Southern’s upset bid fades after halftime

November 08, 2008 11:48 pm

— 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.”
Junior linebacker Jared Brawner, despite battling the flu, recorded a career-high 17 tackles for the Lions.
A special teams mistake set up the Bearcats’ go-ahead score midway through the third quarter.
Punting from the end zone, the Lions’ Ian Harrison fumbled the snap. He retrieved the ball and got off a low kick that hit a Bearcat player, but Northwest Missouri’s Blake Christopher, a backup quarterback, recovered at the 20.
Council scored on second down from the 16, giving the Bearcats a 20-17 lead.
Just over a minute later Myles Burnside intercepted a Hinspeter pass at the 40-yard line. Council gained 44 yards on six carries during the nine-play, 60-yard drive, including a 21-yarder on the first play and a three-yarder on fourth-and-1 before scoring from the 9.
Hinspeter and Daniel Thompson hooked up for two touchdown passes to give the Lions a 14-7 lead after the first quarter. The Lions did not score in the first period of their first eight conference games.
The Lion defense set up the first score as defensive back Terrance Scott returned Sheldon Cook’s fumble 30 yards to the 6-yard line. Tackle Dez Johnson forced the fumble.
On first down, Hinspeter found Thompson on a flanker screen up the middle for a touchdown and a 7-7 tie.
Two possessions later, the Lions covered 68 yards in six plays and took the lead on Hinspeter’s 41-yard strike to Thompson down the left sideline. Unable to find an open receiver, Hinspeter moved to his left and saw Thompson as he broke long past the Bearcat defender with 1:56 left in the first quarter.
The Bearcats’ Tommy Frevert kicked 20 and 30-yard field goals in the second period to cut the Lions’ lead to 14-13 at the intermission. It was the first time the Bearcats trailed at halftime since playing Missouri Western nine games ago.
The Lions forced the Bearcats to punt on the first series of the third quarter, and Kellen Anderson came up the middle and blocked Michael Stadler’s kick at the Northwest Missouri 31.
The Lions didn’t gain a yard on three plays, but Malette nailed a career-best 49-yard field goal, giving Southern a 17-13 lead three minutes into the second half.
“The first half was a blast,” Hinspeter said. “It was good to come out and play against the caliber of team we faced — top 3 in the country, No. 1 in our conference, has a chance again to go to a national championship game — we wanted to come out and kind of ruin the end of their season here at home. We wanted to come out and have fun, and for the most part, I think everyone did in the first half. We just ran out of whatever we had in the second half.”
“My hat is off to our players and coaches for coming out here when seemingly there might not be that much to play for,” Tatum said. “They came out and fought their tails off, which is what we asked them to, and they responded.
“Even at the end of the third quarter, we were still right in the thick of things but lacked that explosion on offense. There were a couple of times we needed an answer. We needed to sustain a drive, put the ball in the end zone, answer. We haven’t been able to do that the last four weeks, and it cost us again today. We put our defense up against the wall a few too many times in the second half, and we just didn’t have the (healthy) bodies on defense to stay with them.”

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