THE LITTLE BIG TIME

By JIM HODGES

Dec. 12, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MUNCIE, Ind. —

They had gathered around televisions in the student center, in the houses along fraternity row and in various dormitory rooms, and because most of the kids go home on the weekends, in homes around northern Indiana.

Purdue and Indiana had suffered dreadful seasons, and after Notre Dame’s Jim Sanson missed an extra-point kick, and USC came back to score in the game’s closing moments and then score again in overtime to beat Notre Dame, it became all but official.

The only Division I university in Indiana going to a bowl game was . . .

Ball State?

License plates of the cars you pass along Route 332 tout Indiana’s “amber waves of grain,” but those waves have been reduced to brown stubble poking through the remnants of a three-day-old early December snow.

Here and there in the fields connecting Interstate 69 and Muncie, white-capped hay bales stand out as landmarks, and the tallest buildings around are silos.

It’s “Hoosiers,” the movie, brought to life, and it’s a reminder that this is basketball season in basketball country.

Andrea Seger wants people to broaden their horizons.

“We want to change the view of Ball State: basketball school, to Ball State: basketball school and football school and other sports school,” Seger, the university’s athletic director, says.

She was helped on Nov. 16, when the Cardinals beat Toledo, 24-14, to win the Mid-American Conference championship.

No national championship machinations here. No bowl alliance, no wheeling or back-room dealing with blazer-clad officials from New Orleans or Tempe or Miami. Ball State would represent the MAC in the Las Vegas Bowl, and it looked like Pasadena to the Cardinals.

Caught up in the moment, many of the Ball State Stadium-record 21,581 tumbled onto the field and ripped down both goal posts.

Everybody pitched in, and when only two-foot-long sections of pipe remained from the concrete in the ground, a maintenance man scurried into his shed and emerged with a big wrench, then handed it to a couple of the fraternity guys to remove the nuts that held the base of the posts in place.

The pipes joined the rest of the goal posts on a trip to a campus landmark, the Duck Pond, where the fowl scurried away as the posts were launched into the water.

And so, on a December Friday afternoon, linemen Joe Schmitt and Ralph Baker grasped hands and held up arms in Ball State Stadium, making a comic human goal post for Brent Lockliear to practice kicking.

“Some of the faculty told me, ‘You lost $10,000 goal posts and we’re laying off instructors,’ ” Seger says. “I’ll tell you, we’ll find the $10,000 for the goal posts. It’s the first time they’ve ever been torn down here, and I wouldn’t take anything for it.”

Neither would Ed Shipley, Ball State’s alumni director, whose office sold 1,500 tour packages at $399 each to the Dec. 19 Las Vegas Bowl in the three days after the victory over Toledo.

“We’ll have a pregame tent party with 931 alumni in Las Vegas,” he says. “We’re flying 715 people from Indianapolis on three charters and four different commercial flights, and other people will be going other ways. And that doesn’t count people on the West Coast. There’s a lot of excitement.”

An agency in Muncie sold more.

“We’re not like a Nebraska or Texas, where they start practice in August and figure out which game they’ll play in on New Year’s Day,” Shipley says. “This is big for us.”

It’s bigger for Brent Baldwin, the senior quarterback from South Bend who passed for 1,703 yards and 14 touchdowns for the Cardinals.

“We went to Las Vegas in 1993 [losing to Utah State, 42-33], and I was a redshirt freshman quarterback and our quarterback got knocked out,” he says. “I came in and handed off on a draw play, and then he came back. One play, but it was on national television and I’ll never forget it. It was exciting.”

He has worn a Las Vegas Bowl cap all season, “to remind everybody where we wanted to go.

“It’s special,” he says. “The big thing is we get to play on ESPN. In the MAC, you don’t get exposure.”

Like most of the Cardinals, who by and large are state-bred, he had hoped to play at Indiana University and had gotten a letter from the Hoosiers while in high school. But they looked elsewhere, as did Purdue, Indiana’s other Big Ten entry.

“You dream of playing in the Big Ten, of being on television, maybe going to the Rose Bowl,” Baldwin says. “Everybody here does, but then they think you’re a little too small, or not fast enough or maybe don’t have the arm strength and you hope you can get a scholarship from someplace, anyplace.”

His December is full. “I’ll play on Dec. 19 on Las Vegas, come home on the 20th and graduate on the 22nd,” he said.

Baldwin carries a 3.0 grade-point average in secondary education--it was 4.0 last spring semester, when he was one of 31 Cardinals over 3.0--and is seeking to enter graduate school and maybe get a graduate assistant’s position.

Brad Maynard has a different future. He was found in a camp by kicking junkie Tex Ritter, the Cardinal equipment manager, and invited to walk on at Ball State, where he averaged 46.5 yards per punt in 1995 and made seven All-American teams.

“I went to L.A. for the Bob Hope show, to Phoenix for Playboy, to Las Vegas and to New Haven [Conn.] for the Walter Camp dinner,” he says. “I remember in Los Angeles I was the first one there, well me and Marco Battaglia, the tight end from Rutgers. And then Jonathan Ogden [UCLA’s All-American tackle] came in and he had to go sideways through the door. I thought, ‘What in the world am I doing here?’

“And Marco said, ‘There’s no reason to be in awe. You’re an All-American too, and you belong here just like they do.’

“I got to go to those places, and I wanted my teammates to experience some of that too. I wanted them to see Las Vegas.”

Maynard averaged 45.9 yards this season, with hang time approaching five seconds, and is a second-team All-American. He is also the first punter to be named most valuable player of a Division I conference.

