Manny Diaz saw Miami football performance vs. Louisville coming
The Miami football team scored touchdowns on their first four drives on offense Saturday in a dominant 52-27 victory against Louisville Saturday afternoon. Head coach Manny Diaz saw it coming.
Six touchdown passes by quarterback Jarren Williams, 35 first-half points and 449 yards of total offense led the Miami football team to a 52-27 victory over Louisville on Saturday afternoon during homecoming and Senior Day at Hard Rock Stadium. Miami improves to 6-4 on the season and is bowl eligible.
Miami has shown steady improvement over the past three weeks. The offense went out and when the game on a day that the defense was not as dominant as they had been in the wins over Pittsburgh and Florida State over the past two weeks. A season that seemed lost following the loss to Georgia Tech has turned around.
Jarren Williams is starting to play like an upperclassman at QB. After setting a career-high with 313 yards passing against Florida State last week, Williams set the Miami football program record and tied the ACC record with six TD passes against Louisville on Saturday.
Williams has 566 yards passing, eight TDs and no interceptions in the last two games. After struggling earlier in the season turning the ball over, Miami is plus four in the last two games. Miami was plus two on Saturday against Louisville. Some big punt returns by K.J. Osborn also gave Miami good field position.
"“I am so pleased at our performance today. Our offense from the get-go just took control of the game. We felt like a performance like this was coming. We felt like we had been improving over the last few weeks and the issue was doing it consistently.We talk about being the same for every week and could we capitalize on some of the positives in Tallahassee last week and kick on with another complete performance. The way we set the tone and came out early in the game was fantastic and gave us confidence that we could score every time we had the ball.”Defensively, we gave up a couple of big plays and that was discouraging, but as the first half wore on, we got enough stops to create separation on the scoreboard because when we got stops, we went right down the field.” Our special teams is still providing the edge with a blocked punt and a fumble recovery.We had another long kickoff return What we are doing with our hidden yardage if you look at the total yards, the reason why we got out-gained was because we had short fields. I think we did have a 92-yard drive though.I think our offensive line did a fantastic job in the run game and the way our guys caught the ball down the field was outstanding. Then what can you say about Jarren Williams? Six touchdown passes is outstanding and that is a ACC record and a school record, which leads us to the most points we have scored in an ACC game.It is starting to look the way that we want it to look. We want to be a team that gets better as the year goes on and we hope this is what we can be moving forward.”"
The big plays the Miami defense gave up was discouraging, but the second long TD for Louisville came on a fourth and one for the Cardinals with Miami stacking the line of scrimmage. Hassan Hall broke the Miami containment and galloped 58 yards to the end zone. Diaz has spoken frequently about hidden yardage throughout this season.
Sophomore cornerback Al Blades partially blocked a Lousiville punt to give the Miami football team the ball at the Louisville 32, senior Jimmy Murphy recovered a muffed punt by the Cardinals Tutu Atwell to give the Hurricanes the ball on another drive in Cardinals territory and the Miami return game thrived.
Osborn had a 36-yard punt return and added 105 yards in kickoff returns to help the Hurricanes offense. Louisville was the best team on the Miami schedule in November. The Hurricanes close out the month with winnable games against Florida International at Marlins Park and at Duke.