Wild day for Harris

The Eagles had done it against Wake Forest and Riley Skinner, and against Florida State and Christian Ponder.

Yesterday, however, against North Carolina State, coach Frank Spaziani’s Eagles had a solution for anything the Wolfpack and coach Tom O’Brien had in their playbook.

His name was Montel Harris, and he was both an Eagle and a Wildcat in a career performance as he scored a school-record five touchdowns and ran for a school-best 264 yards in BC’s 52-20 victory before an announced crowd of 35,261 at Alumni Stadium.

“It was a nice victory, to say the least,’’ said Spaziani. “We bounced back nicely [from a loss last week at Virginia Tech] and it looks like we are making some real progress. Hopefully it will continue.’’

Hopefully for the Eagles, Harris, a 5- foot-10-inch, 200-pound sophomore, will continue to elevate his performance, but it will be tough to top yesterday’s, when he ran from a variety of positions, but most successfully from what the Eagles call their “Bazooka’’ or Wildcat formation, which has Harris take the snap directly from center, then improvise.

“You don’t see that every day, you don’t see that in practice,’’ said Spaziani. “He’s a special back, he has great vision, and he just floats, like the puck in air hockey.’’

Harris had taken apart Florida State with a then-career-best 179 yards in the Eagles’ 28-21 victory two weeks ago. He easily topped that yesterday.

“It was fun,’’ said Harris, who ran five plays out of the Bazooka for 167 yards, including a 70-yarder in the first quarter that set up the Eagles’ first TD. “It’s the most I’ve ever run for anywhere in any game that I’ve played. I had a big smile on my face and I was looking forward to it in the second half [when he was told the Eagles would run more Bazooka plays]. This was a fun game. That was the most I’ve ever put up in a game in high school or college.’’

“Montel sure made it easy for me,’’ said freshman quarterback Dave Shinskie, who had a nice bounce-back game with 187 passing yards, including a pair of touchdowns. “You have to give credit to the offensive line. They were making some big holes and Montel had a career day and I loved watching him.’’

The victory, which put BC (5-2, 3-2) back in the thick of the wide-open Atlantic Division race, was a performance in stark contrast to the one submitted in last week’s 48-14 rout by Virginia Tech.

N.C. State (3-4, 0-3) was no Virginia Tech, much to the dismay and disappointment of O’Brien, who was the Eagles’ coach for 10 years before leaving for N.C. State following the 2006 regular season.

“We’ve certainly got a lot of work to do,’’ said O’Brien, who is now 0-3 against his former team. “We are not a very good football team right now.’’

From the start, the Eagles looked and acted like a much different and more confident team than the one that was run out of Blacksburg, Va. And Harris was the catalyst, setting the tone in the first quarter when he took a direct snap at the BC 28 and rumbled 70 yards to the N.C. State 2. He scored on the next play, and BC was off and running, building a 24-13 halftime lead.

It grew to 45-13 by the start of the fourth quarter, ending any ideas the Wolfpack, who have lost three straight games, had of fashioning a comeback.

After Harris’s first score, N.C. State, led by quarterback Russell Wilson, quickly tied it. The Wolfpack also came back after the Eagles had regained the lead on a 59-yard TD pass from Shinskie to Colin Larmond, kicking a pair of field goals to make it 14-13.

But after that, the Eagles sent more Bazooka shots across the bow of N.C. State. By the half it was 24-13, and when the Eagles went 72 yards in 11 plays, with Harris going the final 10 yards, BC had a 31-13 lead.

BC piled it on from there and is now 5-2, back in the win column going into next Saturday’s game at Notre Dame, and feeling much better about itself than at this time a week ago.

The Eagles will take a break from ACC play the next two weeks, hosting Central Michigan after the Notre Dame game, take a week off, then dive into the final three games of the regular season, against ACC opponents Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland.

Win all three of those, which is quite possible, and BC could be at a place few people thought a month or even a week ago - playing in Tampa for the ACC title for the third consecutive season.