By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
CINCINNATI – This time, it didn’t take a miracle.
Back on the road for just the second time this season, Baylor (3-4, 2-2) used a much different script to pull out a 32-29 win over the Cincinnati Bearcats (2-5, 0-4) Saturday afternoon before a sellout crowd of 38,193 at Nippert Stadium.
Unlike the 36-35 comeback win over UCF, when the Bears scored 29 unanswered points, Baylor took control with two touchdowns on back-to-back plays in the second quarter and then held off a late rally by the Bearcats to remain unbeaten on the road.
“You do feel the us versus them,” Baylor coach Dave Aranda said of his team’s success on the road. “Anytime this comes up, in mind, we have to play better at home. . . . It can’t just be when it’s us in a cramped little (visitors’) locker room when we feel a certain way. I thought the team on the sideline responded well to all the things we’re saying. They’re locked in.”
Isaiah Hankins made four field goals, including a career-long 54-yarder, while Blake Shapen threw for 316 yards and one touchdown and rushed for another behind a reshuffled offensive line that had brothers Clark and Campbell Barrington at guard and redshirt freshman Coleton Price making his first-career start at center.
“Clark is a leader . . . way mature, family dude and all that off the field,” Aranda said. “On the field, he’s way nasty and plays at the edge of the edge. That’s been somewhat compromised and held back being the center. When he was in the center role, he was kind of the dad. I think the guard allows him to be the big brother. There’s some nastiness that came out today, which is way cool. We need it.”
With the game on the line in the fourth quarter, Baylor’s offense clicked off a 15-play, 57-yard drive that used up more than seven minutes off the clock, leading to a 43-yard field goal by Hankins that proved to be the difference in the end.
“That was our emphasis all week was to get in the red zone and score points,” said Shapen, who picked up one first down on the drive with a 17-yard run and two more on passes of 13 yards to Ketron Jackson Jr. and 11 yards to Josh Cameron. “We still have a lot of work to do with that. Those drives where we kicked field goals, we’ve got to be able to finish those drives.”
Trailing by 15, Cincinnati made things interesting with a pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns. The Bearcats pulled within three with 5:03 to go when Emory Jones hooked up with Xzavier Henderson on a 28-yard TD pass and then found Evan Prater for the two-point conversion out of a formation that had four of the five offensive linemen spread out to the far side.
“I don’t think it was anything that they did to fool us,” linebacker Brooks Miller said of the defense giving up four “chunk” plays of 38 yards or longer and 450 yards total offense. “I just don’t think we had the best gap integrity when we needed to. All in all, we did for the most part, but they would hit when we didn’t, and they just capitalized on it.”
Baylor’s defense, which also came up with a pair of red-zone stops, all but sealed the deal when redshirt freshman safety Corey Gordon Jr. broke up a Jones pass to tight end Chamon Metayar on fourth-and-11 from the Cincinnati 42.
“I thought the heart and the fight and the belief, all those things,” Aranda said of the defense. “If you don’t have belief in your teammates and belief in us, those things don’t happen.”
Instead of sweating out a potential game-tying field goal or worse, all the Bears had to do was snap it two more times to run out the clock and celebrate another road victory in their first-ever meeting with Cincinnati. In their debut season in the Big 12, the Bearcats remained winless in league play.
“First of all, just very frustrated and disappointed,” first-year Cincinnati head coach Scott Sattefield said. “This is certainly not what Cincinnati football is all about, I can promise you that. . . . This one was certainly there for us to go get, and we didn’t do it. And it starts here with me.”
Dominating time of possession in the first quarter, Cincinnati had little to show for it. The Bearcats fumbled on a fourth-and-one play from Baylor’s 20 and gave up a 41-yard punt return that led to Hankins’ career-long 54-yard field goal and a 3-0 lead.
Jones capped off a 14-play, 75-yard drive with a four-yard TD pass to Henderson on the first play of the second quarter. But Baylor’s answer was a 75-yard drive of its own, with Shapen finding Jackson for a 41-yard gain and then capping it off with a three-yard run.
On the ensuing kickoff, linebacker Jeremy Evans forced a fumble by Braden Smith that landed in the lap of Utah State transfer Byron Vaughns, who returned it 15 yards for the touchdown and a 17-7 lead.
Hankins booted a 43-yard field goal after a Shapen 41-yard pass to tight end Drake Dabney, but Cincinnati got on the board again with a 38-yard TD scamper by Myles Montgomery that made it a one-score game at the half, 20-14. The Bearcats finished with 288 yards on the ground and had a pair of 100-yard rushers in Montgomery (10-103-2 TDs) and Corey Kiner (15-129).
“This game is kind of a gut punch,” Aranda said. “We’ve got to be able to stop the run and do it at a better clip than we did today. That’s a challenge for us. We’ve got the guys to do it, both players and coaches. There was some positive growth in that regard prior ro the game, and we took a step back today.”
Shapen and Jackson hooked up again, this time for 55 yards, on the opening drive of the third quarter and then found North Texas transfer Jake Roberts from six yards out for his first touchdown in a Baylor uniform to make it 26-14. Jackson had a career day as well with five catches for 130 yards.
In a big red-zone stop, Jones missed Payten Singletary on a fourth-down pass from the 15-yard line that was broken up by Devin Lemear. Back-to-back 20-yard plays on a Shapen pass to Monaray Baldwin and a run by Dominic Richardson led to a 46-yard field goal by Hankins that pushed the lead to 29-14 late in the third quarter.
What ultimately ended up being the difference was Baylor moving from its own 17 to Cincinnati’s 13-yard line with a balance of run and pass plays in a seven-minute fourth-quarter drive. An intentional grounding penalty pushed it back 13 yards, but Hankins made it a 4-for-4 day when he split the uprights with another 43-yarder that made it 32-21.
The Bears flipped the time of possession in the second half, keeping it for almost 19 minutes, and actually finished with a slight edge overall, 31:13 to 28:47. Baylor struggled to run the ball against Cincinnati’s defense, finishing with 80 yards on 28 attempts, but the revamped offensive line kept Shapen upright most of the day until a pair of fourth-quarter sacks.
“Coleton (Price) played amazing,” Shapen said of the redshirt freshman center, who had appeared in just two other games in his career. “His poise and confidence were awesome to see. The rest of the offensive line, they played a great game, too. It was really fun to wtch those guys. I felt clean most of the game.”
Baylor returns home to face Iowa State (4-3, 3-1) at 2:30 p.m. next Saturday, Oct. 28, for a Homecoming game broadcast on ESPN2. The Cyclones were idle this week after beating Cincinnati, 30-10, on the road last week.
