After the confetti fell at SoFi Stadium on a rainy night in Los Angeles three years ago, scores of jubilant Georgia players returned to the locker room in the aftermath of their 65–7 destruction of TCU to claim back-to-back national championships.
Wading through heavy cigar smoke and players throwing their gear into bags for the long journey home, a beeline of reporters made it to the area reserved for the quarterbacks. Stetson Bennett, the game’s offensive MVP, was still on a golf cart in the bowels of the stadium making his way to the postgame news conference, but recorders weren’t rolling to capture what he had to say.
They were there instead for Carson Beck, the backup who was still beaming from ear to ear over the victory and getting to see the field for a seventh time that season, throwing three passes in a title game that stands out for its one-sided dominance. While coach Kirby Smart waited to name the highly touted Jacksonville native as the team’s starter for the following season, the moment was clear that the baton had been handed to the 6′ 4″ signal-caller. The ongoing dynasty in Athens, Ga., was his.
On Monday night, Beck will be back in that final game of the season. He will take center stage in his home state as a starting quarterback—just as he always dreamed of doing. But the path from celebrating a national title three years ago to trying to lead his new team, Miami, to its first in over two decades has been anything but straightforward.
It has been rocky at times, including last season with the Bulldogs when ineffective play and a propensity for turnovers caused his stock to drop from a certified first-rounder in the eyes of NFL scouts. It has been difficult, with over four months of rehab following surgery to repair the ulnar collateral ligament he sprained in the 2024 SEC championship game that was his final one with Georgia. It has been controversial even, with plenty of off-field headlines generated for his choice of cars or the very public breakup with a former girlfriend.
Miami quarterback Carson Beck won two national championships with Georgia. Now, he’s trying to lead the Hurricanes back to the top. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated
“For me individually, everything that’s happened and transpired over the past 12 months, it’s been unreal, you know? It’s been just over 365 days since I got my surgery. That was on Dec. 23,” said Beck after the Cotton Bowl quarterfinal win over reigning champion Ohio State. “I remember just going back to [right before] Christmas time. My family’s down in Miami because we had practice and we’d just beaten Texas A&M. We’re just there reminiscing about the past year and everything that I had gone through and that our family had gone through.
“It’s been one hell of a ride, and to be able to get to this point, and play with these guys and these coaches and this fan base, it’s unbelievable.”
That ride ends soon, the culmination of a college career with a little bit of everything from the highest of all highs to the lowest of lows spanning his old program and his new one.
While there are numerous butterfly effects that may have pushed Beck to Coral Gables, Fla., few were as consequential as one second left on the clock in the first half of the 2024 SEC championship game between Georgia and Texas. Had time simply expired and the Bulldogs gone into the locker room trailing 6–3, perhaps the veteran quarterback would have been wrapping up his NFL rookie season this month.
Instead, there was still time for Georgia to run a play, driving with the ball on the 42-yard line. Beck took the snap, dropped back but was flushed to his left by the pass rush. He eventually found enough daylight to launch a Hail Mary but, before his arm could whip forward, Longhorns linebacker Trey Moore came down hard with both hands to force a fumble.
As the ball bounced around between a few players with zeros on the clock, Beck laid almost motionless at midfield of Mercedes-Benz Stadium while grabbing his right elbow. Trainers rushed to him and were so numerous that Smart had to stand tall even to peer in and get an update.
After eventually getting up to walk slowly back to the locker room at halftime, Beck returned to the sideline with his helmet on in the second half and watched as backup Gunner Stockton methodically guided the Bulldogs back, eventually forcing overtime in a battle between two College Football Playoff teams.
Stockton, however, was sent to the sideline on the second possession of the first overtime after taking a hit so hard that his helmet flew off on a scramble in the red zone. The Georgia coaching staff turned to Beck and asked him if he could still do one last snap despite little feeling in his hurt arm.
“That was a really cool moment, for that to be my last play at Georgia and not the injury. It was kind of full circle,” said Beck this summer of what proved to be a game-winning handoff to Trevor Etienne to walk off the SEC title. “It was never my plan to leave Georgia. My plan was to spend my career at Georgia and then ultimately go to the NFL, which has been a dream of mine since I was a kid.”
Carson Beck suffered a UCL strain in the 2024 SEC championship game for Georgia. He missed most of the second half and overtime in the game, and transferred to Miami later that month. | Brett Davis-Imagn Images
Beck missed the team’s trip to the Sugar Bowl to play Notre Dame after being diagnosed with a UCL strain. He had surgery to repair it in Los Angeles shortly before Christmas, but the redshirt senior still declared for the NFL draft on Dec. 28, 2024. He was widely projected to be selected in the first three rounds of the 2025 draft.
