How a 2023 drop led South Carolina’s Nyck Harbor to see the football, elevate as a WR
Nyck Harbor makes for an easy target.
He is 6-foot-5, 230 pounds and perhaps the fastest college football player in America. He qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 200m and, well, more notice came later when EA Sports made him the only receiver with a speed rating of 99.
So, of course, just about every defensive back tasked with covering Harbor turned into Johnny Carson.
“All DBs do is chat,” Harbor said Wednesday. “They’ll just talk about that I’m just fast in the game. Only good in the game — this, that and the third. … DBs will talk all the time but, at the end of the day, I was catching the ball and they were behind me.”
For a while there, the jokes were easy. This was a former five-star recruit who was racing Olympians in the spring and a video game star in the summer. Note: None of that is football. After a lackluster freshman season, Harbor was hardly touching the field as a sophomore.
“I had to talk with him,” Harbor’s father, Azuka, told The State on Wednesday while acknowledging his son is the fastest receiver in college football. “Forget about everything you see. Forget about everything. It’s just a (video) game. If this does not translate to a real game, it doesn’t make any sense.”
As South Carolina’s 2024 season rolled along, slowly Harbor began not only to progress, but also to see tangible results.
There was the ridiculous touchdown snag in the final seconds of the Alabama game, which might have been the best play of the season had the Gamecocks won. He had a career-high 69 yards against Missouri and began getting behind corners. He recorded at least 40 receiving yards in the final five games of the year, including a marvelous toe-tap in the Citrus Bowl.
“I don’t doubt his ability to go get the ball,” Azuka Harbor said. “If you throw that ball where you want him to go, he’ll go get it.”
Added Nyck: “I just started to have more confidence.”
In one year, the narrative around Harbor went from, “Is he going to be able to figure things out?” to “Could he be South Carolina’s best receiver in 2025?” And that evolution seems to stem from something so simple: Sight.
It brings a reminder of a theory from Malcolm Gladwell’s book “David vs. Goliath,” in which the author says Goliath, in part, was defeated because he was partially blind. This giant, looked upon by everyone as some sort of physical marvel, was undone by his eyes, proof that physique means nothing without vision.
And, well, Harbor couldn’t see. That is not to say he was going blind, but he couldn’t see “the best I could,” he said.
Azuka noticed something was off during the 2023 game against Texas A&M. On the Gamecocks’ first drive, quarterback Spencer Rattler fired a third-down pass to a wide-open Harbor. Somehow, it looked like a ball Harbor was staring directly at had sneaked up on him. It slid right through his hands and thudded off his helmet.
After the game, Azuka called his son.
“Bro, what’s going on?” Azuka asked. “Is everything OK?”
“Dad,” Harbor responded, “I did not see that ball. It just hit me in the face.”
“Well,” Azuka said, “we need to go do something.”
That was not the day Harbor realized he had some eye troubles — at his signing day ceremony in 2023, he was wearing glasses. Heck, he wears glasses all the time, but always away from the football field.
Finally, he accepted his imperfect eyesight just before last season. In the opener against Old Dominion, Harbor was wearing LaNorris-Sellers-esque rec specs but then switched to contacts soon thereafter.
“That was probably the best decision I’ve made,” Harbor said. “It’s like a whole new world.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 7:00 AM with the headline "How a 2023 drop led South Carolina’s Nyck Harbor to see the football, elevate as a WR."
