What A Game!!!

Wow!. It was an upset for the ages.
34-32. Little old Appalachian State upsets mighty Michigan. The final score graphic is etched in my brain.

I'm happily living here on the Carolina coast now, but come football season my heart is back in the mountains of Boone draped in black and gold. Some of best times were the Saturday afternoons we spent at Kidd Brewer Stadium on the ASU campus. We made back-to-back journeys to Chattanooga where we covered the Mountaineers two national championship wins. We've spent quiet time with coach Jerry Moore and found his personal philosophy and his football philosophy are one and the same. You can learn a lot when Jerry gets into story telling mode.

We were standing mighty tall at sea level Saturday. Quite out of character, Mrs. Rondinaro and I spent our Saturday afternoon at a bar, watching the game on a Big 10 Network satellite feed at the Wrightsville Grill. Nobody paid much attention to us until the last three or four minutes of the game. By then the entire place was with us cheering on the Apps.

What happened?

Jerry Moore and his staff had their team better prepared. Period.

The Apps were hungry and unafraid. Big House? Big deal.

We bent but we didn't break. We executed when we had to. We answered their big plays with big plays of our own. We gutted it out. In the last two years we've seen this team do that time and again against I-AA competition. (Hello Furman.) But Division One Michigan? Mighty 5th ranked Michigan? At home? Holy Heismans, who would have believed it besides Jerry Moore and a bunch of guys in black?

Some folks looked at me a little weird when I told them I wanted to run a preview piece on the ASU-Michigan game last week on the WWAY 6PM news here in Wilmington. I said, "Humor me." So I had John Rendleman send me a story from our station in Boone and we ran it.

I don't think anyone will question me about running a follow-up report. Wow!