Then came a surprise twist—Beck’s name popped up in the transfer portal on the first Thursday of 2025. Though he insisted Smart and Georgia would have welcomed him back for his final season of eligibility, roughly 24 hours later Beck committed to Miami for one last collegiate campaign.
“In this day and age with transfer stuff, you’ve got to get a lot of information in a little bit of time. Luckily enough for me, I knew some people in Carson’s background,” Hurricanes offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson says. “I knew [former Georgia coordinator Todd] Monken real well. I had a long conversation with him because I didn’t know a lot about Carson other than what I could see on TV. I could watch his games and see he was a talented thrower of the football. He’s won a lot of games. But I didn’t know a lot about the person. I think a lot of people don’t know a lot about the person and they make certain assumptions about Carson. They really aren’t true. There’s some narratives about him that once you get to know him are the furthest thing from the truth.”
Still, there was a bit of an unknown over what exactly Miami was getting in Beck. During his second season as a starter in red and black, he was far less efficient and turned the ball over at an unexpectedly high rate, doubling his interception total. The Bulldogs lost twice during the regular season and barely scraped out wins against several others after nearly making the four-team CFP with a 12–1 mark the season prior.
While much more was on his plate (Georgia had its worst rushing offense in over a decade), Beck also struggled behind an offensive line that seemed to be in constant motion. Drops plagued the receiving corps all season. Beck experienced criticism more than he had at any point in his career, with negative body language constantly getting pointed out on social media. The chatter about his $300,000 Lamborghini, NIL deals and the rest of his off-field life didn’t cease.
There was also the matter of the unknown regarding his recovery. Dawson made calls to other quarterbacks who had suffered similar injuries and felt better at bringing Beck in, as part of a reported $4 million NIL deal, after getting positive feedback from then-49ers QB Nick Mullens about the process. Coaches were also impressed with the way he attacked the rehab process early on. Beck spent spring ball on the sideline as an interested observer in a role several around the program joked was as a volunteer assistant.
Carson Beck threw for 268 yards and two touchdowns against Ole Miss in the College Football Playoff semifinal. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated
“I don’t really have any mutual friends that know him or anything like that so I really had no idea what to expect. But I knew he was a really good football player, and he’s done a lot of great things in his career,” says center James Brockermeyer. “Just meeting him the day he got to the facility in January [2025], watching him learn the offense, it was awesome. The dude’s special, we’re really lucky to have him.”
In late April, Beck was put on a pitch count that grew by the week as he built his arm up. Doctors fully cleared him late last summer and he was able to trot out onto the practice fields in August to show what he was really capable of.
Past the tree-lined boulevards that lead up to the Miami football facilities are a series of tall construction fences that denote a multimillion-dollar facelift to the team’s traditional home base. They are a sign of progress in Coral Gables after years of lacking modern amenities and a reminder of the ambition the school’s administration has for the program.
It is also something that Beck and his teammates have spent months navigating over, around and through in order to get work in.
While it’s a minor nuisance, it’s something that has been dealt with as the quarterback receded from the limelight with his move to town and made the facilities his new home away from home. From early mornings to late nights, Beck has been a constant presence around the coaching offices, watching film on his own in empty meeting rooms or getting additional work in at the indoor practice facility.
While he had the cachet of having been an SEC signal-caller with two national title rings, the work ethic the veteran displayed from the moment he joined the program impressed those who had only ever been exposed to the recent negative stories coming out of Georgia.
“He really doesn’t care too much about what people have to say about him. He’s about his business,” said freshman Miami wideout Malachi Toney, who set the program record for receptions on the other end of Beck’s passes. “He was a great quarterback with a lot of experience. People were always doubting him, but I wanted to get to know him as a person.”
Beck often pulls players aside during breaks in practice to go over plays or offer tips. He was inseparable from offensive analyst Max Drisko as he learned the playbook during his first few months in town. Even when he wasn’t able to get onto the field to throw passes, he still hung out with nearly every receiver and invested quite a bit of time with them away from football trying to understand what made every one of his new teammates tick.
“The first thing he told me was, ‘If you want to win the natty, you’ve got to believe,’ ” receiver CJ Daniels said. “At the end of the day, we believed it. He’s been through a lot, everybody knows. The whole world criticized him, but he came to work every day with that pressure. Carson, there’s no other quarterback I’d want to play with.”
Hurricanes wide receiver Malachi Toney celebrates after scoring a touchdown against Notre Dame to open the season. | Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
“That’s the man with the plan. Everybody spoke bad on him, saying this or saying that, and he proved everybody wrong,” receiver Keelan Marion said. “He’s been proving everybody wrong game by game. You can say what you want about him, we know who he is.”
