34-32

I'd like to officially apologize, on behalf of the state of North Carolina, for the behavior of the Appalachian State University football team on their field trip to Michigan's "Big House" this weekend. It doesn't speak well for our state's athletic programs that one of our teams, from the NCAA's junior varsity league, would go into the home of the winningest program in college football and outplay the 5th-ranked Wolverines in front of over 100,000 fans of the blue and gold.

If we continue behavior like that, it's entirely possible that the App State Mountaineers will do something in the 2007 football season that the Michigan Wolverines haven't managed to do in a decade.

Win a national championship.

Again.

For the third year in a row.

Now, let's face it, this weekend's upset of Michigan by the kids from UNC-Doobie was on a par with the CFL champs coming into Foxboro and thumping the Patriots, but it's also not unreasonable to think that the best program in Division 1-AA could, on a day when everything went very well, thump the somewhat overrated 5th-best team in Division 1-A. And there's not a lot of argument that the Mountaineers are the best team in their division. Back-to-back national titles will pretty much lock that designation up for you.

But it's not fair. It's not fair to the Wolverines, who were, after all, trying to do something nice for their little cousins in the JV by giving them the home opener and a flaming shitload of television time. It's just rude to take advantage of that kind of gratitude and milk it for days and days worth of Sportscenter highlights. But we'll take it. Just this once.

Best T-shirt ever - Michagan Who? 34-32. Seen all over Boone this weekend.

In other sports news, another hillbilly kid outdid himself in Fenway this weekend and probably won't be headed back to Pawtucket anytime soon.