Michael Haynes is a pretty resourceful guy. Quick and tough, too. As an army brat in Panama, the Penn State pass-rushing terror used to chase boa constrictors for kicks. Now he's a 6'3", 263-pound junior with more moves than Christopher Walken. Even off the field, he seems to have an answer for everything. And yet tonight, opening night for the Nittany Lions, you pity Haynes. You pity him because he's getting the spit beat out of him nine different ways by the man across the line.

That man is Miami's WWF-sized left tackle, Bryant McKinnie, college football's most dominant force -- and a player Penn State passed on two years earlier. Before the first half is over, Haynes will try every move he has ever learned. First, a speed rush. (Bad idea. The 6'9", 336-pound McKinnie drives him so far past the pocket, Haynes can't tell QB Ken Dorsey from Ken Starr.)

Next, a bull rush. (Really bad idea. Big Mac engulfs the defensive end like a volcano burying a small village.) Then, a swim move. (Wrong again. McKinnie's mitts are too fast; he swats away the pest and sends him sprawling to the ground.) Finally, Haynes grabs at his opponent's face mask while trying to work an inside move. (Uh-oh. McKinnie simply uproots him this time, knocking him back almost five yards.)

After the game, a 33-7 Miami romp, Haynes seems unfazed as he jokes with reporters. He says he's impressed with McKinnie, but not that impressed. "My game plan was to not get manhandled," he admits, "and I think I did that."

Huh? Has McKinnie knocked the sense out of this guy? Wouldn't be the first time. Big Mac renders all comers utterly clueless. He is Shaq in pads. The cornerstone for top-ranked Miami -- and the potential first pick in next year's NFL draft -- he runs the 40 in five seconds flat and has a 31-inch vert. But the two numbers scouts love most are these: 94 and 0. The former is the length of McKinnie's wingspan in inches. The latter is the number of sacks he has allowed in his career, including scrimmages. It's an amazing stat, a streak almost as unlikely as his path to stardom.

Every once in a while, a coach will stumble onto some fabled freak -- a guy who bench presses Chevy Impalas or outruns cheetahs or heaves a football 95 yards. And it seems like these characters always get discovered in some backwater town, cleaning gutters or chopping down trees.

Bryant McKinnie was found in an unusual place all right -- banging on the bass drum in the high school marching band. Truth is, he was always too big for his own good. Or at least for the good of Pee Wee football leagues, whose weight restrictions were dwarfed by his imposing frame. His old man, Bryant McKinnie Sr., wanted him to play Pop Warner, but the league in Woodbury, N.J., had a 90-pound limit, and Junior -- a quiet third-grader with size-10 shoes -- pushed the needle all the way to 135. He tried wrestling, but didn't like it. Wasn't into hoops, either, and got bored with piano after a year. For a while, his favorite hobby was eating; he'd polish off eight boxes of cereal a week. Finally, when Bryant was 15, Michele Green started bringing her son to step aerobics class. By now he was 6'5", 220, and all the women in the class -- which was everybody -- thought he was Michele's new boyfriend. (She and Bryant Sr. divorced when Junior was a toddler.) The ladies marveled at how agile and graceful he was. The kid loved the attention.

It was also around this time that Bryant Sr., a former standout safety and high school wrestler, convinced his son to give football another try. Although Junior was extremely raw and undisciplined as a freshman in 1994, the coaches at Woodbury High could see he had D1 tools. But his laid-back ways landed him in a heated argument with head coach Jim Boyd during two-a-days before his sophomore season. Boyd accused McKinnie of loafing. McKinnie told Boyd he didn't need football, then stormed off the field. "Bryant can be very stubborn," says Woodbury assistant Willie Murray, who once coached Bryant Sr. on the South Jersey Cowboys, a semipro team. Stubborn? The next time Murray and Boyd saw McKinnie in uniform, they couldn't believe their eyes. He showed up for the Thundering Herd opener attached to a huge bass drum, looking like a cross between Sgt. Pepper and Sgt. Slaughter.

"Here he was, 6'7", with all this talent," Murray says. "I was like, 'You don't need to be in that band. You need to be on this football team. If you are, someday you'll be able to write your own ticket.'"

McKinnie stuck with the band all season, but eventually he realized that Murray might be onto something. He rejoined the team the following year, then blew up as a senior, growing to 6'8", 270, and notching 13 sacks. That got the attention of Iowa, which stumbled onto him while checking out a Woodbury quarterback. But when McKinnie failed to qualify academically, Hawkeyes assistant Frank Verducci directed him to Lackawanna JC in Scranton, Pa. The coach there, Mark Duda, was a no-nonsense former defensive tackle with the St. Louis Cardinals who had played for Verducci at Maryland. He took McKinnie sight unseen.

Big Mac's career on the D-line lasted all of nine seconds at Lackawanna. Duda, with visions of a supersized Jackie Slater in his head, immediately switched him to left tackle -- a move that didn't sit well with McKinnie. After that first practice, he visited Duda's office, explaining how the coaches at Woodbury had tried to switch him before, and how he balked each and every time. "I didn't think I could get noticed playing O-line," Bryant recalls. But Duda described the monsters he had played against, 300-pounders with ballerina feet and bulldog dispositions. The coach even confessed what he dreaded most: having to face a pure demoralizer, a giant whose chest you couldn't touch even if you were armed with a joust. Finally, Duda cut to the chase, echoing Murray's prediction: "Bryant, you are going to be an abundantly wealthy man someday if you play offensive line."

