No. 3 Miami hangs on to beat Florida State, 43-35 in a double-overtime thriller

Miami beat its archrival — and staked a claim to moving atop the AP Top 25 for the first time since 2002. Darian Mensah threw for 326 yards and three touchdowns, the last of them a 3-yarder to Malachi Toney in the second overtime, and No. 3 Miami held on to beat archrival Florida State 43-35 in a back-and-forth classic on Saturday night. “This is what great teams do, find a way to win,” Mensah said. No. 1 Georgia lost to Auburn and No. 2 Notre Dame lost to BYU, making Saturday the first instance of the nation’s two top-ranked teams falling on the same regular-season day since Nov. 17, 2012, according to Sportradar. That clears a path for Miami to be No. 1 when the new poll comes out Sunday. “We have a good enough sample size of 2026 to know that s absolutely insignificant and irrelevant with the changing of the guard from week to week,” Miami coach Mario Cristobal said. “It just has no value to our processes and whatnot. I ll focus on the real ‘1’ that s important — the