Cam Ward and the No. 10 Miami Hurricanes improved to 3-0 on the season with a win over Ball State on Saturday.  The senior sensation threw for an incredible 346 yards and 5 TDs as the Hurricanes set a school record for offensive yards in a single game with 750.

Head coach Mario cristobal spoke on his offense’s explosive performance following the game,” Well, I think now that it’s year two of Coach Dawson’s system, I think everyone is really starting to feel comfortable, excel at it, understand timing and spacing because, in the passing game, that is the most critical thing along with protection.”

Cristobal continued, “We’ve got a good offensive line. Cam [Ward] sometimes checks us and puts us in great protection and when he knows he’s not protected, he knows where to go with the ball. He gets to that person quickly. Again, we’re hitting on all cylinders in the passing game but, you know, you’ll ask Cam and he’ll tell you that he felt like he left some things out there that could have made it a better day and that’s the way we want to stay. We’ve got a lot of work to do and we’re looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow.”

Miami moves on this week to what is likely it’s toughest test of the season thus far as it takes on a feisty South Florida team that gave fourth ranked Alabama trouble in Week 2. 

Led by second year head coach Alex Golesh, the South Florida Bulls are a program on the rise in the American Athletic Conference. After winning just a single game in 2022, Golesh took over and immediately guided the Bulls to a 7-6 record in his first year. 

This season South Florida is led by junior quarterback Byrum Brown who has over 400 combined passing and rushing yards through 3 games and senior linebacker Mac Harris who has 3.5 tackles for loss.

The Hurricanes have put up dominant performances through the first three weeks, but doing so against a team like USF may come with some challenges.

Thursday night’s game between the Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills began in an ordinary way—pre-game chatter about the Bills’ dominance of the Dolphins in recent years, the coin flip, kickoff, touchback. Only a few years ago, that normalcy—new kickoff rules aside—would have seemed a little strange. Earlier in the week, the Miami-Dade Police Department had released body-cam footage of cops pinning the Dolphins’ star wide receiver Tyreek Hill to the ground and putting him in handcuffs, after he’d been pulled over for speeding and not wearing a seat belt while driving to the Dolphins’ stadium before a game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. In the video, Hill had handed over his license to the officer. “Give me my ticket, bro, so I can go. I’m gonna be late. Do what you gotta do,” Hill had said, and then rolled up his window. The officer had knocked on the window and ordered him to keep it down, and, when Hill told him to stop knocking, the cop had ordered him out of the car. Hill started to comply; another cop never gave him a chance. He grabbed Hill by the neck. Within seconds, Hill had been put on the ground, face down, a knee in his back, his wrists placed in handcuffs. “Stop crying,” the officer said. Later, when Hill was seemingly too slow to sit, he was forced to the ground. A teammate saw the scene and pulled over to help; he was also given a ticket. Another player who stopped was also put in handcuffs.

After about twenty-five minutes, Hill was released; a Miami Herald reporter later said that the Dolphins had to intervene so that Hill and his teammate were not arrested. That afternoon Hill caught seven passes for a hundred and thirty yards, including an eighty-yard touchdown, to help the Dolphins beat the Jaguars. He celebrated his score by pretending to be handcuffed; a teammate pretended to unlock them.

After the game, Hill was incredulous. “Right now, I’m still trying to put it all together,” he said. “I still don’t know what happened. I want to use this platform to say, What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill? Like, worst-case scenario.” Everyone knew what the worst-case scenario was. Everyone knew, because millions of people knew that George Floyd, and Philando Castile, and Tyre Nichols, and too many Black men to name here had been killed by police during routine stops. And everyone knew, too, because in 2016 Colin Kaepernick had sat and then kneeled before every game during the national anthem so that no one could forget.

For the better part of two seasons, the fallout from Kaepernick’s refusal to stand, and the decision of some other players to join him, and the decision of every N.F.L. team not to employ him afterward, had dominated conversations around the league, and, by extension, around the country. Black Lives Matter signs, now faded, are still up in the corners of some windows, and it is no longer controversial—even within the N.F.L.—to point out that Kaepernick had a point. But it has been years since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the unjust killing of Black men. And nobody kneels anymore.

During the preparations for the Bills’ game, the Dolphins’ starting quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, said that Hill had been talking to some on the team about planning “something, to help change some things.” He went on, “He’s come up with a couple ideas and we’ve gathered to talk about what we wanted to do. Obviously, we’re going to worry about this week, but next week we’ll get back together . . . and we’ll talk about how we can do something to change what is going on.” Something, some things, something—it was all very vague. But what did anyone expect? The Dolphins’ owner, Stephen Ross, had already founded a nonprofit called RISE, in 2015, to “address the scourge of racism,” and bankrolled it with thirty million dollars; he had also hosted a fund-raiser for Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign, in 2019. (In 2020, Trump, as it happens, banned federal contractors from racial-sensitivity training.) The N.F.L. itself had, for a time, stencilled the words “END RACISM” in the end zones of every field.

“I’m just being a Black man, that’s it,” Hill called out at one point during the encounter. “I’m just being Black in America.” One officer told him not to make it about race, pointing out, apparently, that the other officers were people of color. Fine: it was about power. Historically, the power most often afforded to a few Black men has been fame, which is fickle and flimsy, though it counts. What if Tyreek Hill weren’t Tyreek Hill? If he weren’t so spectacularly good at playing football, he might not have been playing in the N.F.L.—not after he pleaded guilty to domestic assault for punching and choking his pregnant girlfriend, and was accused of at least two other instances of assault, which he has denied. The overuse of force against Hill at a traffic stop was not the first time that law enforcement had failed. Most people with power don’t abuse it; it’s more egregious when they do. The most overzealous officer was almost immediately placed on administrative leave; Hill praised the police, talked about “bad apples,” and called for that officer to be fired.

