By Jim Henry

jhenry@joplinglobe.com

For a little more than a half, Missouri Southern played some of its hottest football on the coldest day of the season.

On the strength of two Adam Hinspeter touchdown passes, Brian Malette’s career-best 49-yard field goal and a defense that forced two turnovers, the Lions owned a 17-13 lead early in the third quarter over No. 3 Northwest Missouri State.

But the Bearcats turned two Lion mistakes into third-quarter touchdowns en route to a 48-24 victory Saturday afternoon at Fred G. Hughes Stadium.

Running back LaRon Council gained 197 yards on 29 carries and scored four touchdowns as the Bearcats (10-1) finished their third consecutive 9-0 MIAA season and claimed their 10th conference championship in the last 13 years.

Council’s touchdowns of 23, 16, 9 and 1 yards gave him 27 for the season, breaking Xavier Omon’s single-season school record of 26 set last year.

Quarterback Joel Osborn hit 21 of 28 passes for 226 yards as the Bearcats accumulated 592 yards, including 305 in the second half.

Hinspeter, in his final game with the Lions, became the school’s career total offense leader early in the second quarter on a 14-yard completion to wide receiver Johnny Johnson.

Hinspeter completed 18 of 37 passes for 199 yards and ended his career with 8,881 yards (9,016 passing, minus-135 rushing) on 1,905 plays. He passed quarterback Josh Chapman, who gained 8,801 yards (3,233 rushing, 5,568 passing) on 1,509 plays from 1999 through 2002.

“Obviously it’s a great honor, to come to school here as a kid out of high school wanting to play football here,” Hinspeter said, “to win the job my freshman year and build on that all four years. You can put up numbers all you want, but we wanted to come out and get wins. We didn’t do that ... to do this on senior day, it’s kind of bittersweet. It’s something I’ll look back on down the road and be proud of.”

“I grabbed him after the game and told him how proud I was of him,” Lions head coach Bart Tatum said. “For a fifth-year senior who statistically has been as strong as he has through the years, to get pulled for a freshman a few times during the year with games on the line, he really could have been a distraction, a cancer in the locker room. And he was directly the opposite to that. I told him that will take him a long way in life.”

Redshirt freshman Collin Howard, who shared duty with Hinspeter late in the season, came in midway through the fourth quarter and scored the Lions’ final touchdown on a 42-yard run.

Johnson snared a career-high 11 receptions for 116 yards for the Lions (4-7, 2-7 MIAA), who totaled 205 yards in the first half and 307 for the game.

“We tried to send the seniors out on a good note,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have anything to lose, so we came out nice and relaxed and played our game. The score may not show it, but we did some good things today, things that we’ve been trying to do all year. We moved the ball on third down, we put complete drives together.”