McElwain ready for opportunity to coach and teach Gators QB Treon Harris
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 | Football, Volleyball, Scott Carter
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- A year ago Treon Harris had just won his second consecutive state championship at Miami's Booker T. Washington High and was verbally committed to play at Florida State.
Meanwhile, Jim McElwain had just won the New Mexico Bowl over Washington State in his second season as head coach at Colorado State, confident that with junior quarterback Garrett Grayson set to return in 2014, the Rams' offense was in capable hands.
McElwain was right as Grayson threw for more than 4.000 yards his senior season and the Rams won 10 games for the first time in 12 years.
Fast forward to today, and Harris is Florida's starting quarterback heading into the Gators' Jan. 3 matchup against East Carolina in the Birmingham Bowl. McElwain is in his third week as Florida's head coach, evaluating Harris and other players whom he will be coaching in spring practice.
A longtime quarterbacks coach/offensive coordinator, McElwain has a proven track record developing quarterbacks, most recently Grayson and Greg McElroy and A.J. McCarron at Alabama.
Soon Harris will be one of his pupils. McElwain shared some thoughts on Harris on Monday night during an interview on the SEC Network.
"Treon has been a guy who has been awful fun to watch,'' McElwain said. "He can spin it; he's competitive. You can see when he's sure he knows what to do. The ball gets out quick. Really looking forward to working with him, as I am all the players."
Harris replaced fourth-year junior Jeff Driskel as Florida's starting quarterback in the Georgia game and went 3-2 as the starter. Harris endured a high-profile off-the-field incident during the season and then earlier this month was charged with a second-degree misdemeanor of operating a motor vehicle without a driver's license.
During a radio interview Tuesday morning with an Orlando radio station, the subject of Harris came up once more, specifically his decision-making and responsibility as a team leader.
"I really look forward into getting into his life and being a big part of his life, as I am all the players, because we're all in a fishbowl," McElwain said. "No matter what, we've got to understand that everything we do has consequences. We all have freedom of choice and yet we don't have freedom of consequences.
"It's like when I get that speeding ticket. I always just smile and give me the ticket because I made the choice, right? At the same time we've got to understand that there's certain things that, especially at the quarterback position, that we need to do to affect the people around us in a positive way."
