Last night sucked, we all know it, and I'm sure we'll continue to discuss and debate what went wrong. In the meantime, thought I'd start a thread for discussing why the sky isn't falling.

• - We're still having a great year. Of all the teams to ever move up from FCS to FBS, only one has ever won more than 9 games in their second FBS season (Marshall). Before the season, most of us would have considered 9-3 a very good year, and 10-2 a home run. Those are still possible.
  
  - We probably aren't going to the GoDaddy Bowl now. Yes, it will probably have the strongest opponent (which also means the one most likely to beat us, BTW). But it's the worst date and location for travel. And the Cure pays out $500,000 more.
  
  - The loss of a Sun Belt title isn't really a killer in the long term. I know people will disagree with this. Winning the Sun Belt was a huge goal for this year's team. The league title is a big deal to the players and coaches, and it stinks that they probably won't get that ring and trophy. But honestly, few people outside the Sun Belt care or even know who wins the league title. Even the league's own bowls don't give any preference to the champion. When we're playing our bowl game, people will just see an App State team that won however many games, and hopefully wins the bowl too. Whether we won the Sun Belt or not won't even register with most.
  
  In short, we didn't move to FBS to join the Sun Belt. We joined the Sun Belt to move to FBS. Finishing strong will still show that we're a program on the rise.

Now, obviously most of that depends on finishing strong. I understand that we're banged up, and we haven't played as well the past couple games. But let's give the guys a chance to get rolling again before we sulk too much.

I look forward to our next game. It will be exciting if our guys are able to bounce back. If not....well, we will play again the next week. We are young and we are having a great season so far, despite last night's loss.

The overall trend of this program remains positive despite the loss.

Also, we beat GaSo this year, so there's always that to reflect on if we're feeling sad.

At the start of the year it was stated going 2-1 through the gauntlet of Stink, AState, ULL would be considered a success. That's still feasible and so is a 10-2 season. As the season has progressed our expectations inflated a little too much I feel like.

Great post, EastHall. The ride back down 421 last night sure was a lot longer and more depressing. Not that a backstory is even needed, but here goes nothing. I'm a 17 year old high school Senior at South Davidson High School and I am addicted to App State Football. Nothing else can be said, that's my confession. My Appalachian Experience began on Halloween Night in 2008, and you all know how special that was. I'll never forget how huge and just downright loud KBS seemed to me as a 10 year old. After that game, I attended around one game per year until my mom and I decided to join my uncle (a season ticket holder for almost 15 years) and get season tickets in 2013. I never really enjoyed watching football or even sports in general, so I can't say that I was very excited about this new venture, but I did love Boone. So here we are, 2 years later:

-Sports are my life, I'm the Student SID at my school, write all the sports articles for my local paper for my school, and NOTHING is better than watching football.
-Appalachian State is my downright #1 choice for college
-I submitted my application over 2 months ago and its fingers crossed until I hear back
-My closet contains nothing but black and gold
-Yosef's Cabin my main form of entertainment (let's face it, school work is hard to get done when you have a great forum to post/read)

Why the change of heart? Over the last two years, I've been welcomed into and became a part of the Appalachian family. We all have our differences, but this one incredible place in the High Country of North Carolina unites us all. As myself and App74 were saying yesterday, nothing can truly beat Appalachian State University and the people that are a part of it. From the friendships in the tailgating lots to the incredible success on the football field. Win or loss, App Nation is undeniably blessed. It's great to be a Mountaineer!

If you told me two years ago after we lost to NC A&T and Charleston Southern at home that this team and this coaching staff would take us to a bowl game and potentially finish, our 2nd full year of FBS at 10-2 or even 9-3, I would have said, "Bartender, pour me another."

Yes I think the hype and expectations of fans and even players was inflated because of a soft schedule, but even with that we should be happy with the direction of the program. Ark State is a better team than people realize. With a healthy QB they are probably a two loss team right now (USC and Toledo).

My big complaint, I think Scott is a players type coach but this team needs some discipline especially with regard to penalties and such. I can accept getting beat but yesterday i saw a cocky App State team that cared too much about this "FTC" movement and not enough about playing focused football.


Onward to Idaho. Our weakness is clearly the secondary and they like to sling it, so we better be ready.

There is much to be learned from a tweet Doug Middleton tweeted this morning:

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably leads nowhere.

That sums up football and real life very well.

A year ago, if someone had told us we'd be 7-2 at this point this year, many of us would have ended up on the floor laughing. The good news is that we all - players, coaches, and fans - now expect to win. One mark of the greatest football programs in history is that each program expects to win every time it takes the field. We're getting there; we've come thousands of miles in the last two years.

