Sacked to sacker: An improbable team’s most intriguing player

He was at work in Blue Ash when he got the numbing call about his son.

“By the time I got to Miami Valley Hospital he already was in surgery,” Brandon Gearing said.

His son, Austin, had been Miami University's starting quarterback the last four games of the 2013 season. The reeling RedHawks had gone 0-12 and Austin was sacked 16 times.

His boy thought it could get no worse.

That summer he found out he was wrong.

“I was helping a buddy move in and I was trying to get a door open and my hand slipped off the wood and went into the glass,” Austin said. “It was cheap glass, and it shattered, and when I tried to pull my hand back out, I sliced every tendon and artery in my wrist. It was really serious and I kinda went into shock.”

His friends wrapped up his left hand and rushed him to Oxford’s McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital, which was just down the street. He was then transported to Miami Valley, where he was attended to by Dr. Rannie Al Samkari, whose expertise is hand surgery.

“The surgery took six hours,” Brandon said. “Afterward (Dr. Al Samkari) pulled us into a room and said, ‘This is the closest thing to an amputation I’ve worked with.’”

Austin, like many others, feared the worst: “I wasn’t sure. Would I ever be able to play football again?”

On Monday, he will emphatically answer that question again, just as he has done all year long.

Three seasons after their 0-12 campaign, the Miami RedHawks meet Mississippi State in the St. Petersburg Bowl at Tropicana Field. Kickoff is 11 a.m., and the game is televised on ESPN.

After starting 0-6 this year, Miami has won six straight games. That made the RedHawks bowl eligible and set NCAA history. They are the first-ever FBS team to win six games in a row after losing their first six.

Miami is the most improbable team of this bowl season, and Gearing is the RedHawks’ most improbable player.

He’ll be in the starting lineup today wearing his No. 11 jersey. That’s typically a quarterback’s number, one worn by such NFL stalwarts as Phil Simms, Drew Bledsoe, Daunte Culpepper, Norm Van Brocklin and Alex Smith.

But today Austin won’t worry about being sacked by the Bulldogs.

These days, he’s the one doing the sacking.

He is no longer a quarterback. The redshirt senior has added 40 pounds to his 6-foot-5 frame and is now an aggressive, 257-pound defensive end.

He’s second on the team in quarterback sacks with four, and he’s first in quarterback hurries and forced fumbles.

“He’s become a great player for us,” Miami coach Chuck Martin said. “To me, he’s a high-end MAC (Mid-American Conference) defensive end. He’s big and runs well and is so physical. He can do a lot of jobs on the football field. I think he’s got a shot to be a special teams guy at the next level. He could play in the NFL.”

Sitting in the RedHawks' indoor practice facility on the eve of the bowl trip, Austin thought about his saga – being battered in the winless season, nearly severing his left hand, adding all the weight, making the monumental switch of positions and ending up in a bowl game – and finally just shook his head:

“It’s pretty surreal. It’s like I’m living a dream.”

When reached by phone in Florida on Christmas Eve, Brandon recalled the advice he gave his son during all those challenging times:

“All you can do is try to stay positive. So the motto became: ‘Work hard and good things will come.’

“And look, here we are in St. Pete!”

Battered and bruised

Austin grew up in Franklin and began playing organized football in the fifth grade. From the start he was a quarterback, especially a running quarterback who liked to bulldoze defenders.

At Bishop Fenwick High in Middletown, he threw for 2,005 yards and 14 touchdowns and rushed for 1,450 yards and 27 more TDs.

He got scholarship offers from several schools, including Cincinnati, Kent State and Toledo. Some of those programs saw him as a tight end. But Miami, he said, promised him he would be a quarterback so he came to Oxford in 2012.

With Zac Dysert – who would end up Miami’s career passing leader – as the senior starter, he redshirted that first year.

The following year, when Austin Boucher – the Alter High product who had won the starting quarterback’s job – was lost with a knee injury eight games into the season, Gearing took over.

The team – which had lost its last four games in 2012 and was 0-8 when Boucher tore his ACL – was in disarray. Head coach Don Treadwell had been fired three games earlier and assistant Mike Bath was finishing out the season.

