WACO, Texas — Seth Russell did something for second-ranked Baylor only a Heisman Trophy winner had done before. Corey Coleman is well on the way to his goal of setting a standard for the Bears that will be hard to match.
Russell became the only Baylor quarterback other than Robert Griffin III in 2011 to throw for 300 yards and run for 100 in the same game, and Coleman caught three more touchdowns break the single-season school record as the Bears got a measure of revenge with a 62-38 victory over West Virginia on Saturday.
“The way he runs his routes, he’s so dynamic, so explosive,” Russell said. “You’re going to have to double-team him, maybe the only way you can try to stop him.”
Coleman matched and then broke Kendall Wright’s school record, his nation-leading 16th coming halfway through the regular season for the Bears (6-0, 3-0 Big 12).
“I’m trying to make it elite,” Coleman said. “I’m trying to make it unbreakable.”
West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen called Coleman “the best player in college football. You can put me on record for that.”
Coleman finished with 10 catches for 199 yards, his fourth consecutive game with multiple touchdowns and his seventh in a row with at least 100 yards receiving. The 5-foot-11 junior had catch-and-run plays of 50 and 42 yards without scoring.
His 2-yard TD catch, a play after Baylor converted a fourth-and-1 midway through the first quarter, put the Bears ahead for good at 14-7 and matched Wright’s school record 14.
With an 11-yard score in the second quarter, Coleman surpassed Wright, the current Tennessee Titans receiver whose record season at Baylor came while catching passes from RG3.
The Bears won their FBS-best 19th consecutive home game.
Baylor’s only regular-season loss last year was 41-27 at West Virginia, and the two-time defending Big 12 champion Bears wound up the first team left out of the initial College Football Playoff.
“Really good win against really the only Big 12 team that we don’t have a winning record against since 2011,” coach Art Briles said. “That’s a big deal for us as a program. We felt a lot of desire, a lot of need to clear our name. We didn’t feel like we had a good name in West Virginia, so that was kind of our motivating factor.”
Russell was 20 of 33 for 380 yards and five TD passes, and ran 14 times for 160 yards with another score. His FBS-best 27 TD passes are well in range of Griffin’s school record 37 in 2011.
After Coleman added a 33-yard score early in the second half, on a short fourth-down pass when he quickly cut back and the defender slipped down trying to keep up, Russell threw two TD passes to Jay Lee in a span of just over 4 minutes to make it 48-24.
Skyler Howard, from Fort Worth, Texas, less than 100 miles from the Baylor campus, threw four TD passes for West Virginia (3-3, 0-3).
West Virginia needed only three plays to score after that, with Howard’s 70-yard TD to Shelton Gibson, who was wide open near midfield by the Baylor sideline, then cut across the field and ran untouched to the end zone.
That quickly brought back memories of the 2012 game, though they didn’t keep up the pace of West Virginia’s first conference game after moving into the league. The Mountaineers beat Baylor 70-63 at home then in the highest-scoring game in Big 12 history.
“Against a team like Baylor, if you’re not scoring every time, then there’s a chance that they could turn out that way,” said Howard, who finished 18 of 37 for 289 yards.
Gibson added a 100-yard kickoff return with 1:05 left, right after Baylor surpassed 60 points for the fifth game in a row on backup quarterback Jarrett Stidham’s 9-yard TD pass to tight end Trevor Clemons-Valdez.
