Three games into the 2016 season, Appalachian State’s third after transitioning into the FBS, the Mountaineers hosted what was then considered to be the most significant football game in their history. Anticipation built for weeks. A capacity crowd of nearly 35,000, then a school record, filled Kidd Brewer Stadium in Boone.
And then App State endured a humbling 45-10 defeat against Miami. For a program still adjusting to a higher level of competition, the defeat offered proof — 35 points worth — of how far it had to go before it could contend with teams far wealthier and more talented.
“We weren’t ready for it,” said Shawn Clark, the App State head coach who was then in charge of the Mountaineers’ offensive line. He reflected recently on that defeat, and the distance App had traveled since. “And now,” he continued, “we’re ready for these opportunities to come along.”
That’s one way to put it. Fifteen years after the Mountaineers provided college football with one of its most indelible moments, they once again find themselves as early season darlings of the sport. Only this time, their 17-14 victory at No. 6 Texas A&M last Saturday wasn’t quite as stunning as the memorable triumph at No. 5 Michigan in 2007, back when App was an FCS national power.
By now, the Mountaineers expect this sort of thing. They were perhaps a failed two-point conversion away from opening the season with a victory against North Carolina. They did indeed beat UNC in Chapel Hill, and South Carolina in Columbia, in 2019. And over the years there have been other near-triumphs — at Tennessee, at Penn State — that have proven App’s mettle.
And yet the question remains, too: How exactly has Appalachian State done it?
How has a Sun Belt school in small-town Boone become this state’s most consistently excellent program, for one — and how has it managed to not only compete with schools with much greater resources, but defeat them, too? Consider the disparities, financial and otherwise, that App State overcame last weekend in College Station, Texas.
To start, the Aggies owned a considerable advantage in talent, at least according to the recruiting experts. Texas A&M finished with the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class earlier this year, according to 247sports.com, and its three previous classes all ranked among the top 10. As for App? Its classes between 2017 and ‘21 finished with an average national ranking of 98.
Then there’s the money. A&M’s athletic department budget during the 2020-21 fiscal year was almost $142 million, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database. App, meanwhile, spent $33.4 million — or about $3 million less than Texas A&M spent on football alone. The amount the Aggies spent on football coaching salaries ($16.5 million) in 2021 was almost double the entirety of App’s overall budget for the sport ($9.8 million).
But then there were these numbers, on the scoreboards at Kyle Field, after the teams played for 60 minutes last weekend: App State 17, Texas A&M 14. It brought to mind what Clark, now in his third season as the Mountaineers head coach, said earlier this month in the days before his team’s game against UNC, which became arguably the most anticipated event in Boone history:
“We are who we are. I’m not Mack Brown. I’m not Dabo Swinney. I’m Shawn Clark and we’re gonna work our tails off and put the best product we can on the football field and it’s gonna work out.”
It almost worked out against the Tar Heels, against whom the Mountaineers scored 40 points during a frenetic fourth quarter. That it worked out at all for App State at Texas A&M was considerably more improbable, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been given the Mountaineers’ proclivity for doing more with less. On paper, at least, App has become a college football model for maximizing potential, and for overcoming the tangible — whether it be facilities or piles of cash — with the intangible, and those characteristics that are difficult to measure except on scoreboards.
Clark and his players know all about their supposed disadvantages, yet “our guys are very confident,” he said. “They think they can beat the Dallas Cowboys week in and week out. And that’s the beauty of it.”
Last Saturday was the second consecutive in which the Mountaineers played an opponent that did not recruit any of App State’s players. Against UNC, the Mountaineers proceeded to shred the Tar Heels’ defense, particularly in that memorable fourth quarter.
And in College Station App walked in, won and left $1.5 million richer, thanks to the check the Aggies provided App for the so-called guarantee game. Not only did App State make off with the victory and the money, but it also earned an upcoming visit from ESPN’s “College GameDay,” which chose to showcase Boone — and App’s game against Troy on Saturday — over Miami at Texas A&M.
Finding ‘App guys’
“GameDay” on Saturday will undoubtedly devote some significant air time to App State’s culture, which Clark embodies these days perhaps more than anyone. He grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, and found a home in Boone when he arrived there to be a part of Appalachian State’s offensive line in 1994. Upon graduation he aspired to be in the FBI but “I hurt my back,” he said, and missed the cutoff date for the FBI Academy.
