Perine lands on Dolphins draft radar after leading Gators to Orange Bowl win

The Miami Dolphins might not have to look far and wide for their future running back.

Lamical Perine rushes for 139 yards and two touchdowns on 13 carries to lead the Florida Gators to a 36-28 win over the Virginia Cavaliers in the Orange Bowl. He also gained 43 receiving yards and another touchdown.

Perine became the first Florida running back since Jacksonville Jaguars legend Fred Taylor in 1998 to earn bowl MVP honors.

The senior made a statement in his final career collegiate game in front of Dolphins general manager Chris Grier, who was at the game. One of the Dolphins’ last transactions of the regular season was to bring in Perine’s cousin Samaje, who spent the first three years of his NFL career with the Washington Redskins and Cincinnati Bengals.

Perine entered the bowl game with 538 rushing yards and 219 receiving yards with four touchdowns from both the air and the ground. He rushed for a career high 826 yards a year ago but his performance at Hard Rock Stadium proved that stats don’t tell the entire story.

“He’s one of the best backs in the country and came back his senior year,” Florida head coach Dan Mullen said, “and if you just purely look at stats and rushing yards, you might just kind of get a misread on it, but the reality is he’s one of the best backs in the country and he showed it out here tonight, running, catching.”

Perine immediately set the tone of the game with his first carry being a 61-yard touchdown run. The Gators were designated as the away team but the crowd said otherwise.

Perine’s second touchdown came on a 16-yard catch in which he had to shake off a defender on his way to the end zone.

His third touchdown was on a 10-yard run in the second quarter and he would’ve had a fourth one in the fourth quarter had the side of his foot wasn’t out of bounds on the one yard line. That allowed quarterback Kyle Trask to experience the end zone on a one-yard touchdown run.

Given the current state of running backs in the NFL Draft hierarchy, the Dolphins might not have to use one of their higher draft picks to select Perine. It would be ironic if the fifth round pick they acquired from the Arizona Cardinals in the  Kenyan Drake trade ends up being used on Perine.