Northwest Missouri State won college football’s Division II national championship on Saturday, beating North Alabama, 29-3, in a snowy title game in Kansas City, Kan. It was the snow bowl of the year, and weather became an enormous part of the story. Northwest won the title at 15-0 for the second year in a row.
2016 DII National Championship final score: NW Missouri State beats UNA in a snow game for the ages
The snow was unexpected. Northwest winning a football game was not.
Northwest found a way to grind through the elements, however. The game stayed scoreless into the second quarter, but the Bearcats scored a touchdown with 58 seconds left in the first half to go up, 7-0. They didn’t pull away in typical fashion, but they also didn’t relinquish their lead, either.
The Bearcats’ halftime lead was 7-3, after a late field goal got UNA on the board. Northwest churned out another touchdown in the third quarter to go up 14-3, and a snow-aided safety on a UNA punt attempt pretty much sealed the game.
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Nothing knocked Northwest off its game all year, and snow couldn’t do it, either.
Northwest’s victory serves to further entrench the Bearcats as a Division II football dynasty. The Bearcats have now won three national titles in four years and four in eight, and this has been a particularly destructive year. It’s the program’s sixth national title in history and the third under sixth-year head coach Adam Dorrel.
They entered the weekend with an average scoring margin of 47-13, with a perfect record for the second year in a row. The win runs the program’s winning streak to 30 – the longest active streak in NCAA football, and just 10 games shy of Grand Valley State’s 40-game record set in the mid-2000s.
Their dominance has been comprehensive, with nobody even staying within two scores of the Bearcats until Ferris State lost by a mere 15 in a national semifinal last weekend.
North Alabama was playing in its fifth title game all-time. The Lions won three in a row from 1993 to 1995, and they hadn’t gotten back to the final since. The team’s current head coach, Bobby Wallace, coached all of those winners before spending 13 years as the coach at Temple and then West Alabama. He’s gotten UNA to the playoffs every year in his second stint there, and the Lions were so close to finishing the job this time. Northwest, it turned out, was just a bit too much.
Wallace and Dorrel are now two of the three head coaches to have won three DII national titles. The other is Dorrel’s predecessor at Northwest, Mel Tjeerdsma. The Bearcats had promoted longtime defensive coordinator Scott Bostwick to replace Tjeerdsma when he retired after the 2010 season. But Bostwick died of a heart attack and never got to coach a game. It was a sad circumstance for Dorrel to take over.
“I think the thing that we did immediately as a staff is, we sat down and I just told everybody, ‘You know, I can’t be Mel Tjeerdsma, and I can’t be Coach Bostwick, but I can be Adam Dorrel,’” Dorrel recalled in an interview on Thursday. “‘I’m confident that’s gonna be good enough.’”
It certainly has been. For his success at Northwest, Football Scoop reports Dorrel will take an FCS head coaching job for next season, at Abilene Christian.
The scene on Saturday was unusual because of the snow. Northwest averaged nearly 50 points per game coming in, and UNA averaged nearly 40. The weather rendered offense much harder to carry out, causing obvious calamities like dropped passes and subtler ones like slow, tentative cuts. You can’t blame the players, either.
Northwest receiver Randy Schmidt did this, somehow:
But stuff like this was a lot more typical:
By the fourth quarter, yardage markers were more of an abstract thing than a way to actually track a team’s offensive progress.
This was football in a snow globe. It was weird, and the snow made the game a different one than both teams likely preferred.
But it ended with something that isn’t weird or unusual at all: the Northwest Missouri State Bearcats winning a game and a title. That, simply, is what they do.
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