Michael Hawkins Jr. posted 235 combined yards in his first game wearing West Virginia navy—132 passing, 103 rushing—as the Mountaineers defeated Coastal Carolina in a bowl matchup that doubled as a spring camp audition. The Oklahoma transfer's mobility metrics matter more than the opponent: offensive coordinator Chad Scott's scheme requires a quarterback who can threaten the edge on broken plays, and Hawkins cleared that bar in December rather than August.
Cam Cook's 72-yard run on the opening snap gave West Virginia immediate field position and let Scott call a conservative first quarter while Hawkins settled. By the second half, Hawkins was keeping designed read-option plays rather than handing off—the offensive line gave him clean pockets on drop-backs, and he hit intermediate routes without forcing deep shots. The 103 rushing yards came on scrambles and designed keeps, not one explosive run. West Virginia's front office watched a quarterback make quick decisions under pressure, which is the skill that translates from bowl games to Big 12 conference play.
The timing accelerates West Virginia's 2025 quarterback room decisions. Hawkins entered the transfer portal in November after losing the Oklahoma starting job to freshman phenom Michael Hawkins III—wait, wrong Michael Hawkins. Let's clarify: Hawkins *Jr.* transferred from Oklahoma, where he'd been the backup, after the Sooners' season ended. West Virginia head coach Neal Brown needed a bridge option after Garrett Greene exhausted eligibility. Hawkins' December performance means Brown and Scott can finalize their spring depth chart in January rather than waiting until fall camp. That matters for recruiting: high school quarterbacks in the 2026 class want to know the depth chart before signing letters of intent in February.
The secondary story is what this does to West Virginia's transfer portal posture. Brown has three offensive line spots still open for the 2025 roster, and a settled quarterback room makes those pitches easier. Tackles entering the portal want to block for a known commodity, not audition while the coordinator experiments. Hawkins' dual-threat profile also changes the offensive line profile Scott recruits: fewer mauling run-blockers, more athletic pass-protectors who can recover when Hawkins scrambles. West Virginia's NIL collective, the Montani Collective, has roughly $4 million in annual commitments—modest by Power Four standards—and a proven quarterback lets them allocate more to the offensive line instead of bidding on another transfer signal-caller in the spring window.
Coastal Carolina's defense, to be clear, is not a proxy for Big 12 defenses. The Chanticleers finished 112th nationally in opponent yards per play. But bowl games reveal process, not just results. Hawkins read coverages quickly, slid protection correctly on three blitzes, and didn't fumble on his scrambles. Those are coachable skills that transfer across competition levels. West Virginia's front office needed to see decision-making speed, and Hawkins showed it in a live game rather than a scrimmage.
Watch for West Virginia to announce its spring practice schedule in mid-January. Scott typically scripts the first 15 plays of every spring scrimmage to stress-test the quarterback room under game conditions. If Hawkins is named the starter before spring ball begins, that's a signal Brown trusts the bowl game evaluation. The alternative: West Virginia enters the transfer portal again in April for a veteran backup, which would cost $500,000 to $750,000 in NIL guarantees.
The offensive line recruiting visits are already scheduled for the third weekend of January. Brown and Scott now have film to show.
The takeaway
Hawkins' **235** combined yards let West Virginia lock its quarterback room two months early, freeing NIL budget for offensive line portal adds.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.