Early on in what has turned out to be yet another perfect Mount Union College football season, Coach Larry Kehres came upon his senior fullback, Dean Paul of Garrettsville, in a state of contemplation.
  
The object of Paul's deep thought was his finger.  

His ring finger.  

"He's the only one with a championship ring," Kehres said.  

Paul had played on Kehres' first team, the '86 bunch that Kehres' mentor, Ken Wable, had willed him upon his retirement.  

Like Wable's final team, it, too, had gone unbeaten, won the Ohio Athletic Conference and reached the second round of the NCAA Division III Playoffs before losing to Augustana.
And Paul had been there, a small part of it.  

Now, he was back, given an extra year to play because a knee had fallen apart on him in 1989. Even more than the championship ring on his finger, Dean Paul had become a symbol of what Mount Union football is.  

"Of the continuity," Kehres said. "That's the word for it.  

"Continuity."  

The Raiders come at you like sheets of purple rain.  

They proved as much Saturday at Mount Union Stadium, where before a nearly full house, they put away Hiram 44-13, the last notch in a 10-0 season that will lead to Division III Playoffs this week, probably against Allegheny or Ohio Wesleyan.  

When the damage was being done, the outcome decided, Paul was there behind an offensive line that resembles a large piece of road equipment meant for rolling asphalt into a smooth running surface.  

In the first quarter, Paul gained 120 of the 176 yards with which he would finish. Twice, he scored. Once short, from 5 yards. Once long, from 37.  

"The simplest way to get everybody's attention was to come out and run the football," Kehres said of the problem presented by playing a team that would finish 1-8-1. "I wanted to make sure our offensive line got the message that we weren't out here to play a finesse football game today."  

There is no Scott Woolf or Scott Gindlesberger at quarterback at Mount Union as there was in '85 and '86.  

Throwing is secondary.  

This is Brad Petro football, Dean Paul football, Larry Kehres football.  

"If I could play," Kehres said, "I would play like Brad Petro."  

He's tough. He played on a bruised knee against Hiram.  

He's efficient. He leads the OAC in passing efficiency, demonstrating the point by throwing only three times against Hiram but completing two, including a 53-yarder to Ed Bubonics for a touchdown.  

He's effective. He took to a championship a team thought by coaches and media to be good enough only for fourth place and scored a school-record 362 points along the way to underscore the achievement.  

Petro's like a lot of Mount Union men. He waited two years to start. He's been around awhile.  

"A lot of us," Kehres said, "have been around awhile."  

Kehres played quarterback for Wable in the late '60s. Defensive coordinator Don Montgomery was a guard on Wable's mid-'70s teams. Secondary coach Jeff Wojtowicz was a Wable and Mount Union man in the early '80s.  

"I guess we learned something about loyalty," Kehres said.  

Loyalty to a school. Loyalty to each other. Loyalty to a system that works.  

"Ken Wable," Kehres said, "established a style of football for Mount Union and slowly but surely developed a program that was competitive, then better than competitive and finally a championship."  

Kehres' ego did not require that he make wholesale changes in order to make his mark on it.  

With Petro, he uses more veer option and less throwing than he did when he had Gindlesberger and Wable had Woolf and Tony Colao.  

He takes advantage of Ken Edleman, the best place-kicker ever to set foot in Division III and, with six points after touchdowns Saturday, the highest scorer (274) in Mount Union history.  

"What we've tried to do," Kehres said, "is stay with the same offensive and defensive schemes of play and give the players four years of an approach to football that they can build on."  

That building has resulted in an unbeaten OAC streak in Mount Union Stadium dating to Nov. 3, 1984.  

It has brought three titles in six seasons.  

"It has meant," Kehres said, "that we are not always starting from scratch."  

And even when this Mount Union team is finished with the Division III Playoffs, and key players such as Paul and Petro, Edleman and linebacker Dave Lasecki are gone, there will be new Mount Union men to take their places. 

Some of them, high school seniors, sat in Memorial Hall Saturday and listened as Kehres told them what it would be like to play for championships, to play at Mount Union. 

Others, such as freshman running back Grandville Weems from Buchtel High School, were downstairs dressing, Weems after having carried four times for 22 yards. 
 
His time is coming and when it does, he, like Dean Paul before him, may have a championship ring for contemplation and inspiration.  

"That's right," Kehres said. "This has been four years in the making and now everyone who's been a part of it can have a championship ring -- if they have the $200 to buy it."  

At Division III Mount Union, a championship ring means twice as much as it does some places.  

A guy has to earn it twice.