Mensah leads No. 4 Hurricanes into night game at Clemson with 5-0 start on the line

Darian Mensah is completing passes at a record rate through his first month with the Miami Hurricanes.

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Through four games, Mensah has completed 88.7% of his passes — 94 completions on 106 pass attempts — and has yet to throw an interception. He’s the only player at the Football Bowl Subdivision level at least in the past 30 years to be that accurate while throwing at least 100 passes through his first four games of the season.

But completion percentage isn’t a stat Mensah is focusing on as the No. 4 Hurricanes’ schedule starts to pick up intensity.

Wins are.

“I’m not impressed with it myself, to be honest,” Mensah said. “I’m really just trying to go 1-0 every week. It’s cool to be [almost] 90%, but they don’t give you a trophy for being 90%. So that doesn’t really mean anything to me.”

That said, how Mensah operates with the football in his right hand impacts the Hurricanes’ chances to keep going 1-0. He’s the leader of the nation’s top offense one-third through the season, a group that is averaging 588.8 yards per game, 8.53 yards per play and 51.8 points per game.

And he will be tasked to lead Miami (4-0, 2-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) in what might be the team’s biggest test yet when the Hurricanes travel to play the Clemson Tigers on Saturday at Memorial Stadium (7:30 p.m., ABC).

“I’m just excited to go play in that stadium,” Mensah said. “It’s very loud. Who doesn’t live for games like this?”

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Mensah is one of the few players on Miami’s current roster who has played a game at Clemson’s “Death Valley,” a venue the Hurricanes have been to just four times total and most recently in 2022. While at Duke last season, he led the Blue Devils to a 46-45 come-from-behind victory over the Tigers on Nov. 1. Mensah completed 27 of 41 passes for 361 yards and four touchdowns that day. That included six completions for 127 yards and a touchdown to wide receiver Cooper Barkate, who came with Mensah from Duke to Miami.

“A great game,” Mensah said.

The Hurricanes are expecting just that from Clemson (3-1, 2-0 ACC), which bounced back from a season-opening 51-10 loss to LSU with three consecutive wins over Georgia Southern, North Carolina and California by a combined 74-37 score. However, Miami is still a 16.5-point road favorite. It’s the largest margin a team has been favored over Clemson in Dabo Swinney’s 18 years leading the Tigers.

But don’t tell the Hurricanes that. Instead, they will point to Clemson’s run game led by sophomore Gideon Davidson (who has run for 264 yards and three touchdowns the past two weeks), a 1-2 punch at wide receiver in T.J. Moore and Bryan Wesco Jr. (who will have to come up big to help freshman quarterback Tait Reynolds handle Miami’s defense) and a Tigers defense which has allowed just six second-half points during the past three games while forcing five turnovers.

“Really high-level football,” Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal said.

The same could be said for Miami.

The Mensah-led offense is getting all the attention, and understandably so with the success the group has had through the first month of the season.

But UM’s defense is among the nation’s best early in the season, too. The Hurricanes rank among the top five nationally in rush defense (39.5 yards allowed per game, first), total defense (224.5 yards allowed per game, second), scoring defense (nine points allowed per game, fourth) and yards allowed per play (3.99, fifth). Miami has also forced four turnovers the past two weeks, while logging 19 tackles for loss and 10 sacks on the season.

“The game looks completely different when you make a team one-dimensional,” Miami cornerback Ethan O’Connor said. “So when we’re tackling well and we stop the run and we just make a team throw the ball all game, it’s really hard to do — especially with the cover guys that we have.”

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Miami will look to put it all together on Saturday night at Clemson.

This story was originally published October 1, 2026 at 11:50 AM.