At six feet and 194 pounds, Tuff Harris is one of the fastest players in the Big Sky Conference and one of the most dangerous punt return men in the country, while playing for the No. 2 team in Division I-AA football.Maybe none of this is a surprise, for those who saw Harris throwing down dunks as a freshman at Lodge Grass, or catching touchdown passes for Colstrip. By the time he was a junior in high school, he was the fastest young man in the annals of Montana track and field, having torn through the 100 meters in 10.77 seconds.
Speedy? Absolutely. But also strong, and possessing enough spring to win a handful of track titles in the jumps. By the summer before his senior year the recruiting calls were coming. Brigham Young. Wyoming. Washington. Montana.
"You say, 'This is college football,' " Harris said. "They had all the bells and whistles. The cannon, the skydivers, the cheerleaders, the marching band. Potentially playing for a team like that definitely draws you."
Harris had confidence in his ability, and figured he could come into his own in the proud Montana Grizzlies' football program from his first recruiting visit. If headlines mean anything - Tuff Gets Going, Tuff Gets the Call, Tuff Enough (three times, counting the variation Tuff Enuf) - he certainly has arrived.
Four years after hitting campus, Harris is among a handful of All-American candidates for the Griz, now 8-1 as they head into Greeley, Colo., to play Northern Colorado.
He just didn't think it would be at cornerback.
Harris has the size and speed - and it turns out, the hands - to play receiver, and he figured he was playing offense right up through the time new coach Bobby Hauck and his staff moved him to defense, in the spring of 2003.
Somewhere in there, somebody forgot to tell Harris.
"To my knowledge, I was still a receiver," remembered Harris, who went with Levander Segars, Jefferson Heidelberger and the rest of the wide outs when the Griz broke into groups that spring.
Told he'd been moved, his reaction was: "OK, I don't know about that," followed by "All right, whatever, probably won't last very long."
Then, finally, acceptance. Saturday will mark Harris' 49th collegiate game, all at cornerback. It will be his 37th straight start.
Along the way, he's become - along with junior Jimmy Wilson - part of possibly the best corner tandem in the Big Sky.
"He's got good size, good strength, good speed, good eyes," Mike Hudson, the Grizzlies' cornerbacks coach, said of Harris. "But probably his best attribute, in my opinion, is his feel for the game. He has good peripheral vision. He understands how people are trying to attack us, and what he needs to be successful."
If it wasn't always this way, blame youth. Those were some trying times in 2004, when the Griz ranked near the bottom of I-AA in pass defense. Harris and junior Kevin Edwards started at corner that year, in a backfield that included sophomore Matt Lebsock and redshirt freshman Van Cooper, Jr.
"That was kind of a rough year," Harris remembered. "I think out of 116 teams, we were like 110th. We were getting hit all season. It seemed like all the teams just abandoned the run game and went to the air."
There was good news. While opponents piled up the yardage, they weren't necessarily cashing it in for points. And the Griz were winning.
"When it came into the red zone, we really put some cleats into the ground and did some good things," Harris said.
The best thing he did that 2004 season came on Dec. 11, when the Grizzlies hosted Sam Houston State in the I-AA playoff semifinals. Sam Houston had beaten UM 41-29 in September down in Huntsville, Texas, in a game that wasn't that close.
The rematch had the makings of a replay, with quarterback Dustin Long marching the Bearkats toward an early touchdown. A 38-yard pass from Long to Jason Mathenia - over Harris - put the ball at UM's 9-yard line.
Then it happened.
"We bent and didn't break," Harris said. "Dustin Long was trying to throw the slant, which I'd seen in film."
Harris cut in front of Mathenia, made the interception, and his ensuing 74-yard return galvanized the sellout crowd at Washington-Grizzly Stadium and set up the Grizzlies' first touchdown in a 34-13 Montana victory.
It was the first of two picks by Harris, both setting up TDs, but the first was the most memorable. Just ask Hudson, who was on the opposite sideline as Sam Houston's defensive coordinator.
"Tuff and I and the other guys joke about that a lot," said Hudson. "I did not have a whole lot of kind words for him as he was running down the sideline. The only thing I could take out of that was at least he got tackled by an O-lineman."
Offensive linemen - and punters - seem to be the only things that can stop Harris these days. Hudson, for one, has been converted from foe to fan.
