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No Trick Here: Mountaineers win big
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Published: November 1, 2008
BOONE -- Appalachian State ate all the candy last night.
Wofford got an upset stomach.
ASU, ranked second in the NCAA's second-tier playoff division, paraded its football gluttony across American television screens and the greenest fake grass in Watauga County, routing the No. 3 Terriers 70-24 and feeding a growing reputation as big-game monsters.
Wofford gained 497 yards and lost by 46 points. The warp-speed ASU calculator surprised the players pushing the buttons. Freshman Ben Jorden, who caught passes for the first two touchdowns, smiled as he remembered the dancing scoreboard.
"You never think you're going to score 70," Jorden said. "Our offense has a lot of weapons, so it's hard to stop us. You may think you're going to score 35 or 40, but not to hang 70 on a team."
The blowout guaranteed the Mountaineers a spot in the 16-team playoffs and a shot at their fourth straight national championship. That would have been enough to inspire a midnight party any night, but this special Halloween party started in Friday's broad daylight, long before the 8 p.m. kickoff on cable network ESPN2.
Chapel Hill stopped ghoulish visitors at the city limits, trying to control a revelry ritual, but Boone rolled out the black asphalt carpet and welcomed the largest crowd in school history, 30,931.
Cavorting under bright new lights in Kidd Brewer Stadium, the Mountaineers gave their inventive classmates reasons to squeal.
Quarterback Armanti Edwards led the student-athletes, setting the Southern Conference career record for total offense (9,397 yards) in the process. Edwards passed for 367 yards and five touchdowns. He ran for 73 yards and one touchdown -- and he settled a strange local debate.
"Some people at our school asked me: ‘Do you have a chance?' " Edwards said. "We're No. 2 in the nation. Of course we've got a chance. Nobody gave us a chance, so we took that to heart."
The leaderless student-actors wore costumes of all nations, from Dracula capes to Swiss miniskirts. With black and gold as a common color scheme, bumble bees ruled the undergrad section, buzz on top of buzz.
A young woman rushed to keep pace with her friends, a considerable chore for someone walking on bare feet and carrying yellow heels in her hands.
That was slightly before temperatures dropped into the low 40s -- and slightly after a scruffy older fellow wrapped a hand around a beverage and adjusted the sign on his chest: Free Kisses.
The touchdowns didn't come much harder for Edwards and his high-powered offensive cohorts.
Edwards hit Jorden with a 23-yard pass for the first touchdown barely two minutes after the kickoff. The next touchdown drive was even quicker.
ASU needed 1:52 to drive 77 yards, with Jorden catching a 48-yard touchdown pass. Coach Jerry Moore's dynamos eventually produced four faster drives: eight seconds, 36 seconds, 59 seconds and 62 seconds.
Wofford, which beat the Mountaineers last season, arrived with the third-ranked offense in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
Quarterback Ben Widmyer revved up the Wingbone, and Wofford traded touchdowns with ASU until the score leveled off at 14-14.
The Mountaineers promptly kicked down the remaining defensive roadblocks. Edwards, Robert Welton and Devin Radford sped through substantial holes or created their own slivers of open space.
Edwards located CoCo Hillary and his latest best friend, freshman Brian Quick, who caught three touchdown passes (58, 50 and 31 yards).
Radford sprinted past the entire Wofford secondary on a 47-yard run shortly before halftime, when Appalachian took a few deep breaths and chewed on its 42-14 lead.
And that was just the beginning. A fourth-quarter deluge continued after Edwards retired to the sideline.
"It's a whole new atmosphere, with lots of excitement," Jorden said. "There's electricity running through the stands."
Not to mention the streets of a once-sleepy college town.
■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com.
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