A few years ago, Julian Miller told me that in today’s game of college football, nine sacks would make for a good season. He topped that as a sophomore. And again as a junior. This preseason, he said he wanted to become a better player by managing a defensive touchdown. He did that, too.

I should have asked him about winning lottery numbers or perhaps a final score Monday. I instead asked him about Tajh Boyd, his premonitions and the defense’s late-season resiliency.

Dana Holgorsen was about as freaked out by Dustin Garrison’s injury as you would imagine. He feels terrible, I’m sure, but publicly he’s unflappable. Remember, late in the season this guy became their talisman, so it’s no surprise the beat goes on …

“It’s an unfortunate situation for Dustin, but it is one that we will have to deal with as a team,” Holgorsen said in a press release. “It is not something that we are unfamiliar with as we have had to deal with adversity all season long.

“This marks our third key player out for the bowl game with a knee injury, but I expect our team to maintain its focus as we prepare for Clemson.”

Better hope Drew Buie is as collected. Garrison’s teammates are about as bummed out about this as you are, but one predicts that “opportunity is when legends are born.”

Speaking of injuries, here’s one no one is talking about: Sammy Watkins missed one game and was iffy for another with a bum right shoulder. It looks as though he’s fine now.

“Sammy’s shoulder is good,” Morris said. “I know he took a pretty good hit in practice the other day on a pass and hopped right up and away he went. If his shoulder was bothering him, he would have definitely been limited from that point. But I think you’ve got him back healthy, and that’s always good to have.”

Understand the Mountaineers have sincere respect for Watkins and all the problems he will portend Wednesday night.

Finally, Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris is one of those “it” guys right now — a lot like Dana Holgorsen was not too long ago. Morris coached 16 years and won three state titles as a high school coach in Texas. His last two teams were 32-0 with two state titles and he took a job with Todd Graham at Tulsa before the 2010 season.

He just signed a six-year contract that will pay him $1.3 million per year.

Q. A couple years ago when you were back in Texas and thinking about getting into the college
game, could you have dreamed that in just a couple years you’d be coaching in a BCS game?

COACH MORRIS: No. No. As a coach, you try to put goals for yourself, as you do for your
team. Everybody likes to set goals for themselves. My goal was by the time I turned 40 I wanted to have an opportunity at least coach college football. At 41 I had that opportunity.

Actually had it beforehand, but it just wasn’t the right situation at the right place. Taking an opportunity to go to Tulsa last year, no one envisioned that you’d be sitting in quite the stage that we’re in right now this quick after coming to Clemson just a year ago.

It’s been great. I don’t have time to kind of sit back and look and analyze things. We’ll do that
probably here in a few weeks, get a little bit of time off, we can sit back and think, wow, we had a good season or we had a great season. But as a coach your mind always works, what do we have to improve on and what do we have to do to get better and what kind of recruits do we need to go get to get better and fix some of the problems that we have.

All that time  in Texas let Morris got to know his counterpart Wednesday. Holgorsen was an assistant coach at Texas Tech from 2000-07 and then Houston from 2008-09.

“I had met Dana at a couple clinics down in College Station at the Lone Star Clinic,” Morris said. “I met him there and listened to him speak. Obviously his time at the University of Houston they’d recruit in our areas. And then when he moved on to Oklahoma State, we played against him when I was at Tulsa.

“I know he’s a very sharp-minded football coach on the cutting edge, and that’s always great to see, how he grows his offense. They definitely have those guys going. As a high school coach in state of Texas, that is one of the guys that you always looked at, and again, always on the cutting edge of things.”