Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32.
That score isn’t supposed to happen in college football. But Appalachian State University pulled off one of the biggest upsets in college football history by traveling to Ann Arbor and beating the fifth-ranked University of Michigan team in front of 109,218 fans in Michigan Stadium (“the Big House”) on Saturday.
“We’re still sort of shocked,” Appalachian State’s head coach, Jerry Moore, told the Associated Press after the win, which was the first ever by a NCAA Division I-AA team (now called the Football Championship Subdivision) over a ranked Division I-A team.
As The Chronicle reported last week, top teams like Michigan typically schedule an outmatched opponent for their first game of the season. The power-conference teams get a tuneup, while teams like Appalachian State get a big payout and national exposure. As expected, the first games of the year included some blowouts. The 10th-ranked University of Louisville, for instance, beat Murray State University, 73-10.
But this was the weekend of the upset, and, in Texas, the shock of a narrowly averted upset, with Arkansas State University making a game of its trip to play the fourth-ranked University of Texas at Austin. Although The Chronicle reported on the long odds and huge football budget differences Arkansas State faced, the underdog gained more yards than Texas, which didn’t wrap up its shaky 21-13 win until the last minute of the game.
According to the AP, the suspenseful game was scary enough that the Longhorns were thankful not to be lumped into same category as Michigan. Pointing to the win by Appalachian State earlier in the day, the quarterback for Texas, Colt McCoy, said: “That very well could have happened to us today.”
Appalachian State, meanwhile, and its hometown of Boone, N.C., were basking in the media limelight, with prominent coverage of the victory and the postgame celebrations not only in local papers like The Watauga Democrat but also in national publications, including The New York Times. — Paul Fain
