CINCINNATI — The Scott Satterfield Bearcats turned a corner Saturday against the No. 14 Iowa State Cyclones. It’s been a turn that been three years in the making and one that had Bearcats fans and alumni endure two seasons of promising starts following by colossal nose dives.
The Bearcats built a 24-point lead, saw it trimmed to nine in the fourth quarter but didn’t flinch in a 38-30 win over Iowa State at Nippert.
At 4-1 overall and 2-0 in the Big 12, this certainly does feel different after five games. The Bearcats can pump out their chest a bit and consider themselves, at least for now, in the same company as ISU, BYU, TCU and Texas Tech as among the best in the Power 4 Big 12. They should crack the Top 25 this week for the first time in Satterfield’s tenure in Clifton.
The Bearcats offered up the best 30 minutes of the Satterfield era Saturday in scoring 24 first-quarter points and 31 for the half and laying a physical beatdown on one of the upper-echelon teams of the conference in taking a 31-15 halftime lead.
The Bearcats were the more physical team Saturday and it paid off in the long run. They were doing what their NFL counterparts have been unable to do four weeks into the season, move their opponent off the ball.
“When you see you can do that to a team, you start to lick your lips a little bit and get really excited,” Cats running back Evan Pryor told me. “There are
schemes that go into football, but when you line up across from someone and you just know that they can’t do anything to stop you or the guys next to you, it brings a different level of confidence. So you just got to keep building off it.”
What made this game different from Miami (OH) in 2023 or Pitt (2024) was what happened in the second half. After a drive at the end of the first half that ended with a questionable pass interference call on Cincy’s Matthew McDoom and a subsequent Cyclones touchdown on Rocco Bocht’s run up the middle, the Cyclones came out and drove 75 yards in 14 plays to open the second half and momentum had totally shifted. You could feel it in the stands and the players and coaches could certainly feel it on the sidelines.
“It’s a different team. I think our recruiting staff did a great job of identifying guys that we needed to bring in,” Satterfield said postgame. “We did a great job of keeping the guys we needed to keep from the last two years that were on this team. And then I think our whole program has done a great job of kind of molding this team and getting, getting this team to be a connected team in this day and age of the portal and all the different moving parts that these teams have now. You want to have a veteran team. You want to have a team that’s been scarred together, like we have, and you want to have talent. So you want to have all that mixed in there, I think, you can look at some of the plays and some guys that were made today with guys we had before. But then also guys we brought in, like Tawee Walker and Caleb Goodie.”
With UC up, 31-22, midway through the fourth quarter, the Cyclones were driving for another score when someone had to step up and make a play. That someone was Matthew Golday, a linebacker that NFL scouts are closely watching. He shed a blocker and made a big stop early in the game when the defense was rolling. This time, the defense was on its heels and running out of gas.
His stop of Becht on fourth-and-1 keeper from the UC 16 gave Cincinnati the ball back with 7:40 remaining. Three plays later, Brendan Sorsby tossed a perfect rainbow that Caleb Goodie ran under for an 82-yard touchdown to make it 38-22 and you could feel the Bearcats sideline exhale, led by Satterfield.
Dontay Corleone was playing in his first game since injuring his ankle against Bowling Green on Sept. 6. He was listed as a “game time decision” but started and finished with two tackles and was a disruptive force on the defensive line all afternoon.
Cincinnati rushed for a season-high 260 yards, led by Pryor’s 111 on only 10 carries, which included touchdowns of 18 and 30 yards. Tawee Walker had 89, his third-straight game with a season-high. While Pryor had the numbers, fellow back Tawee Walker had the power move of the game, trucking Carson Willich at midfield for 14 yards. No one play symbolized the new era of Satterfield toughness than that one. These Bearcats have convinced themselves they are worthy of title talk within in the Big 12. And good for them.
Tawee Walker Laid the BOOM
#Big12FB | 📺ESPN2 pic.twitter.com/AxbC9p19QS— Big 12 Studios (@big12studios) October 4, 2025
“We got some new pieces, but for the main part, our whole team is back,” Pryor said. “A lot of the situations we see ourselves in this year we saw ourselves in last year. So that’s the difference. We can look at a situation like today, going up big at halftime, and knowing how it worked out last year, it’s huge. When you have that confidence in that experience in the back of your mind, to be able to know we’re up 31-7, but it doesn’t mean anything until the clock is double zero. That’s something we preached at halftime. Any situation we’re in, we feel like we’ve seen a lot of looks, a lot of things, from last season. We’re just gonna keep building off of that.Goodie’s 83-yard touchdown catch marked the longest UC connection since Gunner Kiel to Mekale McKay in 2015.”
The Bearcats jumped out a 31-7 lead, scoring on all five of their first half possession and totaling 342 yards before the break.
“It started with our offensive line, the way they were blocking and coming off the ball,” Satterfield said. “It was our best running back game we’ve had this year with Tawee and Evan just breaking tackles and getting huge runs. Then, Brendan [Sorsby] with some timely throws, I thought, throughout the day, with none bigger than the one late in the game to Caleb [Goodie], to push it to two-score game. Obviously, that was huge for us on third down. Special teams played really well again today. We’re knocking down field goals. We had two big kickoff returns, and then Max [Fletcher] pinning that ball on the one-inch line was phenomenal for our special teams effort.”
“I thought our guys had a great focus throughout the week,” head coach Scott Satterfield said. “The mentality was right where it needed to be coming off a huge win on the road in the Big 12 at Kansas, and then to be able to put that one to bed and really focus everything on Iowa State, they did an absolutely great job with that.”
The most entertaining game of the Satterfield turned into his biggest win to date.
Sorsby 13-of-25 for 214 yards and two touchdowns and a rushing touchdown.
The game was marred by officiating that enraged both sidelines, triggered obscene chants from the capacity crowd and caused multiple delays that resulted a game that took three hours, 52 minutes to play.
Rocco Becht completed 29-of-46 passes for 300 yards, two touchdowns and ran for two others. The Bearcats also intercepted him twice. The Bearcats stopped Iowa State twice on fourth down in the second half, including a 4th-and-1 stop at the Cincinnati 16 that led to the 82-yard dime to Goodie three plays later on third down.
Cincinnati overcame three different first down conversions that were wiped out by penalties, including two consecutive illegal man downfield calls, calls that Satterfield smiled about postgame and termed the “adversity” teams face in game, noting his players were more onto the next play than the coaches on some calls.
There was also the aforementioned defensive pass interference call on corner Matthew McDoom that led to a Cyclones touchdown run by Becht with no time left in the first half, cutting Cincinnati’s lead to 31-15 at the half. Pryor ran in another touchdown from 18 yards in the second quarter and finished with 111 yards on 10 carries.
Cincinnati welcomes Central Florida to Nippert next Saturday and is likely to be ranked for the first time since 2022. Time for the Bearcats to show they’ve put the Iowa State buzz behind them and they’re serious about contending near the top of the Big 12.
