No one can put this Miami team away.
For the second straight week, No. 8 Miami overcame a slow, mistake-riddled start and rallied for an unlikely win.
This time, it was a seemingly impossible one as the Hurricanes came back from 25 points down to beat Cal 39-38 in a late-night ACC thriller in Berkeley, California.
It spoiled what was otherwise a fun and memorable day for Cal football, which hosted ESPN’s “College GameDay” on campus for the first time.
And a sold-out crowd was sent into a frenzy when it seemed like the Bears were on their way to an emphatic win over a top-10 team, at one point leading 35-10 late in the third quarter.
Instead, Miami improves to 6-0 with another improbable victory.
Miami quarterback Cam Ward tossed the winning 5-yard touchdown pass to Elijah Arroyo with 26 seconds to go.
It capped another big day for Ward, who bolstered his Heisman résumé with 437 yards passing and two touchdown passes to one interception. He also ran for a score.
Most of that production came in the last 20 minutes of the game as Ward and the rest of the team looked shell-shocked for the first two-thirds of the game.
Ward had just 109 passing yards in the first half and he started the second half by throwing a pick-6 on an ill-advised toss across his body. Cal’s Nohl Williams snatched it out of the air and ran it back 40 yards for a score to give the Bears a 28-10 lead.
Cal added one more touchdown after that to put the Canes in an enormous hole.
But it was all Miami from there as the offense produced four TDs on four drives to close out the game while the Bears mustered only a field goal the rest of the way.
Ward and Co. went down the field methodically, with scoring drives of 12 plays and 75 yards, 11 plays and 75 yards, nine plays and 70 yards, six plays and 92 yards.
Ward threw both his TD passes and ran for a 24-yard score in the fourth quarter.
It was the second week in a row he had to create late magic to overcome some early blunders after he engineered a 10-point fourth-quarter comeback over Virginia Tech.
While the Canes might be cutting it close, there’s something to be said about surviving on a day when four top-10 teams went down, three of them to unranked opponents. Even No. 1 Alabama couldn’t escape the day of chaos.
But Miami did escape. And for now, that’s all that matters.