Letters to the Editor
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King Kaufmann is the George Bush of sportswiters
because evidence before your very eyes you still can't admit that you were wrong.
Get over yourself. Go Huskers.
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It Happens Every Year
Back in the day, there was a famous quote referring to pro football wherein someone observed that, paraphrasing here, "on any given Sunday, anybody can beat anybody." That holds true in college football.
Appalachian State had a better game-plan, App St had more desire, more motivation and was hungrier. Michigan was arrogant, thinking they were going to sleepwalk through a sure-fire victory. Wrong!
The Notre Dame-Georgia Tech game followed the same script as the Michigan-App St game: a hungrier, more motivated, better coached and more cohesive team kicked the crap out of the "favorite" team. Notre Dame, with all its tradition, history, fanbase, NBC-TV exposure and cheerleading from the network's announcers, lost and lost badly. Boo hoo!
If things happened on the field as if they were scripted, then college football wouldn't be as much fun to watch. However, when the unexpected happens, the lowly team wins, the back-up player steps in and steps up and the coach who has been with five different unsuccessful programs in his career notches a brilliant victory, we all believe that "on any given Saturday, any team CAN beat any other team".
With that in mind...Roll Tide!
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Give credit where credit is due
Michigan chose a tougher opponent than you thought. Admit it, you saw the name Appalachian State, maybe heard all the jokes about Caitlan Upton, and jumped to a conclusion.
You don't follow college football, so you likely didn't know that the Mountaineers are one of the best Division-Formerly-Known-As-1AA schools in history. Or that this year's Michigan team was highly over rated coming into the season. You saw Big School vs Little School and made an assumption.
Modesty forbids me using my own beloved Miami Hurricanes - a relatively small school that was on the verge of eliminating it's football program entirely just 2 years before they won their first National Championship, which kicked off 25 years of more or less consistent Division 1A dominance - as an example of how wrong these kinds of assumptions can be. Well, I guess I'm not all that modest :)
I will tell you that this is going to become more common, not less. As school budgets are slashed around the country, there are going to be more and more talented atheletes who play their first ball when they get to college. And a lot of them are going to turn out to be damn good. Good enough for David to take out Goliath. We may not see an upset of these epic proportions again, but there are going to be some really good games and unlikely outcomes.
It's just a shame that you won't see any of them.
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I agree that a good game doesn't change things
Because I would have had to know that it could be a good game before it started.
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Please change the headline on the front page
"Appalachian State's Stunner" suggests that the article will be about the game itself, not about the often intelligent King Kaufman's puzzling failure to practice good sportsmanship or to admit creating one of the best examples of irony you'll ever see.
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College Football
College football demands belief in what it preaches while cloaking the starkness of its appetites. The discrepancies between a high school senior footballer and the board of regents of a college or university mandate that the baller be treated as chattel. The ballers must adhere to rules, that if imposed on the preachers would be declared immoral and unconstitutional.
All of which leads to the classic mismatches in college football. All done for money – none of which is forwarded to the ballers. Sure, the ballers receive a scholarship for a number of years (usually not long enough to receive a degree), but the board of regents gets their money back a hundred times over for their investment in those scholarships. Meanwhile, most ballers do not graduate from their college or university, but do receive life long physical and emotional injuries. Meanwhile, these players are as replaceable as any part feeding an assembly line.
The real score of the college mismatches is
Board of Regents 100
Ballers 3.
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Hmmmmm
Allow me to sum up this article: "Even though I was wrong, I'm still right."
I admit that the 12th game and the loosening of rules on playing 1AAs has meant more "cupcakes" on the schedule. I understand why this makes sense from everyone from coaches and athletic directors all the way to state legislators. And while I'm not wild about it, I understand.
The AD of Virginia Tech has a scheduling strategy for dealing with this. Besides the full slate of ACC games, his goal is to schedule an Out of Conference game with a name team from one of the other 5 BCS conferences each season, and then fill the rest with MAC-tacular games and a baffling 9-season series with East Carolina (although, based on how well ECU played this weekend, that may not be so crazy. I was at the game and ECU was GOOD!).
So for example, this season VT has LSU. Even King can't say this isn't a good matchup. The next two years it's a home-and-away with Nebraska. Future schedules include Pitt, K-State, and Ohio State.
In my mind, this strikes me as reasonable balance.
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Texas
Beat Arkansas State 21-13.........State outgained the Longhorns 397-340.
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No mention?
The larcenous Clay Buchholz throws a no-no in his 2nd MLB start and nary gets a mention?
I'll accept that the world doesn't revolve around the Red Sox (even though Boston is The Hub), but come on!
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wrong
Sorry, AnaHadWolves, but I don't know what coverage you were watching of the ND-GA Tech coverage. Yes, it is an ND-network, so there was more coverage of ND, but the general theme of the pre-game remarks was, how in the world are they going to fill all those holes? and most of the play-by-play pointed out that the answer was, not very well.
And as embarrassing a loss as that was for ND, getting clobbered by a traditional Div I power doesn't come close to Michigan losing to Appalachian St as a David-beats-Goliath story.
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You See This Stuff All The Time
It's even extended in some cases to the preposterous. There was some national sportswriter, can't remember the name, who spewed that the Tigers would beat the Cardinals in 3 games. In a best of 7.
Turns out the young and mostly inexperienced Tigers were mismatched against the grizzled, play-off experienced Cards.
Then the same guy a couple weeks later was typing about another contest that was absolutely automatic.