If that incident hung over the first half of the game against the Bills—or at least a little shadow of it, reduced to a sleekly produced interview with Amazon Prime—by the end it was mostly forgotten. In the third quarter, with the Dolphins in the red zone and in need of a touchdown, Tagovailoa saw a seam and ran for the first down and more. As the Bills’ safety Damar Hamlin stepped up to make the tackle, Tagovailoa lowered his helmet and crashed into him. As he fell, he threw up his right arm in an awkward way and hit the ground—a fencing response, which is an automatic reaction to a serious brain injury. Medical staff immediately rushed onto the field, and players began to kneel. It was Tagovailoa’s fourth diagnosed concussion in five years, most recently in 2022. His coach, Mike McDaniel, walked over to him as he was treated on the field, his face the picture of haunted dread. As Tagovailoa walked off the field, McDaniel reached up and kissed him, tenderly, on the side of his head.

After the game, talking about Tagovailoa’s injury, McDaniel was solemn and grim. Asked about what might be next, McDaniel deflected the question. “Right now, [it] is more about getting a proper procedural evaluation tomorrow and taking it one day at a time,” McDaniel said after the game. “The furthest thing from my mind is, What is the timeline? We just need to evaluate and just worry about my teammate.” Everyone was sober, emotional. More than a few coaches and players wondered aloud, publicly, whether Tagovailoa should retire. The next day, McDaniel pleaded with people not to speculate about Tagovailoa’s future. It would only make his situation worse—there was no way that it would help. All that mattered was Tagovailoa’s health in the here and now.

He was right. And yet there was the strange sense of witnessing so much distress and concern, and taking it on its own terms, as if McDaniel hadn’t sat in that very seat before, with much of the same stress and concern, as if we hadn’t watched Hamlin, the Bills player who had made the normal football play on Tagovailoa, being resuscitated on the field in 2023 after another normal football play; as if we hadn’t been talking about these very issues for so long. For a decade, the life-threatening danger of football had been at the forefront of conversations surrounding the N.F.L. And, in the past few years, the issues of racial inequality and injustice had engulfed the sport. The intensity of those conversations, which had seemed like crises for the league, can seem, lately, also like things of the past. No one talks glibly about police brutality or head injuries anymore, nor urges players to toughen up. But, even for thoughtful people who genuinely care about the players, the issues no longer seem existential for the sport. Freak accidents, bad apples—same old story. ♦

Cam Ward was dominant again, throwing for 346 yards and five touchdowns before getting subbed out early in the second half as No. 10 Miami piled up stats in a 62-0 win over Ball State on Saturday night.

Miami (3-0) outgained Ball State 750-115, setting a school record for yards in a game. It was the biggest shutout win over an FBS opponent in Hurricanes’ history, topping the 61-0 win over Rutgers in 2001.

Ward now has three straight 300-yard games to start his season. He connected with Xavier Restrepo on a pair of touchdown passes, and found Jacolby George, Elijah Arroyo and Chris Johnson Jr. with his other scoring throws for the Hurricanes (3-0).

Ward’s five-touchdown game was the 10th by a Miami quarterback, one shy of the school record of six TDs set by Jarren Williams against Louisville in 2019. And it all came on the weekend where Miami celebrated the 35th anniversary of the school’s 1989 team winning the national title — a team that had a young offensive lineman named Mario Cristobal, now the Hurricanes’ coach.

Ajay Allen had a 56-yard touchdown run on the first play of the fourth quarter for Miami, and Elija Lofton caught a 40-yard scoring pass from Emory Williams with 11:46 left. Jordan Lyle had a rushing score late for Miami.

Kadin Semonza completed 16 of 26 passes for 111 yards for Ball State (1-1). The Cardinals fell to 0-9 all-time when playing Top 10 teams and were shut out for the first time since a 42-0 loss to Temple on Oct. 8, 2011.

Ward’s numbers through three games: 1,035 yards, 11 touchdowns and one interception while completing 73% of his passes for the Hurricanes. Excluding a one-play drive to run out the final few seconds of the first half, Ward played seven series — five ending in his touchdown passes, one with a field goal and one with a punt.

The game’s kickoff was delayed for nearly 2 1/2 hours because of lightning in the area.

The takeaway

Ball State: The difference in speed between the Cardinals and the Hurricanes was evident, particularly when Miami had the ball. The Cardinals gave up 20 plays — 17 passes, three rushes — of more than 15 yards.

Miami: If there’s a concern for the Hurricanes right now, it’s the health of the offensive line. Miami came into the game without left tackle Jalen Rivers and left guard Ryan Rodriguez — both starters — and saw right guard Anez Cooper limp off the field in the first half with what appeared to be a lower-leg issue.

Poll implications

Miami should remain in the Top 10 when the AP Top 25 is released on Sunday.

Ward’s numbers

Ward is the first Miami quarterback to reach 1,000 yards in the first three games of a season since Craig Erickson (1,126 in 1990). Ward is 89 yards away from 15,000 in his career, counting the 13,876 yards he had at Incarnate Word and Washington State.

Up next

Ball State: Visits Central Michigan on Saturday.

Miami: Visits South Florida on Saturday.