Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312120052
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jack Bogaczyk
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The wind-chill factor was a big zero Saturday. The NCAA Division III football championship game certainly wasn't.
People were turning purple at Salem Stadium, and that was long before Mount Union's Purple Raiders and their impressive fan following celebrated the Ohio school's first NCAA football title.
To start the game, Rowan won the coin toss and coach K.C. Keeler took the wind. The Raiders got the gusts when they needed them most, when they found themselves trailing in the fourth quarter for the first time this season.
Mount Union scored a pair of final-period touchdowns to earn a 34-24 victory over the Profs, completing a perfect season as quarterback Jim Ballard finished his collegiate career with a performance that was a breeze.
In a playoff semifinal on Dec. 4, Ballard threw eight touchdown passes against St. John's (Minn.) in the rain and muck. In the Stagg Bowl, Ballard completed 28 of 45 passes for 387 yards and three touchdowns, ignoring the brisk conditions and mostly avoiding Rowan's strong rush.
"Jim's the best quarterback I've ever coached in terms of ignoring poor weather conditions and playing through bad conditions," said Larry Kehres, Mount Union's coach. "Today was a little more windy than I'd have liked it to have been, and it did have a tremendous effect on the game."
Of the nine scores, seven came with the wind at the offensive team's back. Rowan (11-2) scored all of its points with the wind. the difference was Ballard, who threw for a pair of touchdowns into the gale.
"With today's conditions, having the wind at our back in the fourth quarter really worked to our advantage," said Ballard, who unquestionably isn't just the best player in Division III. He possesses the talent and poise of a Division I-A quarterback.
Had Mount Union won the coin toss, the Purple Raiders' choice would have been different from that of their New Jersey opponent.
"We would have taken the ball," said Kehres, whose past four teams are a combined 45-3-1. "They did get nine points in the first quarter, so I guess you could say it worked for them, but I wouldn't give up a possession in a football game like this.
"You know you're going to have the wind two quarters anyway, and we were pleased to have it in the second and fourth quarters."
Ballard confounded Keeler's coin call by guiding Mount Union into decent field position on the first possession and then to a touchdown later in the first quarter.
"My original thought was, `If we win the toss, defer,' " Keeler said. "That way we have the choice in the second half. But the wind was coming and going and doing all sorts of crazy things.
"We talked about it as a staff and the train of thought was: The team that has to punt first into the wind is in trouble. If we could pin them down there, then we thought we could have some success."
Rowan did score first, but then Ballard took the Raiders 82 yards to wipe out the field-position and scoreboard disadvantage.
It was too bad some in the standing-room only crowd of 7,304 couldn't brave the conditions. Despite the frigid wind and occasional snow, the game was a well-played offensive show with only three turnovers.
The lead changed hands five times as these superb teams went up and down the field for 769 yards. Or, was that back-and-forth just the temporary press box swaying in the wind?
In the second quarter, with the wind whipping the tarps on the press box, public-address man Dave Lohse, with the microphone not quite far enough away from his mouth, exclaimed, "This is just absurd. Did the polar icecap melt?"
In the first quarter, with the snow suddenly much more than flurries, Wayne Burrow took a phone call from a fellow NCAA official and said, "This is great. We have 7,000 people here and it's snowing like a son of a -----."
He was even more accurate than Ballard's second-half passing. At Salem's first Stagg Bowl, only the weather was brutal.
by CNB