Great performance by Miami Hurricanes’ Jacory Harris

ALLAHASSEE — One of the great season-opening victories in 84 years of University of Miami history is what it was. That’s all. And one of the great, clutch performances ever by a young Hurricanes quarterback. That’s all.

What sounds like it must be hyperbole might be understatement after Monday night’s thrilling 38-34 UM upset victory against Florida State here forged by sophomore Jacory Harris’ 386-yards passing.

Winning or losing this game wasn’t going to tell us, by itself, whether UM was back to the national football prominence that has eluded it most of this decade.

We saw enough to know this much, though, and it would have been true no matter who led last in this typically great Miami-Florida State matchup:

The Hurricanes are getting there.

Oh yes they are.

And I believe they have found the player to lead them the whole way back. Last season, we saw hints and signs from this kid. We saw potential.

Monday night we saw proof.

Harris, the young quarterback, took everything on here and handled it all. So much pressure on this young man, so much weight, but those skinny legs of his didn’t buckle a bit.

“I am embracing the challenge,” he had said of his first foray into the din of Doak Campbell Stadium.

He did, too, in a game that rocked back and forth and found FSU back up 34-31 late — the underdog Canes toe to toe with the 18th-ranked Seminoles — until UM went up for good set up by Harris’ 40-yard completion to Travis Benjamin to the FSU 3.

Labor Day, indeed. The work wasn’t done until the clock read :00.

“I like to break the spirit of fans,” Harris had said of the Seminole crazies in garnet who awaited him.

He did that, too. He gave his Canes leads and chances before he ultimately gave them triumph, overcoming a UM pass defense that made FSU’s Christian Ponder look like Tim Tebow-meets-Tom Brady.

Harris was the Hurricanes’ weapon-with-silencer for much of the game and when it counted, turning Florida State fans quiet while using his right hand to lift the spirits of Miami fans, and see them loud and soaring.

UM’s own defense, more than Florida State’s, seemed at times to become too much for Harris to overcome. It was not.

You would have been harsh, even had Miami had lost, if all you saw was the 31-yard late interception return touchdown against Harris. He was sacked as he released, sending the ball squirting up like a watermelon seed. Moreover, so much good overwhelmed that one play in a career-high game plus two touchdown passes.

The third year of the Randy Shannon era could not have begun any bigger or better for the Canes, concluding Week 1 of the college season under the coast-to-coast glare of ESPN.

It was a season-opener that could (and should) lift the Canes now up into the national Top 25s. It was an ACC game. And winning provides a ton of feel-good for the Canes as they set out on a front-loaded schedule that follows now, brutally, with Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech and Oklahoma.

The season didn’t so much “arrive” Monday night for Miami and Florida State as hit like a tsunami.

These were two big but dethroned football programs, each trying to rediscover the greatness lost (or misplaced, at least). These were two state schools in a race to a new claim of national stature.

And at the center of it all: Harris, the rail-thin 6-4, 190-pound sophomore who has a chance to be Miami’s next great quarterback.

Source: MiamiHerald.com