The rest of the country soon became reacquainted, too. He threw two touchdown passes, including an incredible one before halftime to Daniels, in a marquee win over Notre Dame in the season opener. He balanced out two picks against a ranked South Florida team with 340 yards and three scores in a blowout. They thumped rival Florida at Hard Rock Stadium, and he threw four touchdown passes against Florida State that suddenly made everyone sit up and take notice of Miami.
Beck surged to near the top of the Heisman Trophy odds and many pegged the Hurricanes as the favorite to win the ACC and finally reach the CFP they narrowly missed the season prior.
“The quarterback position is such a unique position and it takes reps to understand certain things and see certain things. You can do things on the fly when you’ve seen a certain coverage or a certain pressure or a certain look, and it might be something that you recall that you saw three years ago,” Beck said. “Obviously, the more experience that you have, the game just continues to slow down. You can be calm, cool and collected out there on the field and just have the game come to you.”
The Hurricanes rose to No. 2 in the polls and the first whispers started about the potential for The U actually being back with the national title game at Hard Rock Stadium. It was all lining up for the program going into its first bye week and especially so without any ranked opponents left on the schedule.
Then Louisville arrived in town for a Friday night game that was supposed to be about revenge—the Cardinals delivered the last home loss for the Canes—but turned the contest into a nightmare where everything that could go wrong did. Fake field goals were run successfully, the defense looked much more like last season’s version that gave up too many big plays and opposing QB Miller Moss was the one coming up clutch to keep moving the sticks.
Beck, meanwhile, went from Cinderella story into a full-on pumpkin, throwing four interceptions for the first time in his career—the last coming while the team was in field goal range to potentially tie the game with under a minute left.
“This is when I knew that really we were going to be fine. Because I went up to the office the next day and he was extremely positive,” Dawson said after the loss. “That’s part of being a quarterback. You’ve got to have short-term memory.”
Miami remained in the top 10 with its fate still firmly in its hands, but the setback was all that was needed to resurface those creeping doubts about the quarterback who turned it over too many times with the Bulldogs in 2024. The Hurricanes bounced back against Stanford with an easy blowout, but their first trip out of state to play a game could not have gone worse, resulting in a 26–20 overtime loss at SMU that had most dancing on the team’s grave.
Carson Beck and the Hurricanes routed Stanford as doubts had started to creep in about their shot at the CFP. | Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
All that money spent on the roster, that high-priced transfer quarterback, suddenly it felt all for naught. Feelings were raw and exposed on the flight home from Dallas. For some teams, it would have been the moment when things unraveled further.
Instead, it became an inflection point that Miami has built upon with each passing week. A players-only meeting put everything out in the open and drew the group closer. Coach Mario Cristobal became even more resolved to convey the message about being 1–0 each week while tuning out external noise.
“It was never easy, it was never perfect. There was a lot of adversity not only that I faced as an individual, but that we faced as a team,” Beck said after the Fiesta Bowl. “We really banded together and showed that we believe in connection, we don’t fake it. This team is really a family.”
It’s shown up between the lines. The Hurricanes wheeled off seven wins in a row—five away from home across three different time zones—after slowly moving up the CFP rankings until the selection committee placed them as the last team into the field.
Beck completed at least 70% of his passes in every outing during this run and posted an impressive 15-to-two touchdown-to-interception ratio since the loss to SMU. He was key in helping guide Miami past Texas A&M despite 30 mph winds at Kyle Field, played near flawlessly by using his legs to pick up several important third downs to beat reigning champs Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl and eventually scored the game-winning touchdown on a scramble to top Mississippi in closing seconds of the Fiesta Bowl semifinal.
Carson Beck has done it all for the Canes in their playoff run. Now, just Indiana stands in their way. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated
Now, just one game remains against undefeated and top-ranked Indiana.
“I’m super excited, this whole team is super excited to have the opportunity to play not only for a national championship, but to play in Hard Rock,” Beck said. “It’s been unbelievable. Almost exactly a year ago, I made the decision to come to this university. Me and Coach Cristobal, we were talking on the phone in Jacksonville at my house and in my room. He had a big smile on his face and I had a big smile on my face.”
On Monday, at home, the pair will take the field one last time together in a season-ender that means just a little bit more than others.
Out in front, leading the way, for all to see, will be Beck under center. It has taken an unpredictable series of twists and turns to reach the final game of the season again, but there is hope, for him and his welcoming new family at Miami, that it ends with the quarterback flashing another beaming smile in the locker room after lifting a trophy all the same.
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