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MICK MCCABE: With win, troubled team bounces back

Suspensions rock Flint Southwestern
September 16, 2007

BY MICK McCABE
FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER

The Flint Southwestern Academy football players, minus two, met with the Southwestern coaches, minus one, after school was dismissed Friday afternoon.

The question the coaches put to the players was simple: To play or not to play?

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"We talked things over," said senior running back Mark Ingram. "They told us if we wanted to play they'd have our backs and coach us. Everybody wanted to play."

So the players and coaches -- minus the three -- headed to Bay City and Ingram took it from there.

Ingram ran for an incredible 377 yards on 20 carries and scored six touchdowns in Southwestern's impressive 39-22 victory.

"It could have been 450 yards," Ingram said Saturday morning. "They took away an 80-yard touchdown I had because of a penalty."

Ingram was simply magnificent, scoring on runs of 10, 65, six, 15, 69 and 59 yards.

"It seemed like I'd get through the line and there would be only one guy," said Ingram. "If you're an athlete, you should be able to beat a guy one-on-one with a move."

In the final minutes of the game, Ingram's teammates asked him how many yards he thought he had gained.

"I thought maybe 275 or 250," he said. "When they said 377, I thought: 'Oh, wow!' "

The 377 yards gives Ingram -- whose father, Mark, played at Michigan State and in the NFL for 10 seasons -- a total of 995 yards in four seasons, and he gained a bunch of fans in Bay City.

"He's got great speed, but he's got great explosion to go with it," said Western coach Jim Eurick. "There were times it looked like we had him, and he'd make a cut and he was gone."

By Saturday morning, Ingram was back to reality and knew things would not be back to normal when school resumes Monday.

"We had a lot of controversy last week, and it's far from over," he said. "I don't know what's going to happen."

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