“It was so much fun,” said sophomore H-back and tight end Cade Beam, a Tippecanoe graduate. “It was my first game in snow.”
It was also the first game in snow for running back Jake Chisholm, a fifth-year senior.
“It’s something I’m going to remember forever,” he said.
Beam caught two touchdown passes from Shane Hamm in the fourth quarter to turn a 28-20 lead into a 42-20 advantage with 7:22 to play, while Chisholm added another chapter to a standout career with 205 rushing yards on 34 carries with two touchdowns.
Dayton (8-2, 6-1) has won five games in a row. It entered the weekend tied for second place in the Pioneer Football League with Butler and Davidson and one game behind St. Thomas.
St. Thomas (9-1, 7-0) beat Stetson 23-0 on Saturday to stay atop the standings. It plays Butler in the final week of the regular season. Davidson played at San Diego on Saturday night, and Butler played a late afternoon game at Drake.
Dayton closes the regular season at 1 p.m. next Saturday at Davidson in North Carolina.
“This team’s rolling,” Chisholm said. “We’ve got great culture in the locker room. We’ve got one more. We can kind of control our own destiny a little bit next week.”
The Flyers can earn the PFL playoff bid if they tie with St. Thomas for the league title because the Tommies are a new FCS program and are not eligible for the playoffs. Dayton and St. Thomas did not play in the regular season.
“Our goal every year is to get to that last game and be in the position to win a championship,” Dayton coach Rick Chamberlin said. “We’re in that position now. Whatever happens with those other teams, we’re going to go down and do our very best, and if it works out, that’d be outstanding to play in the playoffs.”
Dayton built a 21-17 halftime lead with a 10-yard touchdown pass from Hamm to Sam Bubonics, a 4-yard touchdown run by Chisholm and a 5-yard touchdown run by Michael Neel.
The Flyers missed an extra point on the first touchdown and then failed to convert a run after their second score, but they made up for those lost points with a game-tying safety with 7:28 left in the half.
Morehead State scored its two first-half touchdowns on runs of 72 and 67 yards — both straight up the middle — by James Louis.
The Dayton defense gave up one more big play, a 72-yard touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, but otherwise played better in the second half as the conditions improved.
“We were just finding our footing at first and moving a little bit slower, especially when it was all in clumps out there,” linebacker Ben Schmiesing said, “but as time goes on, the snow kind of withered away and we were able to get our footing back.”
Special honor: Dayton named senior quarterback Ryan VanSchelven the winner of the 65th annual Lt. Andy Zulli Memorial Trophy at halftime. VanSchelven, a civil engineering major from Roscoe, Ill., is a three-time member of the PFL Academic Honor Roll.
According to UD, “the award goes to the Flyer senior who best exemplifies the qualities of Zulli, a former UD football player who was killed in a military vehicle accident while serving in the Army in Germany shortly after his graduation in 1954. Zulli was not a star football player at Dayton, but his qualities of sportsmanship, scholarship and leadership were so exceptional that this award was created in his memory shortly after his death. It is considered the most prestigious award in the University of Dayton football program.”
About the Author
