Washington Post sports columnist celebrates upset victories of Sun Belt football teams from relatively small places

The Post used these pictures as the lead illustration for the piece.

The Rural Blog has never had an item about college football games, but Chuck Culpepper of The Washington Post saw a story where no one else did, and it has rural resonance, so we are following his lead.

"Two lovable underdogs just toppled college football royalty. What a blast," is the headline over Culpepper's analysis of the upset victories of Appalachian State University of Boone, N,C., over sixth-ranked Texas A&M University in College Station and of Marshall University of Huntington, W.Va., over No. 8 Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind. He also notes that a third Sun Belt Conference member, Georgia Southern University of Statesboro, population 33,000, beat the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers in Lincoln, but focuses on the two schools separated by 158 miles of mountains, in cities of 20,000 and 46,000, respectively:

"Most of us, statistically, do not reside around Boone or Huntington. Most of us live neither in the western hills of North Carolina nor on the western edge of West Virginia. Poor most of us . . . We’re about to live weeks inferior to the weeks they’re about to live in Boone and Huntington. Shall we get to sit around Boone and talk about how our utterly lovable program spent 9 minutes and 15 seconds of game-clock time straddling the third and fourth quarters — 9 minutes and 15 seconds! — using 18 delicious morsels of plays — 18 plays! — to go just 63 yards — just 63 yards! — for the winning field goal against haughty and overly moneyed Texas A&M? . . . Oh, to be in Boone this week and talk time of possession: 41:29 to 18:17! To marvel how the Mountaineers went from giving up 567 yards to North Carolina in that 63-61 loss in which the loser scored 40 fourth-quarter points, to giving up 186 to a team allegedly aimed toward the College Football Playoff. To hear again how Appalachian State, with its donors and NIL totals a fraction of A&M’s donors and NIL totals . . . " And in Huntington, Culpepper concludes, "A deathless Saturday waned, but up ahead lay a week around town with which the rest of us cannot compete."

UPDATE, Sept. 14: Texas A&M says it is taking down from its Twitter feed a pre-game rally speech by senior player Zac Cross saying Appalachian State is "deep in the backwoods, just like you would expect any hillbilly college that names themselves the Mountaineers. . . . I know for a fact that barely half their football team can even read the name on their jerseys." The Deseret News has a story.