West Virginia had not won a Big 12 game all season. Then Michael Hawkins Jr. threw for 464 yards, Jack Cassidy kicked a 35-yarder as the clock expired, and Morgantown came unglued. West Virginia 45, Cincinnati 42.
That 464 is the most passing yardage by a Mountaineer since Will Grier in 2018. Hawkins went 25-of-33 with three touchdown passes. He also ran 26 times for 77 yards and scored twice on the ground. That is 59 plays with the ball in his hands, and he was involved in nearly every meaningful thing West Virginia did.
The Last Drive Was Absurd
Tied at 42, West Virginia took over at its own 2-yard line. On third-and-9, Hawkins threw a 41-yard ball to Prince Strachan to get out of the shadow of his own goal posts. Two plays later he hit Strachan again for 39 more.
Cassidy had missed from 49 yards late in the first half. He did not miss from 35 with no time on the clock. Eighty-two yards in the closing minutes of a tie game, from a team that had dropped its first three conference games.
Cam Cook tied it at 42 on a 40-yard swing-pass touchdown with 3:52 left. DJ Epps caught a 37-yard touchdown from Hawkins to open the fourth quarter and tie it at 28. There was no defense in this game and nobody watching it cared.
Cincinnati Played Well and Lost Anyway
JC French IV threw for a career-best 389 yards on 22-of-30 passing. Cole Tabb ran for 118 yards on 15 carries. Max Fletcher dropped a 66-yard punt that was downed at the West Virginia 1. Scott Satterfield’s team did nearly everything it needed to do and still flew home at 4-2 overall and 1-2 in the Big 12.
West Virginia now leads the all-time series 19-3-1 and has won five meetings in a row, which has to be maddening in Cincinnati.
Fletcher’s punt to the 1 should have been the play that decided this game. Instead Hawkins marched the Mountaineers 82 yards the other way. That is the difference between a defense that can close and one that cannot, and Cincinnati’s is the second kind right now.
Rodriguez Can Stop Worrying About the Position
West Virginia is 4-3 and 1-3. This season is not ending in Arlington. But Rich Rodriguez has something more useful than a conference title shot right now, and that is a quarterback who can carry an offense by himself.
Hawkins took 26 carries. Some were designed and some were survival. A quarterback who throws for 464 and runs for 77 in the same afternoon, while his defense gives up 42 points, is doing the work of two players, and he did it against a team that came in with a winning record.
The rest of the Big 12 schedule still looks hard, and West Virginia will probably lose more than it wins from here. What changed Saturday is that the Mountaineers finally have an obvious identity. Put the ball in Hawkins hands and find out who can stop him. Cincinnati could not.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.