MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – They always felt like national championship games, even if some of the kids playing in those South FLA neighborhood parks had helmets that made them look like the Great Gazoo.
Yes, had to throw in a “Flintstones” reference, and for those under 40, the Great Gazoo’s helmet was twice the size of his entire body.
“I’ve seen the pictures, my pants down past my ankles and my helmet bigger than I was,” Miami star edge rusher Rueben Bain Jr. joked.
On Monday, Miami and Indiana will duke it out in the real College Football Playoff national championship game, and perhaps fittingly, at Hard Rock Stadium.
“Back where it all started for a lot of us,” said Miami running back Mark Fletcher Jr., who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and still remembers the names of his first youth league football teams.
“The first team I ever played for was the Lauderdale Lions,” said Fletcher, who would have been 7 at the time.
As an 8-year-old, he played for the Fort Lauderdale Rebels and then the Plantation Wildcats once he turned 9.
“That’s the team I started to get my name out there. That’s where it really started,” Fletcher said.
Coming back home to play in the most important game of his life carries special meaning for Fletcher, but he’s been playing with a higher purpose ever since the 2024 season when his father, Mark Fletcher Sr. (Big Mark), died unexpectedly in his sleep on Oct. 24, 2024. He was 53.
Fletcher initially committed to Ohio State out of high school, but changed his mind and stayed home so his family could watch him play. His father was his biggest fan, and Fletcher still sends heartfelt text messages to him before games – Fletcher’s way of staying connected with Big Mark. Fletcher’s mother, Linda, isn’t a fan of flying and drives to all his games, including the trip to the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona last week.
“I know she’s extremely pumped…. My girl (his mother) only gotta do 15 minutes this time, so she’s good,” said Fletcher, who went to American Heritage High School and is a proud product of the SFYL – South Florida Youth League – which has long been a breeding ground for elite players in both the college and NFL ranks.
And like most youngsters playing in those neighborhood park games, Fletcher’s dream was to play for The U. He smiles and then breaks into a slight grimace when asked to choose his Mount Rushmore of former Miami players.
The first one is easy – the late Sean Taylor. It gets more difficult after that.
“I’m going to put DeeJay Dallas in there. That’s my boy,” Fletcher said. “I’ve got two more? I really love the defensive guys. I gotta put Ed Reed in. There’s too many to name. I’m just going to finish it off with Ray Lewis.”
Quarterback Carson Beck and Miami’s defense have received much of the love in this playoff run, with the Hurricanes winning seven straight games after losing to SMU in overtime on Nov. 1. But Fletcher’s teammates say he’s been one of the pillars. The 6-2, 225-pound junior has 1,080 rushing yards and 10 touchdowns entering the title game, and he racked up 395 of those yards in the three playoff games.
“He runs violent, with bad intentions,” Miami center James Brockermeyer said. “He makes us look good. Sometimes we’ll miss a block, and he’ll run a guy over or make a guy miss and take off down the sideline. What also stands out about him is that his pass protection is elite, some of the best I’ve ever seen. He’s such a great teammate and wants to do whatever it takes.”
Playing with that kind of passion is born in neighborhood parks in South Florida at a young age. Malachi Toney, Miami’s dynamic freshman receiver, also played at American Heritage High with Fletcher and grew up in Liberty City.
When he was 8, he was dubbed “Baby Jesus” by somebody on Facebook who had seen Toney do in the parks what he did this season to opposing defenders in earning ACC Freshman of the Year honors.
He was a quarterback at the time and playing on the same team (the Washington Park Buccaneers) as Indiana All-America cornerback D’Angelo Ponds.
“Not everybody gets this kind of chance,” Toney said. “It’s everything you could ask for.”
Toney and Ponds could wind up seeing a lot of each other on Monday after first meeting as grade-schoolers a decade ago.
While Toney was highly recruited (he said he was leaning toward going to Alabama until Nick Saban retired), Ponds didn’t have many big schools recruiting him despite playing on a stacked Chaminade-Madonna High team. Schools were scared off by his size (5-9, 173 pounds), even though he would routinely cover Jeremiah Smith in practice.
“It ended up the way it was supposed to,” Ponds said. “We’re here playing for the national championship, and for me, it’s right back where I grew up.
“It’s definitely a full-circle moment for me just to play at this stadium. I drove past it every day to go to school.”
Ponds is three years older than Toney. When they first met, they were both quarterbacks.
“I always liked defense a little more, so I switched,” Ponds said.
Miami coach Mario Cristobal joked that he doesn’t have any good stories to tell from his youth league football days in the Miami area because he wasn’t good enough to play.
“I was a baseball player. I got cut as a freshman in high school, was walking the hallway, and the coach said, ‘You’re kind of tall. Come out and play football.’ That’s how it ended up happening,” Cristobal said. “I went out there and I wanted to play quarterback, but I threw the ball sideways. And I wanted to play tight end, and I didn’t run fast enough. They kept moving me closer and closer to the football, and I ended up a couple spots down from it at tackle.
“Thank God I did because I learned so much as it relates to this sport but also what it is to be part of a team. The most elite coaches that I’ve ever been around are my high school coaches.”
To this day, Cristobal said any major decision he has to make that he picks up the phone and calls his high school coach, Dennis Lavelle, who coached both Cristobal and the father of Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza (Fernando Mendoza IV) on the same 1986 offensive line at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami.
“A lot of these guys, like myself, you grew up watching the University of Miami and you wanted to wear that U on the side of your helmet,” Cristobal said. “You wanted to play in front of family and friends and the community, and the community has watched these guys play for a long, long time. Youth football and high school football here are so big. … It’s almost like fan bases within fan bases.”
For Fletcher, it’s a chance to honor his father one final time this season and help deliver The U it’s first national championship since 2001.
“God never leaves you,” Fletcher said about what he’s learned over the last year and a half. “I might be going through the storm, might be going through some adversity, but he will never leave you. You’ve just always got to have that faith and appreciate the bad times just as much as the good times because the good times are going to come around again.
“But you’ve got to go through the battle a little bit so you can really, really appreciate those good times.”
And keep alive the dreams, too, the ones kindled with the Lauderdale Lions.