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One pick-6 apparently wasn’t enough for Maxwell Hairston on Saturday afternoon.
Kentucky’s star sophomore cornerback provided highlight-reel bookends to the Wildcats’ 45-28 victory at Vanderbilt, twice returning interceptions for touchdowns to both set the tone for the win and help seal it.
There was the interception of Commodores quarterback AJ Swann in the 1st quarter that Hairston returned 29 yards for a touchdown that gave Kentucky a 14-0 cushion not even 7 minutes into the conference opener for both teams.
? – @SECNetwork: https://t.co/fw8ryZTQfJ pic.twitter.com/kOfssIWxXi
— Kentucky Football (@UKFootball) September 23, 2023
And there was Hairston’s interception of Swann in the 4th quarter that he returned 54 yards for a score that gave the Wildcats a 45-21 lead with 4:15 left in the game.
Hairston added 4 tackles, all of them solo, and 3 pass deflections in the virtuoso performance that helped Kentucky improve to 4-0 going into next week’s home showdown against Florida.
Hairston had 1 interception this season — in Week 2 against Eastern Kentucky — going into Saturday, before he exploded against Vanderbilt and served notice to the rest of the SEC as conference play gets rolling.
The native of West Bloomfield, Michigan, had 19 tackles, 13 of them solo, in the 1st 3 games of the season.
As a freshman last fall, Hairston played in 12 games and totaled 2 tackles (1 of them solo), both in a win over Youngstown State.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
