Mario Cristobal and Fernando Mendoza’s dad played high school football together in Miami.
Columbus High School sent several players to Miami in the 1980s, including Mario Cristobal.
A Miami newspaper described Fernando Mendoza IV as ‘un ganador.’ Translation: a winner.
Old high school football memories have a way of blurring the lines between reality and urban legend, as the years go by.
Give it enough time (plus a few cold ones), and the game manager who quarterbacked the prep team from yesteryear slowly morphs into Joe Montana.
The Columbus High football teams he coached in Miami in the 1980s, good though they were, didn’t revolutionize offense. They would’ve benefited from more talent at the skill positions.
“Very vanilla,” Lavelle said of his Columbus offenses.
Vanilla tastes pretty good when you own the line of scrimmage.
Columbus did.
“We made a living up front,” said Lavelle, who’s retired from a decades-long career in coaching. “Our offensive and defensive lines were full of Division I kids.”
Columbus’ 1986 offensive line featured three surnames you’ll hear this week when Miami plays Indiana in the national championship game at Hard Rock Stadium.
Cristobal. Mendoza. Mirabal.
Mario Cristobal coaches Miami, where Alex Mirabal is his offensive line coach.
As for Fernando Mendoza IV, the cameras keep finding him in the stands throughout this College Football Playoff. You know his son, Fernando V, as Indiana’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback.
“Great kids. Just absolutely great kids, really good players,” Lavelle told USA TODAY of Mendoza IV, Cristobal and Mirabal.
“They’re the kind of kids that you get out of bed in the morning to coach and teach. They were freaking perfect.”
Fernando Mendoza IV was ‘un ganador’: A winner
Mendoza IV graduated a year ahead of Cristobal and Mirabal. The Miami Herald described Mendoza following his 1986 senior season as “the top offensive lineman” for Columbus.
The multi-talented Mendoza participated on the United States’ eight-man crew team that won the 1987 World Junior Rowing Championships in West Germany. He previously won gold in the four-man quad at the 1984 U.S. Junior National Championships.
Mendoza later rowed crew at Brown University.
For those uninitiated to rowing, let’s cut through the jargon.
The Miami Herald’s Spanish edition needed just two words to describe Mendoza in a story about his rowing accomplishments.
“Un ganador,” the newspaper wrote of him in 1987.
Translation: a winner.
That’s how Lavelle felt about his ’86 Explorers football team.
Columbus High’s ‘extremely strong’ brotherhood includes Mario Cristobal
As Lavelle put it, Columbus was “full of really good students” who “wanted to be” at the private Catholic school. They took a test to gain entry.
“When you go to Columbus,” Cristobal said, “that brotherhood is extremely strong.”
Cristobal recalls the details of Columbus winning a Class 5A region title in the ’86 season by upsetting Southridge, the state’s No. 1-ranked and previously undefeated team.
The Explorers won 3-0 on a field goal from Carlos Huerta, one of the many players Lavelle coached who’d play for Miami. Cristobal and Huerta became Hurricanes teammates.
Remember what we said about a vanilla offense?
Well, in that upset of Southridge, Columbus attempted five passes. It completed one. It won the game at the line of scrimmage.
The next year, in 1987, Cristobal earned third-team all-state honors before playing for Miami.
Mirabal later began his coaching career at Columbus as an assistant under Lavelle.
“He was in with both feet,” Lavelle said of Mirabal’s coaching interest.
Lavelle keeps in touch with Cristobal and Mirabal. They helped arrange for Lavelle and his sons to attend Miami’s first-round playoff win at Texas A&M. Cristobal texted Lavelle, who lives in Stuart, Florida, this week about attending the national championship.
Lavelle and his wife are Ohio natives, and they were in attendance in 2021 when Cristobal coached Oregon to a win against Ohio State at Ohio Stadium. Lavelle counts watching the Buckeyes lose to Cristobal’s team as “one of the great experiences of my life.”
Cristobal beat Ohio State again, this time with Miami, on New Year’s Eve to continue the march to Hard Rock Stadium, where the Mendozas and Cristobal will spotlight Columbus.
Mendoza IV is a doctor in the emergency department at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. Although Cristobal hasn’t kept in close contact with his former teammate, he praised him as “a prominent member of the community down here in the medical field.”
“All the respect in the world for him and his family,” Cristobal said.
Dennis Lavelle had ‘the greatest time in the world’ coaching Columbus
Mendoza V also played for Columbus, starting at quarterback there for two seasons just a few miles from Miami’s campus. He didn’t receive a scholarship offer from the Hurricanes out of high school. Miami hired Cristobal weeks before Mendoza signed with California. He’s the one who got away.
“How could you have missed him, Coach?” Lavelle said teasingly.
In seriousness, Lavelle points out nearly “everybody else” missed on Mendoza, too. He had a two-star recruiting rating when he signed with Cal out of Columbus.
Miami pursued Mendoza when he decided to transfer. He chose Indiana, where his brother, Alberto, is the backup quarterback.
Not until Mendoza V was at Cal did Lavelle realize the son of one of his former players was a budding star quarterback. Now, watching Mendoza excel at Indiana, Lavelle offers an assessment we all share: “Man, can he play. Holy crap, he is the real deal.”
With one Mendoza quarterbacking the Hoosiers, another watching from the stands, and Cristobal and Mirabal coaching for the Hurricanes, Columbus will have its fingerprints all over this matchup.
As Lavelle reflects on coaching players like Mendoza IV, Cristobal and Mirabal at Columbus, he’s struck by a thought.
“That was just the greatest time in the world,” Lavelle said. “I miss it. I miss the (crap) out of it, I really do.”
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