"It's very ironic that the next year I would end up coaching him, and actually find out what a very fine young man he is," Hudson said. "A pleasure to coach, and just a good all-around young man who'll be successful in whatever he does after football."
Cornerback doesn't come easy to anyone, and Harris was no exception. The school of hard knocks included tutorials from Mathenia, Cal Poly's Ramses Barden, Clarence Moore of Northern Arizona and Vincent Jackson from Northern Colorado.
"Playing corner is one of the hardest positions as far as transferring what you're learning," Harris says now. "If you separate a few feet, the guy is going to catch the ball on you. It's just being on an island. I have much more respect having played the position than when I first started out."
To this point Harris has seven career interceptions, not a high number for a corner who's made 36 starts. He returned one for a touchdown. Then again, it's not all about the picks.
"First of all, we play a good mix of man and zone defense here, and Tuff plays a lot of man," Hudson said. "And when he is in man defense, that's not an interception defense. That's an incompletion or a deflection defense."
The TD came while the Griz were in zone, off a tipped pass against Portland State in UM's 26-20 win at Portland on Sept. 30. It was his second collegiate touchdown.
His next came a week later, on an all together different play, at a position that might be his best.
The punt, off the foot of Eastern Washington's Ryan Donckers, traveled 57 yards and chased Harris back to the 6-yard line, where he made an over-the-shoulder catch. He turned it into the longest punt return in UM history.
The best part for the Grizzlies was that the TD helped a first-quarter blitz that paved their 33-17 win over Eastern. The best part for Harris was that he finished off the return somewhere besides in the arms of the opposing punter.
A month before, Harris had twice been tackled by the punter at the end of long returns. So while he racked up a single-game UM record for punt return yardage against South Dakota State with 142, he had no TDs. One 51-yard return ended at the SDSU 6.
That didn't happen at Eastern.
"It seemed like a dream," said Harris, who also had a 74-yard punt return for a score the year before against Portland State. "I knew I had to beat him (Donckers). Fifty yards one way, 50 yards the other, to beat one guy. Who was the punter. Ninety-four yards later I got in the end zone, finally."
Touchdowns aside, Harris is averaging 16.8 yards per punt return. Like a Barry Bonds batting practice, you could almost charge admission to watch Harris catch punts in pregame. He makes it look that easy.
"Boy, he's a talent there," said Hudson. "He's got a gift - he's got a chance (in the pros) at that. How can you not see that?"
The ironic thing is that for all of Montana's apparent troubles against the pass in 2004, the Grizzlies fell to a running attack in the title game. Playing on a newly re-sodded field in Chattanooga, Tenn., that almost instantly began coming apart, James Madison ran roughshod over the Griz. The Dukes threw for just 132 yards and ran for 314 in a 31-21 victory.
"They went to their strength," Harris said. "It was hard to go through the air. But their O-line, they were huge. And it was hard to run any sort of stunt or anything. We had to play them straight-on.
"Usually in that situation, the bigger guy wins. They had the beef up front."
These days Montana has the beef, and a defense that has grown into one of the best in the nation. Many of the faces - Harris, Lebsock, Cooper - remain the same. The Griz are older and better.
And sound of body. Harris credits a renewed interest in the weight room for his healthiest season.
"I just put it into my head that I was going to be in the best shape I've ever been in," he said.
The result is solid all-around play. Hudson talks about how the corners act as a defensive end at times, playing contain and forcing option running plays back inside. Harris is a sure tackler, with 27 stops.
"He just gets them down," Hudson said. "He's a disciplined player who doesn't try to do to much, which is big out there."
Not bad for a receiver wannabe.
"It was kind of my fit," Harris remembered. "We were receiver-loaded: We had Jefferson, Levander, (Jon) Talmage, (Tate) Hancock. Playing time would've been a tough thing, so I stuck with playing corner.
"After that season, I kind of knew my position. I started getting used to it, and understanding the defense. I was contributing to the team, and the position kind of grew on me."
A couple years later Harris still thinks of 2004, in terms of what could've been and what might still be.
By winning Saturday and next week at home against Montana State, the Grizzlies could set themselves up with home playoff games into the title game. That formula got them to all five of their I-AA championship appearances.
"If we keep getting these Ws, it's going to work out," Harris says. "It does kind of remind me of 2004. It's good to be where we're at - from here on out, it's detail.
"Everything we want and everything we prepare for - our goals - is staring us in the face."
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