Jacory Harris threw into double coverage again. Weird. His punishment: getting absolutely lit up by a pass rusher.

That hit had all sorts of pain incorporated in it. First, there was the helmet to the chest with about 250 pounds of force behind it. Then there’s the getting lifted off the ground with his feet above his head and landing on his spine … with about 250 pounds of force coming down on top of it.

Harris left the game, which Miami is losing, and isn’t expected to come back. The injury was undisclosed, but I’m going to go ahead and diagnose him with a severe case of jacked-up-edness.

If you’re on Twitter, do yourself a favor and do a search for Jacory Harris. You’re going to see a lot of “Wow!” in that search, but it’s what comes after that “Wow!” that’s the fun part.

From tweet to tweet, it likely varies from “what a throw” to “what the hell was he thinking?”

The Miami junior can be one of the most dynamic players in the country when he’s on, but one of the more frustrating ones when he’s not. And that’s just in the course of one quarter.

Take today’s game against Clemson for instance. Harris hit Leonard Hankerson on a seam route with a pass that couldn’t have been thrown any better. Hankerson didn’t have to break stride after getting behind two Clemson defenders, and went untouched for the touchdown. Even my wife was impressed as she looked up from the Food Network videos she was watching on her laptop.

A couple possessions later, with Miami in the red zone, Harris threw an incredibly horrible interception in the endzone. There was no pressure on him, he just blew the throw.

At this point, we should stop acting surprised at Harris’ up-and-down play. Some people have done that. I heard someone on ESPN Radio this morning state very matter-of-factly that Harris routinely throws into coverage. It’s not something he’s trying to fix, it’s just something he does, which is probably a confidence thing. Harris is supremely confident in his abilities, so he thinks he can make any throw. That’s going to lead to some great things, but some awful things as well. He’s like a skinnier, younger, much less annoying Brett Favre.

Now that college football is back and we no longer have to spend our time over-analyzing off-field issues, let’s turn our attention to over-analyzing what we’ve seen in one night the play on the field.

The first night of games was pretty vanilla — outside of Utah’s overtime win over Pittsburgh, as Anthony pointed out earlier — but it did give us a little bit of insight into a few teams, and what we could possibly expect to see from them down the road.

Let’s take a look at three things we learned on Thursday night: Read the rest of this entry »

Jacory Harris is special.

A week after completing just nine of 25 passes for 150 yards and an interception in a loss to Virginia Tech, Harris bounced back to lead Miami to a 21-20 win over Oklahoma on Saturday night.

Harris was far from perfect as he threw two interceptions and took four sacks. But he also threw three touchdown passes while completing 19 of his 28 pass attempts for 202 yards.

How the Canes won this game is a bit of a shock. They were penalized 12 times for 115 yards, turned the ball over twice and trailed 10-7 at halftime.

But Miami opened the second half by marching down the field and capping the drive off with a Dedrick Epps’ 11-yard touchdown pass from Harris. Midway through the third quarter, Harris struck again, this time on a 38-yard touchdown pass to Travis Benjamin.

The Sooners railed with 10 points of their own, but the Canes managed to play keep-a-way for the final four minutes and 18 seconds to secure the win. In a murderers’ row of games, Miami was able to knock off ranked opponents Florida State, Georgia Tech and Oklahoma, with its only loss coming against Virginia Tech last week. The Canes will gladly welcome Florida A&M next week.

OU freshman quarterback Landry Jones didn’t make many mistakes, but he didn’t do enough in the second half to lift the Sooners to a victory. He finished 18-of-30 for 188 yards and a touchdown, but his average pass went for just 6.3 yards and he only had three completions for over 20 yards. (Miami also sacked him three times.)

It’ll be interesting to see what Bob Stoops and Oklahoma plan to do with Sam Bradford. The season certainly isn’t over, but with two losses already on their belt, it’s highly unlikely that the Sooners will be playing for a national championship again. So is there any rush to bring Bradford back? With a home game next week against Baylor coming up, it might be wise to give Bradford another week off.

Then again, with Texas coming up on October 24, Bradford might need to face Baylor to shake off the rust. It’s an interesting dilemma for Stoops and the Sooners.