That’s the team Gearing took over, and from the start it was, as he put it, “rough.”

The offensive line was a sieve, and he often was a sitting duck.

“The game that stands out the most was Buffalo,” Brandon said. “And the kid that stood out for them is in the Pro Bowl this year.”

He was talking about linebacker Khalil Mack, who ended up a first-round draft pick of the Oakland Raiders and was a Pro Bowler last year, too.

“Oh my goodness, Austin took a beating that game,” Brandon said. “He took some real punishment.”

Mack sacked him three times and forced him to fumble three times.

“Words can’t describe that year,” Brandon said. “Watching your son come out of the locker room afterwards, time after time after time after time. All the losing. What do you say? That season was a real struggle.”

Making the transition

A month after the 2013 season ended, Chuck Martin, Notre Dame's offensive coordinator and quarterback coach, was hired to take over the Miami program.

“We had just gone through an experience that was as bad as it gets, so the whole team was ready for a new chapter,” Austin said. “When Coach Martin and his staff came in, we were real excited.”

Austin remained a quarterback in spring ball, but then came the injury, the surgery and a long rehab.

“I sat through all his therapy sessions, and he could hardly move his fingers,” Brandon said. “But he did everything his doctor and the therapist told him to do, and he was able to push through it and eventually get back.

“A big reason is Dr. Al Samkari. He was incredible. Today we’re friends with him and his nurse. He came to a couple of games and tailgated with us. And he was down on the sideline last year for the (Cincinnati) game. Watching Austin back on the field is pretty incredible for him I imagine, too.”

Austin missed much of the 2014 season, and when he did return, he played some special teams and lined up at tight end, although he never caught a pass.

After the season – because of some lingering nerve damage – he met with Martin, who suggested he switch to defensive end, a position where the RedHawks were thin.

“When he walks through the door with that frame of his, your first thought isn’t a quarterback,” Martin said. “He looks like a tight end or a defensive end.

“When he played quarterback, he really didn’t ‘play’ it. He wasn’t your typical Tom Brady back in the pocket. He tried to run over people. He didn’t have that quarterback mentality. He was aggressive. He wasn’t soft. He was just a big kid plowing over defenders.”

Austin had never played defense before, and last season was a learning experience. This year he came into his own and in the process he made some history.

“He had some unique distinctions,” Martin said with a smile. “One week he was the first guy in Miami history to get a sack and also have been sacked in his career. Two weeks later when we finally had a 100-yard rusher (Kenny Young ran for 118 yards against Bowling Green), it turns out that our last 100-yard rusher was our defensive end.”

Austin had run for 108 yards against Central Michigan in 2013.

“Those were some cool stats he was part of,” Martin said with an appreciative nod.

It’s because of those multiple talents that Martin thinks Gearing has a shot at the NFL after this season.

In early January, Austin said he’s going to begin a rigorous, three-month training regimen – at Ignition Athletics training center in Mason – in preparation for Miami’s Pro Day that allows RedHawks players to show their wares to NFL scouts.

“He already had accepted a position at Cintas – with their management training program in Louisville,” Brandon said. “Now he’s had to make a very difficult call to the guy who hired him. He told him he had to turn down the job because he had a once in a lifetime opportunity here. The guy was completely supportive. He said, ‘I don’t blame you. Go do what you need to do.’“

‘The perfect story’

On Christmas Eve Austin joined his family for dinner under the palm trees at the Oyster Bar in St. Pete’s entertainment district.

“Miami players were walking past, everybody was enjoying themselves,” Brandon said. “Believe me, after the past few years, we’re not used to any of this. That’s why we’re enjoying every minute of it.”

Austin agreed:

“Those of us who went through it all and stayed, we believed if we just stuck together we would turn it around. But to actually do it is something totally different. I feel like I’m in a dream.

“And I’ll tell you, it’s a blast!”

Brandon loves hearing his son talk like that.

“This really wipes away those first four years on the team with one big swoop,” he said. “It’s pretty incredible for him. I mean, think about what’s happened here.”

The most improbable player is now a leader of the most improbable team.

“It’s perfect,” Brandon said quietly. “It’s just the perfect story.”

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