“Professors after class get a sad look on their face and say: ‘Mount Union this week? Yeah, good luck,’ ” Suddeth said. “They mean: All the luck in the world won’t help.”
The story of Mount Union’s extraordinary success has been examined many times as the team trounced opponents during the past two decades. But perhaps its dominance is felt most sharply on the other campuses in the Ohio Athletic Conference — places like Heidelberg, a small liberal arts institution here in northwestern Ohio where the Mount Union game looms like Halloween, an annual rite of fall, except much scarier.
“But everyone goes to the game,” David Kindall, a sophomore at the university, said this week. “Even if it’s just to see if we score this time.”
Heidelberg has not defeated Mount Union since 1988 and has been outscored, 1,096-179, since then, which makes the average score in the last 22 seasons 50-8. Since 2000, Mount Union has scored more than 60 points five times and Heidelberg has scored more than 10 points only twice. Heidelberg is not the only team that Mount Union dominates; the Purple Raiders tend to rout everyone in Ohio.
“People look at the 10 schools in our conference and see one Goliath and nine Davids,” Heidelberg Coach Mike Hallett said. “We’re cast as the lovable losers. But that’s not how we look at it, or approach it. You don’t measure the value of athletics at an educational institution by the result, however lopsided, of one game. You’re missing every lesson if you do that.”
Indeed, at a time when the conversation at the highest levels of college football is dominated by academic dishonor and money-fueled, conference realignment deals, at tiny Heidelberg 150 players fill the roster without a single athletic scholarship. The team’s collective grade point average is just above 3.0. The practice field is dusty and only one locker room has adequate space for the equipment.
Heidelberg is the team that is supposed to lose big to mighty Mount Union on Saturday, and it knows it. But as they gathered this week, the players greeted the late afternoon with boisterous whoops, chants and hollers that drowned out the rattle of an adjacent railway and turned heads in the parking lot of a nearby machine factory.
“Where else would you rather be?” wide receiver Mario Escalante shouted as the first drills began Tuesday.
“Nowhere but here!” his teammates yelled in unison.
It is Mount Union week, and Heidelberg, which has won four of its first five games for the first time in 18 years, actually thinks it can win.
Hallett, who played on Mount Union’s first national championship team, in 1993, remembers his first year as the Heidelberg coach, preparing to play his alma mater.
“I looked at the film of them and of us and I knew we had no chance,” Hallett said. The team he inherited had a 1-39 record in its previous four seasons.
“So I told the kids that we don’t have a prayer of winning,” he said. “I didn’t want to give a typical gung-ho speech because I wanted them to know I wouldn’t lie. So I said we can’t win. But we can compete and prove to ourselves that we can get better.”
Heidelberg had been outscored, 187-0, in the previous three Mount Union games.
“But in 2007 we became the only team in the conference to score a point against their first-team defense,” Hallett said. “We kicked a field goal.”
They lost, 62-3.
“It’s not always going to be a proud moment, but there are things you can be proud of,” Hallett said, adding that the next week Heidelberg upset the conference power Baldwin-Wallace by 22 points, the first Heidelberg win over Baldwin-Wallace in 18 years.
Hallett’s first three teams had 4-6 records. Last season, Heidelberg, whose mascot is named the Student Prince, was 5-5. The scores against Mount Union have gotten marginally closer: 49-0, 44-14, 45-7.
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