “U” logo, said quietly as he walked out of the locker room area.
Players and staff half-heartedly looked at postgame meals packed into aluminum trays, then shuffled off to the buses. The tractor-trailer carrying much of the team's game-day gear rumbled away from the Notre Dame campus around 1 a.m., the team landed back in Miami around 4 a.m. and the staff plane touched down about an hour later. A few hours after that, the Hurricanes dropped to No. 5 in the AP Top 25.
And with that, Notre Dame week was over. It had become Duke week, the homecoming game for Miami, and a game that will be hyped up because Mensah and wide receiver Cooper Barkate played for the Blue Devils last season.
Nothing changes, even when everything changes.
“Back to work,” Cristobal said.
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