Hurricanes

reasons; sacks and some I don’t of them want were him pulling the ball that much. We’re going to run zone read, we’re going to run QB draw, we’re going to do the things we do. But I think I put too much of the plan where if this guy does this, he could pull. We probably had the QB running a little bit more than I wanted him to run.” Center will make line calls: Miami had left guard Jahair Jones making the line calls in the season opener so center Tyler Gauthier could concentrate on hiking the ball to Rosier. Coaches thought the crowd noise could be an issue. Gautier, though, will make calls going forward, starting with Saturday’s home opener against Savannah State. “It’s going to be huge,” off e nsive coordinator Thomas Brown said. “Obviously, later in the game, we were trying to go a little bit faster tempo and sometimes he has his head down. It makes it hard for him to direct traffic with his head being down. He is a quarterback of the O-line and he’s done a really good job when he knows what’s going on. He puts us in the right calls and obviously makes us better from a communication standpoint so we’re all on the same page, so we can pick stuff up a little bit better and we can give the quarterback a little more time to throw the ball.” Miami started working on Gauthier making the calls during practice on Tuesday. “It actually went really well,” Gauthier said. “It’s a little bit of a change in the cadence to keep my head up so I can make calls for blitzes and everything like that.

“We’re doing it for the full game now, but especially when we do a one-minute situation, stuff like that, where they’re going to be sending a lot of blitzes they know we’re going to pass. I think it’s going to help us a lot.”

Diaz questions targeting call: Like Richt, defensive coordinator Manny Diaz questioned the targeting call on cornerback Trajan Bandy resulting in Bandy’s ejection in the first quarter Sunday.

Diaz first defended the way the Hurricanes coach tackling, saying they are a “dedicated shoulder-tackle team” and that the only player to suffer a concussion since they’ve been teaching this way was when an offensive player lowered his head into the defender.

Diaz, then, got into the call. “On a bang-bang play like this ... the game’s not played in super slow-mo now,” he said. “Now, Trajan, coming up on that tackle, had his eyes up, threw his outside arm getting ready to wrap up on the guy, that’s football. Now, if that’s going to be a penalty, that’s fine. That should be a 15-yard penalty. That should not be a disqualification.

“There’s not another sport where we disqualify a player for a technique that had no (bad intent). It’d be like throwing a guy out of an NBA game just for a foul. There should be different levels of flagrant (penalties). I’ve said that before . ... I do think it’s unfair for defensive players, I do, in that scenario.”

Diaz also lamented a possible fumble recovery on the Tigers’ first series.

“Fourth play of the game, forced a fumble,” he said. “If we get on that ball, what that does momentum-wise for that game. That’s not any reason why we lost, but that was a massive, massive turning point in that game.”