The story of the 2023 Sun Belt championship game changes depending on where you start it.
For Appalachian State, it begins in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Oct. 22. The Mountaineers had just arrived back in Boone after a road loss to Old Dominion.
App had dropped four heartbreakers by a total of 19 points. “That’s 4.8 points a game,” coach Shawn Clark pointed out. It included a double-overtime loss at UNC, three-point losses to Wyoming and Coastal Carolina, and coming up a touchdown short against ODU.
It was the latest in the season App had been below .500 since 2014, its first full year at the FBS level. For a fanbase that had grown accustomed to winning championships and traveling to bowl games, it was unfamiliar territory. The only thing louder than the griping among some factions in Boone was the thump of people jumping off the bandwagon.
It wasn’t just Clark hearing the talk.
“When you coach at Appalachian or you play at Appalachian, you have high expectations,” he said. “And when things aren’t going well, it’s hard on your family. My family lives this with me. My wife, my kids, we’re invested in this program, in this town, and when things aren’t going good, it’s rough. They hear it at school. They hear it in the community.”
Standing in that locker room, knowing it would get worse for him, his players and his family after the latest loss, Clark addressed his team.
“We came back here at 3-4, and no one gave us a chance to win except us,” said Clark. “We have a video of that locker room. I told them, ‘If you stick together, you’ll be champions. … At the Old Dominion game, no one cared about us.’ I told our team, ‘When all is said and done, we have the pen last. We’re going to write our story.’”
To his family, he said to ignore the talk.
“They’re uninformed people,” he told his children. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I think it’s important,” he said. “It’s life lessons to your kids, that when things are tough, you just don’t quit. You keep fighting. I thought that was a really good lesson for our players but, more importantly, my family because it’s one of those life lessons you have to get through sometimes. Winning is hard, and life is not fair. It’s not easy.”
Then Clark picked up his pen and began to write his story.
Five straight wins later, App State is headed to the Sun Belt Championship Game for the second time in three years and fourth time in the last six.
Meanwhile in Troy, the story starts much earlier, on Sept. 17 of last year. The Trojans led App State in Boone, 28-26, with two seconds remaining. App faced fourth-and-10 from its own 47-yard line. Quarterback Chase Brice was chased from the pocket and threw a desperation Hail Mary pass downfield. Troy defenders jumped up and batted the ball down, but App’s Christan Horn was able to catch the deflection before it hit the ground. Brice’s throw was short of the goal line, but Horn was able to loop around the mass of defenders and run six yards to the end zone for the most improbable of App State wins.
“Yeah, it sucked,” said Troy coach Jon Sumrall when asked for his memories of the play, which came in just his third game as Troy coach. “I’ll never forget it. I think, as a coach, you remember some of the losses as much as you do the wins. And for our kids, they poured so much into the changes we had brought. We asked them to do some things that were uncomfortable for them, and we were 1-1 going to that game. For 59 minutes and 58 seconds, we played a really good game, and we didn’t play one play at the end very well.”
In a heartbroken locker room of his own, Sumrall addressed his team.
“I just tried to remind them how far we had come and how much we had grown as a team. While we didn’t get the tangible result of a victory, there was growth and there was change that had occurred. It’s never OK to lose like that. I don’t ever feel good about losing, but I saw growth. I talked to our team about how a loss in that moment would not define us. That play would not define us. How we responded to it would. And I think you’ve seen our response. We’re 21-2 since that loss.”
Those two losses came in the second and third weeks of this season, including a two-point loss to James Madison.
“We started 1-2 in 2022 and lost a heartbreaker,” said Sumrall. “We started 1-2 this year and lost a heartbreaker. Both of them were in Game 3. Both were conference games, our first conference game, and you start 0-1 in conference and 1-2 overall, not ideal. I think it showed the group’s resiliency, their character. I think when you’ve been there before and you’ve done it, it gives you confidence that you can do it again. I believe that last year’s experience, starting the year the way we started and the response gave this team a little more confidence in what that response could look like.”
Two teams. Two long winning streaks. Two stories. But on Saturday, only one of them will get completed.
