MIAMI BEACH, Fla. \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Yes, had to throw in a \u201cFlintstones\u201d reference, and for those under 40, the Great Gazoo\u2019s helmet was twice the size of his entire body.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen the pictures, my pants down past my ankles and my helmet bigger than I was,\u201d Miami star edge rusher Rueben Bain Jr.<\/a> joked.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBack where it all started for a lot of us,\u201d said Miami running back Mark Fletcher Jr.<\/a>, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and still remembers the names of his first youth league football teams.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first team I ever played for was the Lauderdale Lions,\u201d said Fletcher, who would have been 7 at the time.<\/p>\n As an 8-year-old, he played for the Fort Lauderdale Rebels and then the Plantation Wildcats once he turned 9.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the team I started to get my name out there. That\u2019s where it really started,\u201d Fletcher said.<\/p>\n Coming back home to play in the most important game of his life carries special meaning for Fletcher, but he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 Fletcher\u2019s way of staying connected with Big Mark. Fletcher\u2019s mother, Linda, isn\u2019t a fan of flying and drives to all his games, including the trip to the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona last week.<\/p>\n \u201cI know she\u2019s extremely pumped\u2026. My girl (his mother) only gotta do 15 minutes this time, so she\u2019s good,\u201d said Fletcher, who went to American Heritage<\/a> High School and is a proud product of the SFYL \u2013 South Florida Youth League \u2013 which has long been a breeding ground for elite players in both the college and NFL ranks.<\/p>\n And like most youngsters playing in those neighborhood park games, Fletcher\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The first one is easy \u2013 the late Sean Taylor. It gets more difficult after that.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going to put DeeJay Dallas in there. That\u2019s my boy,\u201d Fletcher said. \u201cI\u2019ve got two more? I really love the defensive guys. I gotta put Ed Reed in. There\u2019s too many to name. I\u2019m just going to finish it off with Ray Lewis.\u201d<\/p>\n Quarterback Carson Beck<\/a> and Miami\u2019s 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\u2019s teammates say he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHe runs violent, with bad intentions,\u201d Miami center James Brockermeyer<\/a> said. \u201cHe makes us look good. Sometimes we\u2019ll miss a block, and he\u2019ll 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\u2019ve ever seen. He\u2019s such a great teammate and wants to do whatever it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n Playing with that kind of passion is born in neighborhood parks in South Florida at a young age. Malachi Toney<\/a>, Miami\u2019s dynamic freshman receiver, also played at American Heritage High with Fletcher and grew up in Liberty City.<\/p>\n When he was 8, he was dubbed \u201cBaby Jesus\u201d 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.<\/p>\n He was a quarterback at the time and playing on the same team (the Washington Park Buccaneers) as Indiana All-America cornerback D\u2019Angelo Ponds<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cNot everybody gets this kind of chance,\u201d Toney said. \u201cIt\u2019s everything you could ask for.\u201d<\/p>\n Toney and Ponds could wind up seeing a lot of each other on Monday after first meeting as grade-schoolers a decade ago.<\/p>\n While Toney was highly recruited (he said he was leaning toward going to Alabama until Nick Saban retired), Ponds didn\u2019t have many big schools recruiting him despite playing on a stacked Chaminade-Madonna<\/a> High team. Schools were scared off by his size (5-9, 173 pounds), even though he would routinely cover Jeremiah Smith<\/a> in practice.<\/p>\n \u201cIt ended up the way it was supposed to,\u201d Ponds said. \u201cWe\u2019re here playing for the national championship, and for me, it\u2019s right back where I grew up.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a full-circle moment for me just to play at this stadium. I drove past it every day to go to school.\u201d<\/p>\n Ponds is three years older than Toney. When they first met, they were both quarterbacks.<\/p>\n \u201cI always liked defense a little more, so I switched,\u201d Ponds said.<\/p>\n Miami coach Mario Cristobal<\/a> joked that he doesn\u2019t have any good stories to tell from his youth league football days in the Miami area because he wasn\u2019t good enough to play.<\/p>\n \u201cI was a baseball player. I got cut as a freshman in high school, was walking the hallway, and the coach said, \u2018You\u2019re kind of tall. Come out and play football.\u2019 That\u2019s how it ended up happening,\u201d Cristobal said. \u201cI 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThank 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\u2019ve ever been around are my high school coaches.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> (Fernando Mendoza IV) on the same 1986 offensive line at Christopher Columbus<\/a> High School in Miami.<\/p>\n \u201cA 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,\u201d Cristobal said. \u201cYou 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. \u2026 It\u2019s almost like fan bases within fan bases.\u201d<\/p>\n For Fletcher, it\u2019s a chance to honor his father one final time this season and help deliver The U it\u2019s first national championship since 2001.<\/p>\n \u201cGod never leaves you,\u201d Fletcher said about what he\u2019s learned over the last year and a half. \u201cI might be going through the storm, might be going through some adversity, but he will never leave you. You\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBut you\u2019ve got to go through the battle a little bit so you can really, really appreciate those good times.\u201d<\/p>\n And keep alive the dreams, too, the ones kindled with the Lauderdale Lions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI BEACH, Fla. \u2013 They always felt like national championship games, even if some of the kids playing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9978,10552,47,28,30,29,39356,49212],"class_list":["post-122886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-american-heritage-patriots-plantation","tag-chaminade-madonna-prep-lions-hollywood","tag-fl","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-mario-cristobal-88-columbus","tag-mark-fletcher-23-american-heritage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}