Miami tops Stanford 45-6 as Mensah throws 5 TDs in debut
No. 7 Miami's Darian Mensah threw 5 touchdown passes and Malachi Toney broke the school receiving record as Stanford's patchwork line never found an answer in the ACC opener.
Miami's Mensah and Toney turned the ACC opener into a records night
Darian Mensah's Miami debut went about as well as a debut can go: 27-of-30 passing for 400 yards and 5 touchdowns, most of it to Malachi Toney, who caught 12 passes for 233 yards and 3 scores to set the school's single-game receiving record. Miami scored on each of its first two drives and never let up, finishing with 549 total yards and an 8-of-11 clip on third down against a Stanford defense that had no answer for the Hurricanes' new quarterback.
Miami6-45
Hawai'i37-27Stanford played the whole night down 3 offensive line starters — left tackle Niki Prongos, guard Simione Pale and center Aidan Kilstrom — plus receiver Nico Brown and edge rusher Gabe Kaminski, exactly the group Pete Thamel had flagged the day before kickoff, as our own desk covered. Caden High, who'd sat out the opener himself, made his season debut and led the Cardinal with 6 catches for 92 yards, but Davis Warren's 214 yards on 21-of-41 throwing never found the end zone, and Stanford settled for 2 Emmet Kenney field goals in a 6-45 final.
Welcome back @CadenHigh 🫡 t.co/eYnCiXtfe4
Pritchard didn't dress it up afterward. "There were spots tonight where we move the football. We got down in the red zone a couple of times. We got to finish," he said. "We got to find consistency and we got to finish in the end zone." It's the first real gut-check of his tenure, four days removed from Micah Ford's ACC Offensive Player of the Week performance in the Hawai'i comeback.
At the half.
E-40 worked the half, Andrew Luck worked the mic, and neither could slow Miami
The pageantry delivered even when the scoreboard didn't. E-40, the Vallejo native the program has been billing all week as the Ambassador of the Bay, was both the honorary team captain and the halftime performer Friday night, exactly as promised — the account's own combo post nailed it down before kickoff even happened.
The Ambassador x Honorary Captain 🫡
Andrew Luck, back on campus as general manager, ran his promised pregame bit too, with the team account posting "Your questions, answered by The General" ahead of kickoff. Between the two of them it was a genuine Bay Area night at Stanford Stadium — it just happened to coincide with the worst final score of Pritchard's short tenure, and a fan who came for E-40 and Luck got a fuller evening than the ones who came just for the game.
Stanford drops into the ACC's middle as five other teams sit unbeaten
Two weeks in, the conference table already has separation. Florida State, Miami, North Carolina, Virginia and Wake Forest are all 1-0, while Stanford sits at 1-1 alongside Georgia Tech and NC State at the bottom half after Friday's loss. Miami's win was the kind that gets circled elsewhere in the conference too — the Hurricanes opened at No. 7 in the AP preseason poll, their highest to start a season since 2004, and looked every bit of it.
Stanford is 1-1 in its last 2 games, and the swing between them is the whole story of this September: an escape act against Hawai'i that got Ford a weekly conference honor, then a defending-runner-up dose of reality against Miami's new-look offense. The bye week gives Pritchard's staff room to get healthy up front before conference play resumes.
A bye, then a trip to Durham to face a Duke team that's still 0-0 itself
Stanford gets a bye before it plays again on September 19 at Duke, its first road trip of the season and its ACC follow-up to Friday's beatdown. Duke enters that one with a clean slate too — the Blue Devils haven't played yet this season, and their most recent result on the books is last season's 42-39 win over Arizona State.
There's no line up yet on this one — the board hasn't priced it — so for now it's just a date on the calendar and two weeks for Stanford's offensive line to get bodies back before it travels East.