Would-be agents are driving him crazy, and next year, his jersey will be alongside those of Ball State’s other pros: New England’s Corey Croom, Miami’s Bernie Parmalee, Houston’s Blaine Bishop and Milwaukee’s Kenny Stucker.

Milwaukee’s . . . ?

That’s Kenny Stucker of the Milwaukee Mustangs of the Arena Football League, paid to play football and, therefore, a Ball State pro.

“Get Maynard kicking inside a domed stadium, and he’ll make you forget Ray Guy,” says Bill Lynch, Ball State’s coach and the architect of the Cardinal success. He is part-coach, part-promoter, a 42-year-old dynamo who understands his job is not merely winning on Saturday.

“He’s made midnight trips to Indianapolis to get us television exposure,” says Joe Hernandez, the school’s sports information director. “He’s made himself very accessible, been very cooperative, all trying to promote the program.”

The first of those trips came at the end of the second week of the season. Ball State had just lost its first conference game, to Miami of Ohio, and Lynch was asked to make the 50-mile trek along I-69 to appear on a Saturday night wrap-up show.

The Indianapolis media are important to Ball State, and he didn’t hesitate.

He was coaching a 0-2 team--the Cardinals had lost to Kansas, 35-10, in their season-opener, and would lose, 26-23, on a last-minute Minnesota drive the next week before winning their last eight games to earn the Las Vegas trip.

“It’s part of the job,” Lynch says, and when he is reminded that other Division I coaches earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for television and radio work for their schools, he shrugs.

“That’s not going to happen here,” he says. “I just want to do whatever I can to get the team and the school some exposure.”

It was part of the mandate Seger gave him when she hired him in June 1995, three weeks after the men’s and women’s departments were combined and she had become athletic director--one of five women to lead Division I programs.

It was a frantic three weeks.

“After one week, the MAC told me that we had to do something,” she says. “We had been down in attendance for several years, and if we continued, we could lose our membership.”

Ball State also faced a $75,000-a-year fine and probation from the league and the eventual loss of Division I status in football, which requires an average home attendance of 17,000 in a 30,000-seat stadium, a problem with about half of the MAC schools.

Ball State Stadium was the smallest in the MAC, with 16,319 seats, most of which weren’t needed. The season-ticket base was barely 4,000, and that was for $35-a-year tickets.

Seger launched a campaign to enlarge the stadium and season-ticket base, going to 18,159 seats in 1995 and 21,581 for this season, and lowered season-ticket prices to $15 for seats between the 20-yard lines and $10 elsewhere.

Individual game tickets are $4 and $2, lowest in Division I.

“People thought we were giving away the product, but when we lowered ticket prices, revenue went up 30%,” she says.

That was, in part, because attendance went up to an average of 14,990 in 1995 and 17,991 this season.

She’s about to pass the hat again for $500,000 to pay for 4,000 more seats, Phase II in her quest to satisfy the MAC.

The Ball ancestors, whose fortune was built on the jars and lids your mother used for canning vegetables and preserves, will probably pony up. Ball State is named for the Ball brothers, who bought the Indiana State Normal School in 1922 and gave it to the state.

Comedian David Letterman will probably send a check, along with the money he gives the university to endow scholarships, insisting that they be given to “C” average students, as he was.

So too will Jim Davis, the creator of the Garfield comic strip and a Muncie resident. He has already helped fund a new Alumni House, being built alongside Ball State Stadium.

And Ben Ramirez, principal of Pasadena High, who met his wife, Bonnie, at Ball State, will be asked.

Ramirez doesn’t know the names of any of the current players, but he’ll be in Las Vegas.

“Just being from Ball State and in a bowl is enough,” Ramirez says.

It’s a rallying point for the program and the school.

“The Las Vegas Bowl is going to help with [raising the money],” Seger says. “It’s got everybody excited.”

The Las Vegas Bowl guarantees only $150,000, in a special arrangement with the NCAA, which ordinarily requires $750,000 per team for a Division I bowl sanction.

That will help pay for 104 Ball State players--60 on the main squad leaving Monday; the others, including scout team walk-ons and redshirts, to join the team on Wednesday--14 cheerleaders, 234 band members and assorted official traveling party. It’s not enough.

“The president of the university [Dr. John Worthen] told us that this was too important to have to leave anybody home because of money,” she says. “He said that the school would make up the difference so we could send the whole band.”

Posters are all over campus and throughout the city of Muncie.

“The people of Muncie feel a sense of ownership with Ball State,” Seger says. “It’s unusual. I doubt the people of Westwood feel a sense of ownership in UCLA.”

The people of Westwood can’t see UCLA in a bowl this season, but those of Muncie will be in Las Vegas, playing the tables, yanking the slot machines and watching the Cardinals against Nevada . . . perhaps for the last time.

The MAC will add two teams and hold a conference championship game in Huntington, W.Va., next season. It is weighing a two-year extension with the Las Vegas Bowl against a proposed bowl in the geographically appealing Pontiac, Mich., Silverdome, with a $750,000 guarantee for the MAC champion to play an at-large team.

But that’s the future. Baldwin is concerned about Dec. 19.

“I’ve already achieved my goal: to play quarterback for a Division I school. It’s the last game I’ll ever play,” he says. “This is our Rose Bowl.”

It’s also the last of the three goals posted at the entrance of the Cardinal locker room:

“1--Get a degree from Ball State.

“2--Represent the university in a first-class manner.

“3--Win the Mid-American Conference championship and go to the Las Vegas Bowl.”

Mission accomplished.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bowl Payouts

Except for the Las Vegas Bowl, various formulas are used to distribute bowl revenues among conference members.

Bowl: Payout

Las Vegas: $150,000