Appy Who?

“Where is Appalachian State?”

“I dunno.”

“Boone, North Carolina.”

“Where’s Boone, North Carolina?”

“I dunno.”

“Do you pronounce it Appa-latch – ian or Appa-lay-ian State?”

“I think it’s Appa-latch-ian.”

This little tale should be about Delaware, or as an App State student had painted on her bare midriff, “Dela-where?” Apparently neither side was sure of the other. Our weekend road trip, with Kate, Steve and Kate’s look-alike roomie Alix, took us in mid-December to Chattanooga, Tennessee to see the Blue Hens battle the App State Mountaineers on a clear, 50-degree Friday night for the 2008 NCAA Division I Football Championship.

But for all intents and purposes, this was a home game for App State. Seventy percent of the 23,010 fans packing sold-out Finley Stadium were screaming Mountaineer Maniacs, according to a newspaper report the next day. Boone, it turns out, located in western North Carolina’s “High Country,” named after Daniel Boone and with a population of about 14,000, is but a four or five hour drive (269 miles) over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Chattanooga. Its mascot, Yosef, no, not the Hebrew slave from the Torah, but one serious hillbilly from a deep hollow, struts around in blue jean overhauls, yellow-and-black checkered flannel shirt, scraggly gray beard and mustache, floppy wide-brim hat and corncob pipe. And their fans are damn proud of him, judging from all the cars and pickups plastered with huge logos of his snarling face. We saw grown men, students and five-year-old boys dressed just like ole Yosef.

On one side of the stands the maniacs, clad in black and yellow, would yell, “App!”
“State!” came the booming answer from the opposite side of the field.

“App!”
“State!”
“App!”
“State!”
“App!”
“State!”

This chant, midway through the third quarter, roared on for what seemed forever. At least ten minutes. Of course by that time the game was 35-14 in favor of the Mountaineers. U Del students — give ‘em credit, they stood on the aluminum benches the whole damn game — were reduced to ridicule.

“Go back to your hillbilly shack and smoke some more dope!”

“Get your 2.0 grade points off the field!”

“In five years you’ll be working for us!”

“What’s the three fingers for?” (App State was on its way to winning its third straight national championship.) “Is that how many spliffs you can smoke at once?”

“This has got to be the worst officiated game in the history of football!”

“They screwed us when they said Omar didn’t score on that play in the first quarter. That changed the whole game. I’ve gotta see that replay on TV.”

“I’m not watching this game again. I’m burning my tape.”

Appy scored the first three times it got the ball, going up 21-0 with less than five minutes gone in the second quarter. One was a 99-yard drive that started after Delaware failed to punch it in from less than a yard out on third and fourth down, following the refs’ ruling that Omar’s knee hit the ground before he lunged over the goal line. That would be the aforementioned screw job. It took Appy all of one minute and 26 seconds to go those 99 yards.

Then right before halftime, Delaware finally got on the board, making it 21-7, with about a minute left in the half. “They’ve got to get out of the half without App State scoring again,” said Steve. He was right, but Delaware got it wrong. It took Appy a mere 21 seconds to score this time. Going 72 yards in two plays.

The guy in front of Steve, with the blue Delaware jersey and the flaming yellow spiked hair wig, sat down for the first time and buried his head in his hands.

Before the opening kickoff, the vastly outnumbered but determined U Del fans yelled again and again, “We’re not Michigan! We’re not Michigan!” This cheer alluded to the almost exact similarity between Delaware and Michigan football helmets, blue with three yellow stripes and yellow wing tips, and App State’s opening season 35-32 upset of Michigan that shocked the football world and put Appy on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Down 28-7 going into the half, someone in back of us muttered, “We are Michigan.”

Actually, it would get worse. In the second half App State went up 35-7. Then Omar scored to make it 35-14. But ASU put two more touchdowns on the board to go up 49-14.

“Look. K.C. (Delaware’s coach) has put his mic behind his neck. It’s that bad. He doesn’t even want to talk to anybody.”

“Where the hell was Flacco all night?” (Joe Flacco, Delaware’s six-foot five-inch towering quarterback, expected to be drafted next spring by the NFL, didn’t complete 50 percent of his passes tonight.)

Meanwhile, some U Del fans were damning App State’s flashy sophomore quarterback, Armanti Edwards, with faint praise indeed. “Look how skinny his legs are. My wrists are bigger than his calves.” Once Edwards had his helmet knocked off. “Look at that prison hairdo!” Kate turned and said, “Don’t they know every team has guys with dreadlocks now?”

When you’re getting blown out of a championship game, everyone is fair game for abuse: the other team, of course, the refs of course, your coach, your quarterback. Even Delaware’s band.

“Their band is way better than ours.”

“Where’s our band been all night? Maybe the wind’s blowing the wrong way, but I haven’t heard ‘em all night.” “The halftime show was terrible.”

We left, along with most of the 3,000 or so Delaware fans, mid-way through the fourth quarter when Appy scored to make it 42-14. “Tra-vel safe-ly, tra-vel safe-ly,” the App State fans serenaded us on the way out. Our timing was good. We missed the Mountaineer Maniacs storming the field with about three minutes left. They completely surrounded it except for the Delaware bench. Then when Delaware scored on a kickoff return, we missed the sight of the return man crossing the goal line and hurling the ball, apparently aiming for an App State fan, but instead nailing a policeman.

It was that kind of night for Delaware.