Buffalo needed one extra possession and one missed kick to turn a 15-point deficit into a Mid-American Conference win, and Jason Wright made sure the Bulls got both. Wright threw for 358 yards and was responsible for four touchdowns, two through the air and two with his legs, as Buffalo ran down Miami (Ohio) 34-31 in overtime on Tuesday night in Oxford.
This was not a clean game. It was a track meet that nearly got away from the team that looked like it had everything in hand with twelve minutes left.
What happened in the fourth quarter and overtime
Miami had this one. Scoop Smith's 6-yard touchdown run with 12:01 remaining pushed the RedHawks' lead to 31-16, their biggest cushion of the night, and a home crowd on a Tuesday in early November had every reason to think the Bulls were done. They were wrong.
Wright found Chance Morrow for a 4-yard score to cap an 11-play, 75-yard drive and cut it to 31-24. Then, with 1:35 left in regulation, Wright punched one in himself from 2 yards out to finish a 12-play, 80-yard answer and tie it at 31. Two scoring drives, roughly seven and a half minutes apart, and a 15-point game turned into a coin flip.
Overtime didn't need much. Oliver Hautanen made a 27-yard field goal to put Buffalo up 34-31 in its possession, and Miami's Kellan McLaughlin missed from 45 yards to end it. That's the whole game in one sentence: a quarterback who refused to let a blowout happen, and a kick that didn't fall.
The stat line that tells the story
Wright's night stands on its own, but it wasn't a solo act. Morrow went off as his top target, and Miami had answers of its own in Caleb Heavener and D'Shawntae Jones, which is exactly why this thing needed extra football.
| Player | Team | Line |
|---|---|---|
| Jason Wright | Buffalo | 358 passing yards, 2 pass TD, 2 rush TD |
| Chance Morrow | Buffalo | 199 yards, 12 catches, 2 TD |
| Caleb Heavener | Miami (OH) | 154 passing yards, 1 TD |
| D'Shawntae Jones | Miami (OH) | 117 rushing yards, 12 carries |
Morrow catching 12 passes for nearly 200 yards in a game Buffalo trailed by two scores tells you how this comeback actually happened. It wasn't one explosive snap. It was Wright finding the same guy over and over until the defense couldn't get off the field, which is a specific kind of exhausting for a secondary that had been ahead on the scoreboard for most of the night.
Where this leaves both teams in the MAC
Buffalo moves to 6-3 overall and 4-1 in conference play, a record that keeps the Bulls squarely in the mix in the MAC East. Miami falls to 5-4 and 3-2, still very much alive but now needing to find answers after squandering a two-score fourth-quarter lead on its own field.
checked the almanac: the NCAA didn't even have overtime until 1996. before that, this game ends in a 31-31 tie and everybody goes home arguing about it for a week. instead we got seven and a half minutes of Buffalo erasing fifteen points and a kicker's miss deciding the whole thing. that's the sport getting better with age.
For Miami, the lesson from Tuesday is less about talent and more about finishing. The RedHawks moved the ball well enough to take a 15-point lead into the fourth quarter on the road to nowhere, controlling the clock with Jones pounding out 117 yards on just 12 carries. But a defense that had Buffalo largely contained for three quarters couldn't get one more stop when it mattered, surrendering two scoring drives in the game's final ten minutes of regulation.
For Buffalo, it's the kind of win that gets remembered in March when bowl projections firm up. A team doesn't erase a 15-point deficit on the road without something real at quarterback, and Wright's four-touchdown, 358-yard night is the kind of performance MAC coaches will be building game plans around for the rest of the season.
What's next
Buffalo travels to face Ball State on Nov. 11, a chance to build on the momentum of a comeback that will linger with this group. Miami hosts Ohio on Nov. 10, and the RedHawks will want to show Tuesday's fourth quarter was an aberration and not a pattern, especially against an Ohio team that's rolling at 7-2 and 5-0 in conference play after its own last-minute win over Akron this week.
What I'm watching going forward is whether Miami's defense tightens up specifically in the fourth quarter, because giving up fifteen points of cushion in under eight minutes is the kind of thing that shows up again if it isn't fixed. And I'm watching whether Wright's performance was a signature night or the new normal, because a quarterback who throws for 350-plus yards and scores four times himself is the rarest kind of problem for a MAC defense to solve.