McKinnie could barely bench 225 back then. He was too embarrassed to pump iron in front of his teammates, so Duda let him lift in line coach Al McElroy's basement. On the field, though, Big Mac did something new every day, things Duda had never seen before. Like the time against West Point Prep, when McKinnie was fending off the defensive end and noticed the inside backer coming on a delayed blitz. Big Mac shifted his hips, dropped his right shoulder and jolted the backer so hard with his right arm that the guy flipped over backward -- all this while pinning the end with his other arm. "Never seen anything like it," Duda says. "We must've watched that one a hundred times."

McKinnie ended up starting all 22 games during his two seasons at Lackawanna, never surrendering a sack. And while his All-America status still wasn't enough to impress Penn State -- we're not interested in jucos, they told him -- Miami was an easy sell. When Hurricanes offensive line coach Art Kehoe dropped by Scranton to check out McKinnie's film, he watched seven plays, froze the tape and then promptly dialed up Butch Davis on his cell phone. "You wouldn't believe what I just saw," he blurted out. Five minutes later, Kehoe walked into the weight room, introduced himself to McKinnie and offered him a full ride.

Most recruiting gurus had written off Big Mac because he didn't play in the high-profile juco leagues of California, Mississippi or the Midwest. They said his competition was weak, and dismissed him as a pumped-up power forward in pads. They assumed he was soft, because tall guys are almost always soft, right? Not even the Hurricanes were sure what they had the day McKinnie showed up for two-a-days in the summer of '99. But it didn't take long to find out.

Every program has a tough-guy test. At Miami, it's called the Hamburger Drill. The team gathers in a circle as two big guys are summoned to the center to see who's baddest. Davis called out McKinnie first. Then he yelled for hotshot frosh William Joseph, a rhinolike DT. The coach blew his whistle and both men locked up. But instead of the usual 10-second stalemate, Davis got something he never expected. Without even bending, McKinnie hoisted his 305-pound teammate up in the air and threw him on his head. The other players oohed and aahed. The coaches watched in stunned silence.

***

Two days before every game, McKinnie calls his mom before he goes to bed. Last season, the conversation was almost always the same.

"Bryant, are you starting Saturday?"

"Yes, I am. Mama, pray for me."

Michele Green is a PR woman for the Atlantic City Convention Center; she makes her living through hype. But she had no clue just how good her son was. Up until last Oct. 7, neither did her son. Top-ranked Florida State came to the Orange Bowl that day, led on defense by the nation's top sackman, Jamal Reynolds. At 6'4", 254 pounds, Reynolds can bench 525 and has the closing speed of a cobra. (The Packers took him with the 10th pick of the April draft.) Thanks to McKinnie, though, Reynolds never got within five feet of Dorsey. Instead he suffered the worst game of his life, managing just one tackle in the Hurricanes' 27-24 win, while NFL personnel wonks described McKinnie's performance as one of the most dominating they'd seen in years.

Of course, you don't have to be John Madden to spot a great lineman. Just check out the uniforms. If both the QB and his chief protector are nice and tidy, that should tell you something. "Great linemen are never on the ground, because they have great feet," Duda explains. "It's the average ones who have to try and cut you." McKinnie's jersey is so clean, Dorsey could use it for a tablecloth.

When scouts feast their eyes on Big Mac, they see Jonathan Ogden, Baltimore's behemoth Pro Bowler. It's a huge compliment, considering that McKinnie's technique can be a little sloppy at times. He admits he has a tendency to take a stutter-step while setting up in pass protection, and he's still developing as a run blocker. But he's more agile than Ogden (he ran the 400 meters in high school), and his squidlike reach and massive stride enable him to neutralize rushers from almost 10 feet away. "It's like he's gadgetman," Kehoe says. "He can get caught leaning and still extend his arm out and send 'em flying like a bowling pin. It's ridiculous."

After pummeling Reynolds and wiping out Florida sack specialist Alex Brown in Miami's Sugar Bowl win, McKinnie was expected to declare for the 2001 draft, and was projected as a top-10 pick. But Davis convinced him he was the final piece in the Canes' national championship puzzle. The day to declare came and went while McKinnie stayed put. Two weeks later, Davis called a team meeting and announced he was leaving for the Browns.

Feeling betrayed, Bryant and a handful of Hurricane vets marched into AD Paul Dee's office and demanded he hire offensive coordinator Larry Coker to ensure a smooth transition. "If he hired somebody else," McKinnie says, "I'd have probably applied for the supplemental draft." Instead, he took out a $2 million insurance policy and set his sights on the national title.

McKinnie's streak of zero sacks is as good as any run going in sports. This Big Mac pitches a shutout on every play, often going 30-for-30 on Saturdays. The feat generates as much chatter among his teammates as Dorsey's Heisman hopes. Each week they surf the Web searching for quotes from some ambitious -- albeit foolish -- defensive end spouting off about ending the streak. "Just guys trying to get a rep," McKinnie says with a chuckle.

Before the Rutgers game Sept. 8, Scarlet Knight defensive end Alfred Peterson, a true freshman, popped off that Big Mac was "just a man like I'm a man." (Really, really dumb move.) When the 6'3", 245-pound Peterson attempted a bull rush in the second quarter, McKinnie disposed of him the way a bully clamps onto a little brat's dome and laughs as the poor fool runs in place. After the whistle, McKinnie looked down at his bewildered foe.

"Yep, you are a man just like I'm a man," Big Mac declared, his narrow eyes widening for effect. "But I'm a grown man."

This article appears in the October 1 issue of ESPN The Magazine.