So began life in the real world. For about six months, Clark traveled around Roanoke, Virginia, selling windows, doors and sidings. He set a company record in sales, he said, but “I was miserable,” and that misery led him back to football. He became a graduate assistant at Louisville, where he made $8,000 in that role and supplemented it by working nights on a beer delivery truck. In 2003 he caught a break and landed his first full-time coaching job at Eastern Kentucky, where in addition to coaching the offensive line he also served as the equipment manager and director of operations.
Clark earned a yearly salary of $17,000, “And I thought I was the richest man in the world,” he said.
Back at App, where Clark returned in 2016 as a position coach, Clark has built a team in his image. He wants players who aren’t deterred by the grind — ones who, in fact, embrace it.
“That’s one thing we’ve done well at Appalachian State,” he said of the program’s ability to identify players who fit the mold, “because we don’t recruit against North Carolina. We don’t recruit against N.C. State, Wake Forest, those schools. We don’t recruit against Virginia Tech.”
Instead they try to find “App guys,” he said, “and if they’re App guys, they’re App guys.”
One of those guys is Cooper Hodges, an offensive tackle who is 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds and who looks a little bit like Yosef, the Mountaineers’ plaid-wearing, rifle-toting, bearded mascot. Hodges knew he was an App guy early on, during his recruitment, which was a process he mostly despised. He didn’t like the lies and “the half-truths” he kept hearing from some college coaches.
“So when I found somebody that was straightforward with me and where I wanted to be, I committed,” he said, and “I was done,” and that’s how he became a Mountaineer. Other schools tried to sway him, eventually. As signing day approached during his senior year of high school he heard from some of them.
“Like Wake Forest, Cincinnati — like those kinds of schools,” he said. “And for me I was like, you didn’t want me a year ago and now you kind of need somebody to sign, and now you want me.”
The Mountaineers have a roster full of those like Hodges — players who were at the fringes of the recruiting radar, or off of it completely, before larger schools began to realize that maybe they made a mistake. App State’s performances in two games this season, and over the past several seasons, suggest that, indeed, larger and more-monied programs did miss out on some of them.
“Their loss,” Camerun Peoples, a senior running back, said with a smile, before adding this:
“Some guys, you can’t measure that dog in them. And some guys got that dog in them, and some heart. I grew up in that type of place.”
Focus on player development
Peoples, barely recruited by anyone out of his small Alabama hometown, has averaged almost 90 yards rushing during App’s first two games. Hodges, meanwhile, was first-team All-Sun Belt last year and is the latest in a line of Mountaineers offensive linemen whose performance in college far exceeded the meager expectations that might’ve surrounded them as high school prospects.
“What’s special about App is the development part,” Hodges said. “They take these kids, and we’re not as talented as a lot of these other guys. They don’t have the same physical attributions, they don’t run a 4.4 and they’re (not) 6-5 and 220 pounds.
“We take guys who are 6-2 and 200 pounds, and we develop them. We turn them into football players, turn them into App State football players. So that’s like the biggest thing for me.”
When he thinks of a defining example of an App State football player, Hodges thinks of Jalin Moore, the running back who, out of high school, “had zero stars.” Moore then went on to run for more than 3,500 yards and average more than 6 yards per carry, best in school history. Clark thinks of Noah Hannon, the Mountaineers’ former center who started from the moment he arrived on campus. In particular, Clark thinks of App’s victory at South Carolina in 2019, when Hannon went head-to-head against Javon Kinlaw, the Gamecocks’ touted defensive tackle.
“And all he did was take Kinlaw, the whole game, and put him on the sidelines,” Clark said. “Frustrate him, outperformed him. Kinlaw was a first-round draft pick. Noah Hannon’s doing stocks for Truist Bank.”
After that game, Clark said, one of South Carolina’s coaches came up to him and said the Gamecocks hadn’t recruited Hannon, a South Carolina native, because he was two inches too short. It brought Clark to his point: “In college football, as coaches,” he said, “ I think we get too caught up — you’re this tall. How fast are they? What’s your wing span?
“If you’re a good football player, you’re a good football player.”
Texas A&M, home to no shortage of coveted prospects and four- and five-star recruits, learned on Saturday that, indeed, the more unheralded Mountaineers have some good football players. Once again, App State found its way into the national conversation following an improbable road win against a highly ranked opponent. This time, though, it’s a bit of a different feeling.
Not quite as shocking. Not all that stunning.
App State has been there before, and now it’s more equipped to stick around.
