Miami’s Rousseau leaps into national college football consciousness after amazing FSU game
The afternoon after he was named Walter Camp National Defensive Player of the Week for amassing four sacks and five tackles-for-loss in the win over Florida State, Miami redshirt freshman defensive end Greg Rousseau was honored by the Atlantic Coast Conference as the league’s Defensive Lineman of the Week.
Rousseau, who has played in all nine games, is now tied with Oregon State’s Hamilcar Rashed (eight games) for second in the nation with 12 sacks, four of them Saturday in the win at FSU and three the previous week in the win at Pittsburgh.
Chase Young of Ohio State leads the nation with 13.5 sacks in eight games.
The Hurricanes are second in the nation with 34 total sacks, behind the 40 of PItt and SMU.
The Hurricanes (5-4, 3-3) host Louisville (5-3, 3-2) at 3:30 p.m. Saturday in the last UM home game of the season.
“I don’t feel like I’m a different player,’’ Rousseau said after the FSU game. “I feel like I’m doing the same thing,” he said. “Things are going my way, like I have the sacks and stuff, but I never during the season said, ‘Let me work harder,’ or, ‘Let me turn it up.’”
The four sacks are the most by a Hurricane in a single game since at least 2000 — which is as far back as the Sports Reference archive goes. He’s only the second player since 2006 to total seven or more sacks in a two-game span and only the fourth since at least 2000.
He’s now up to 12 sacks on the season, putting him into the top five of Miami’s all-time, single-season sacks list. On Saturday he vaulted past a list of names including Warren Sapp and Calais Campbell, and into a four-way tie for fourth. He now sits alongside former defensive ends Daniel Stubbs, Kenard Lang and Derrick Ham, and is on pace to finish the regular season with 16 sacks, which would place him in sole possession of second on the Hurricanes’ all-time list.
Former defensive end Daniel Stubbs holds the single-season record at Miami with his 17 sacks in 1986.
“The coolest thing about Greg is he’s as humble of a guy that we have on the team,’’ UM coach Manny Diaz told WQAM on Monday morning after Diaz went through all Rousseau’s physical gifts and praised his relentlessness. “You won’t find a better guy than Greg Rousseau. He absolutely lives and dies for the Miami Hurricanes and wants to do everything he can to help us win the football game — which is so fun when your best players are your best people.
“And that really sums up Greg Rousseau.”
Diaz also praised quarterback Jarren Williams, who was nominated for a league player of the week award, but not chosen.
“We’ve got to remember that Jarren Williams is a redshirt freshman that just went to Tallahassee and hung three bills on them,’’ Diaz said. “And like you said, the touchdowns. And those two posts for touchdowns, when you watch them back, I don’t know if you could have run over there and handed the ball to the receiver in a better position than he threw it. They were in stride, I mean right in the bread basket, perfectly placed.
“I felt like there had been a little bit of a myth that formed that Jarren could not throw the deep ball.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2019 at 1:02 PM.
