Michigan Loses To Lamb. Will Carr Be Canned?

I was one of the few people on earth to make money when the Patriots beat the Rams in the Super Bowl. The only way I managed this was when a friend of mine offered me ten points and the Patriots. I told him that I would give him two touchdowns. He said he would give me seventeen points. I said I would give him twenty. He told me he would give me twenty-one points, and I would take a High School football team against a college team if someone would give me twenty- one points. The Patriots were a two-touchdown underdog and that was being generous as hell.

They won. It was the biggest upset in sports history up until Saturday.

If the preceding paragraph didn’t make a lick of sense to you then you ought to stop reading now. The rest is pretty deep football talk, and it won’t mean a damn thing to you.

The way college football works is that the Big Name Legacy Football Factory Schools only have to play six or seven real games a year. They have to have eight wins in a season to play in a Bowl Game, which means television and advertising revenue. Usually, the Big Name Legacy Football Factory Schools will find some smaller school with little money and pay them to come to town and get the snot whipped out of them for a home opening game.  LSU beat Mississippi State 45-0. Oklahoma beat North Texas 79-10. Penn State beat Mrs Harrison’s First Graders 59-0.

Michigan, who was ranked number five in the nation and who was in the running for the national title paid some dinky little school from somewhere no one ever heard of $$400,000.00 dollars to come get their ass kicked on national television and give the Wolverines their first taste of red meat for the season.

Appalachian State, the team who was to be beaten by a few dozen points must have had one savvy media manager. This is a team who has won two national titles at what was once known as the AA division, a step down from Michigan. But they have a damn good team. They came to Michigan’s stadium, a place known as “The Big House”, a place that holds 93,ooo screaming Michigan fans, and they tore the roof off of that sucker. Okay, it never had a roof. It’s an expression.

Let me put this in perspective for you. Michigan getting beat by Appalachian State is like a Chihuahua killing a Great Dane without getting lodged it its throat. Michigan getting beat by Appalachian State is like a rowboat smashing the iceberg that suck the Titanic. Michigan getting beat by Appalachian State is like the American military getting bogged down in a tiny little desert country with no hope of winning whatsoever while being bled white.

Yeah, Michigan got their asses handed to them by Appalachian State, 34-32.

I’m here to tell you what happened, and why.

What happened is that a much better team wasn’t ready to play a much lesser team. The Wolverines, for the entire game, looked like a team waiting for something to happen. It did. To them. Appalachian State came to play football and they did. In most cases of big upsets you have fluke plays, terrible weather, or some other mitigating factor. In this case you have a football team determined to win a game. Appalachian State, was that team.

Lloyd Carr the head coach of the Wolverines ought to be unemployed by this time tomorrow. They should have fired him a half hour after the game. One blocked field goal is an accident. Two blocked field goals is bag coaching. Someone on the line missed an assignment. That’s bad coaching. Michigan, twice, went for two points on the conversions.  Why the hell would you do that? Late in the third quarter, with the score 31-20, Michigan scores a touchdown to make it 31-26. You are the number five ranked college football team and you want to go for two so you’ll have a chance to kick a field goal in the fourth and go ahead by one? Why not just call a time out and tell your entire team you don’t think you can score against these guys? And if  the two point fails, which it did, you’re out by four, which means you have to score a touchdown anyway, don’t you? Michigan loses by two points.

Bad Coach. No Gatorade.

Appalachian State went into Ann Arbor, (and why in the name of god would you name a town that anyway) and they beat a team that looked confused as to what they were supposed to be doing.  I’d can Carr, at the least, and I’d start looking at next year, because this year you will never be able to recover from getting beat by the $400,000.00 sacrificial lamb. Michigan is a team in disarray, and it is a team going down this season, and going down in history as being on the losing end of the Biggest Sports Upset EVER!

Take Care,

Mike