Third-and-12 is where drives tend to become field-position arguments. North Texas made it a referendum on Max Reese instead.
With the Mean Green facing third-and-12 from its 37-yard line late Thursday night, Tayven Jackson found Reese for 33 yards to the Florida Atlantic 30. That catch did not score, and it did not finish the possession. It did something more valuable in a game that kept producing sudden danger: it prevented North Texas from surrendering the initiative after FAU had pulled within three points.
North Texas went on to beat the Owls 48-41 in Denton, completing a fifth consecutive victory and remaining unbeaten after four American games. Reese finished with seven catches for 85 yards, numbers that sat behind Justin Stevenson’s 119 receiving yards, Kyle Koch’s two touchdown receptions and Jahiem White’s pair of rushing scores.
Yet Reese supplied the most important connective work on a nine-play, 74-yard drive that restored a two-possession lead.
The possession began with 8:26 remaining, immediately after Easton Messer caught his third touchdown pass of the night to make it 41-38. North Texas first turned to Reese for 14 yards. Stevenson then lost 2 yards on a completed pass, and the next pass fell incomplete.
That left the Mean Green needing 12 yards just to keep moving. Reese’s catch reached the FAU 30 and changed the drive from a possible punt into a scoring opportunity.
The rest of the sequence still required some repair. A later 10-yard completion to Brec Long was erased by an illegal-shift penalty. North Texas continued, reached the 2-yard line and let Koch finish with his second touchdown catch of the night.
Reese accounted for 47 of the drive’s 74 yards, but the arithmetic should not obscure the collaboration: Jackson made the throw, the offense absorbed the penalty, and Koch supplied the points.
Reese had already been useful before that late possession. During the second-quarter drive that ended with Baron Tipton’s 8-yard touchdown reception, he caught passes of 5 and 16 yards. Those gains helped move North Texas toward a score that tied the game at 10, giving the possession more shape than the touchdown line alone suggests.
Later, after FAU went ahead 17-10, North Texas answered with a 75-yard, 13-play touchdown drive.
That response included a 30-yard Dalton Carnes completion on second-and-19. It came after a 20-yard catch by Stevenson was canceled by offensive pass interference, a small but meaningful setback that could have made the possession unravel. Carnes later converted fourth-and-4 at the FAU 17 with an 8-yard catch.
Koch followed with a 6-yard reception to the FAU 3, then scored from 3 yards out to tie the game at 17.