“Appalachian State already owns what many think of as the biggest upset in college football history,”
I have been told about this game my whole life. My father played for App’s football team a long time ago and he loves this school with his whole heart. He was at this game and he still has the newspaper from the game framed in his office. I knew it was such a big game to him but I forget how big it truly was for the school and all of the fans. Since I was so little when it happened, I sometimes struggle wrapping my head around the true upset that this game was.
“You’re kind of riding a high, having a lot of success, getting more and more people on board and invested in the vision of being the best that we can be in the Sun Belt,”
This quote stuck out to me because this article was published in 2019 and I feel like it speaks to what happened last football season in 2022. App State was on a high this past season in the beginning. They almost beat UNC and it was also UNC’s first time coming up the mountain. They beat Texas A&M which was a huge upset, close to the Michigan one, and even had College Gameday come for the Troy game. They were having a lot of success and having more people involved. That quickly crashed as the season started to go downhill and they started to lose. The high is hard to stay on as seen previous years and most recently in 2022.
“…it just adds to our blue-collar, chip-on-our-shoulder mentality,”
Not going to lie but this quote made me giggle when first reading it. I never thought about App State in that way even though I do find it to be true in a way. It does seem to have this blue-collar identity when compared to other schools in North Carolina. When I think of UNC or Duke I do not think of that identity whatsoever so the fact that the football team plays into that persona I think is great motivation and helps them fight harder in a sense.
