Official Lloyd Carr Death Watch Thread

For selfish reasons, the greatest thing about this thread is Ball State's greatest football moment -- a LOSS, for crissakes -- will live on as prelude to the greatest college football upset of the modern era.

 

Honor system: It was Al Clark. Wore No. 5. We called him "Touchdown Al" as a joke. Came back and beat my alma mater a couple of weeks after the Temple fiasco.

 

Can this really be called the greatest upset, yada yada yada, if Michigan is, as it seems, way overrated? I mean, does anyone talk about any of Gerry Faust's losses like they were historically meaningful?

 

Part of my point here is simple - lots of poorly-rated Div. 1 teams have upset the Michigans and Notre Dames and Nebraskas of the CF world through the years and those games were looked at (wrongfully) as bigger upsets than what we saw Saturday at Ann Arbor.
Upsets, and their importance, depend usually on which person's byline is on the story.
You ask me to mention a few and I must say that through the years, all this shit sort of starts running together - so I can't, off the top of my head, name a few.
I figured a Google search of D-I vs. D-I-AA might help me, so I did one.
The first entry I got is listed below.
It speaks of "greatest upsets" so it might help to show what I'm talking about. Everyone's got a different opinion on this.

http://media.www.californiaaggie.com/media/storage/paper981/news/2006/09/28/Sports/Division.IA.Vs.Division.IAa-2314224.shtml

 

I don't think you're correct. I can't ever remember hearing a previous college football game called "the biggest upset ever."
Plus, you have to keep in mind that this is the first time EVER a I-AA (or Subdivision whatever) team has beaten a ranked team. And it was against the No. 5 team. On the road. In front of 100,000 people.
You can always argue that something wasn't an upset in hindsight, because you have the advantage of knowing what happened and you can analyze why, but I'll bet if you had to risk your life on the outcome of a single game, you would have very, very few (if any) you would feel better about than saying Michigan over Ap. State last Saturday.

 

And to think that only a few days ago, Appalachian State was merely the school of choice for air-headed Miss Teen USA candidates.

 

Ohio State, USC and App State have all followed the blueprint since, handing Michigan three straight losses.

Ball State provided them with the blueprint.

 

So name a bigger upset, hot shot.

 

I'm not joking. Name the last college football upset you heard called "the greatest ever."
I'm serious. I can't remember it.
You do hear it in other sports, but not this one.
If you think this wasn't a huge upset, well, I guess you're right and virtually everyone associated with the sport is wrong.

 

Yeah, but this blueprint is a little different. Smith and Booty aren't exactly running quarterbacks, but they did exploit the secondary in the middle of the field, which is exactly what App State did.

 

A monstrous upset. The biggest of all time in college football? i won't argue against it. One that will be talked about a lot in the months to come and mentioned in the years to come.

Say what you will about Michigan being weak or App State being a I-AA power. But, if I've calculated this correctly, there were 5 other top 25 teams that took on I-AA teams this weekend (Hawaii, Boise, Ohio St, Texas A&M and Louisville).

The combined score of those games? 268-36.