Yep. We lost last night. We lost pretty badly by App standards. The silver lining is that we lost to, most likely, the best team in the conference this year. The better news is that we lost to an FBS team. The best news is that we're still bowl eligible and don't have to live in Arkansas ... or Statesboro!

appstate1998 wrote:Great post, EastHall. The ride back down 421 last night sure was a lot longer and more depressing. Not that a backstory is even needed, but here goes nothing. I'm a 17 year old high school Senior at South Davidson High School and I am addicted to App State Football. Nothing else can be said, that's my confession. My Appalachian Experience began on Halloween Night in 2008, and you all know how special that was. I'll never forget how huge and just downright loud KBS seemed to me as a 10 year old. After that game, I attended around one game per year until my mom and I decided to join my uncle (a season ticket holder for almost 15 years) and get season tickets in 2013. I never really enjoyed watching football or even sports in general, so I can't say that I was very excited about this new venture, but I did love Boone. So here we are, 2 years later:

-Sports are my life, I'm the Student SID at my school, write all the sports articles for my local paper for my school, and NOTHING is better than watching football.
-Appalachian State is my downright #1 choice for college
-I submitted my application over 2 months ago and its fingers crossed until I hear back
-My closet contains nothing but black and gold
-Yosef's Cabin my main form of entertainment (let's face it, school work is hard to get done when you have a great forum to post/read)

Why the change of heart? Over the last two years, I've been welcomed into and became a part of the Appalachian family. We all have our differences, but this one incredible place in the High Country of North Carolina unites us all. As myself and App74 were saying yesterday, nothing can truly beat Appalachian State University and the people that are a part of it. From the friendships in the tailgating lots to the incredible success on the football field. Win or loss, App Nation is undeniably blessed. It's great to be a Mountaineer!

Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. But all the time we do it together.

The future for Appalachian is bright when young men like 1998 choose to make it their school.

This loss hurt nowhere near as bad as pretty much any of our playoff losses.

AppState1998's post gives me even more faith in our incredible (and very young) community. If people think our program has peaked they're insane.


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Great thread EastHall, and great tweet (is that what they call it) from Middleton.

I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, and have lived in other parts of the country and world since graduating from Appalachian State in 1995. I've met amazing people (some of them most folks would recognize, most others folks would not) and when I think about my fellow Mountaineers, those I met in my time in Boone, and those I've met since, a quote from the movie Roxanne comes to my mind.

"I'd rather be with the people [from this mountain] than the finest people in the world."

10-2, or 8-4 finishes outplay any expectation we had 3 years ago, and beats most expectations we had 3 months ago. Remember the pre-season polls picked this team 4th in conference and, what, only 1 or 2 on the All Conference first team?

It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.
` Vince Lombardi

We as a fan base have to keep things in perspective right now. This is our first year as a full FBS bowl eligible team, and we are on track to go to a bowl game. We've just had 2 Thursday night games on national TV with the conference championship on the line, and had it not been for some injuries on the OL we may have been 2-0 in those games.

Our roster includes 43 Freshmen and 17 Sophomores out of 103 total players, and our two deep only has 15 out of 44 players that were signed after we moved up. We are a very young FBS program yet were are in the hunt (even after last night) for a conference championship. To me this means we have a very good coaching staff, and players who are giving it everything they have to be successful.

This program is headed in the right direction, and the future has a lot of great moments in store for App State. Let's be sure to enjoy the process of growing into an FBS team. We're accomplishing great things!

What's disappointing to me is that a large percentage of our fan base has developed this sense of entitlement. Maybe it still stems from our championships a decade ago. They have unrealistic expectations. We're not going to win every game. The Top 25 talk, 11-1, New Year's Day bowl stuff was very premature. We lose one game and everyone gets crazy. Some of the scores our fans predict are crazy. Settle down and be thankful you're associated with such a special school and strong football program. We could be NM St or GA St. We're having a great season and will likely go to a bowl game! Enjoy it! Give 'em Hell Apps!

AppAttack wrote:What's disappointing to me is that a large percentage of our fan base has developed this sense of entitlement. Maybe it still stems from our championships a decade ago. They have unrealistic expectations. We're not going to win every game. The Top 25 talk, 11-1, New Year's Day bowl stuff was very premature. We lose one game and everyone gets crazy. Some of the scores our fans predict are crazy. Settle down and be thankful you're associated with such a special school and strong football program. We could be NM St or GA St. We're having a great season and will likely go to a bowl game! Enjoy it! Give 'em Hell Apps!

Truth spoken here.

I agree that people are probably overreacting to getting their high hopes dashed. I disagree that it was unrealistic or premature to even discuss the possibilities of 11-1 or top 25. Once we beat Southern, we were looking at being double-digit favorites in every remaining game. It wasn't crazy to think we might win them all. It would have been much less improbable than winning the last six last year, for example.

We were already getting votes in the top 25, and if we'd kept winning we'd have likely been ranked at some point. So that was also totally realistic.

New Year's bowl - yeah, that was a pipe dream. A few people got a little ahead of themselves there, but I think most people on those threads realized it would have taken a near-miracle and just enjoyed talking about it.