Posted at 12:30 a.m., Dec. 16: Well, I was wrong about that one. UMass lost by 11 points in the national championship and I felt bad for everyone in volved. Don Brown got choked up after the game when I asked him about losing some of his seniors, and that’s brutal to see that stuff. With how much effort and time that those guys put into this season, it is a shame to see them broken at the national championship game. Brown, Ihedigbo, Baylark, Coen . . . all of those guys are great players and, more impressively, good people. You won’t find many high-profile college coaches as nice as Don Brown, and it was a pleasure to cover a team of his for three months. The same goes for Ihedigbo, the quiet assasin, and Baylark, the soft-spoken bulldozer in the backfield, who ends his career as one of the premier backs ever to play 1-AA football. There won’t be a team like for a while now – so much talent with so much leadership and discipline mixed in. I am sitting in the Chattanooga press box right now as the media cracks down and meets deadlines, and in retrospect, it has been a great experience to cover this team. I haven’t been around this business for that long, but from what I hear, it is very rare to cover a team with a bunch of good guys that can hold their own on the playing field.

Now it’s back to the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel and then a flight back to civilization (Boston) tomorrow morning. I will be glad to get home in one piece and hit my own pillow hard. Both of the goalposts are down on the field right now and the cops just ushered out the last of the roudy Appalachian State fans. They charged the field after the game, and it makes sense because this is like their Superbowl. There isn’t much to cheer about in Boone, North Carolina, other than your local NASCAR guy. I had to take that shot at the South.

Anyway, I might go grab some minor alcohol to end the night. The mashed potatoes at this place were brutal, so grub is an enticing option. I’m heading to Kentucky on the 23rd so I’ll come back on from there. It’ll be another great trip through the South.

Posted at 4:40, Dec. 15: In the press box before the game watching the “Appalachian State is hot, hot, hot” video again. Can’t get enough of it. I just watched another video making fun of the Ole Miss football coach and the way he talks. It didn’t make sense to me until I saw a real commercial that the guy did for Hummers, and then it was hilarious. I find that youtube.com is always good for some free-time entertainment when you have nothing to do for four hours before a game.

I spent the morning driving around Chatanooga. Let me put it this way: I’m Jewish, and I didn’t exactly feel represented down here. Above the concierge in the lobby of my hotel (the Chattanooga Choo-Choo) was a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus, and I saw a sign on the side of the freeway on the drive here from Louisville that said, “Jesus Saves”, in big letters. Not a lot of Jewish people down here. Except there was a hospital in Louisville that’s called “The Jewish Hospital”. Go figure. I wonder how many Jewish people are actually on staff.

There is one little strip in Chattanooga that has some nice restaurants and stuff, but that’s about it. You can get the jist of the city in a car in about 25 minutes, and if you go to far in any one direction, you’ll find yourself somewhere that you don’t want to be. There’s the Tennessee Aquarium, the most elaborate building of the bunch, but it made me wonder how the animals got to this place in the middle of nowhere – cars? trucks? airplanes? up the river? It didn’t make me feel good about the whole thing. In Boston, it makes sense: there’s the water, there’s the aquarium. But down here in the middle of the country? It can’t be a pleasant experience getting them from one place to the other. That’s my environmental rant. You’re welcome.

The App. State fans are overwhelming down here. You can’t go two feet without seeing someone decked in black and yellow or a car with Mountaineer flags flying everywhere. One guy had some black and yellow military camouflage pants – although I think the black and yellow kind of defeat the namesake. I took a picture of the guy in a restaurant because I’ve never seen any item of clothing so ridiculous, but the camera flashed and I didn’t think it would, which created some awkward eye contact between the two tables. I should have asked the guy to pose or something. I’ll bet he would’ve done it.

Anyway, I’m in the empty press box right now waiting for the 8 p.m. game to start. I don’t know about this game tonight. Kevin Richardson, the dynamic App. State running back, said that he was ready to come out and beat Montana, and then quickly corrected himself. It shows you how much respect they have for UMass. Safety James Ihedigbo, famous for taking bulletin board material from other teams and using it to fire his team up, probably has the Richardson thing tatooed to his forehead to get ready for the game. I don’t think the App. State guys really care who they are playing, and seem to have a lot of confidence going into the game. UMass is acting like it is getting no respect, but Ihedigbo might be turning into Rodney Harrison. Even when the Pats were favored, Harrison still insisted that they weren’t getting the proper kudos.

UMass has been the underdog before now it is the underdog again, as you should be when you play against the defending national champions. But the Mountaineers turn it over pretty consistently, and they come from the university that produced that miserable promotional video. But seriously, App. State fumbled 34 times this season and threw 13 interceptions to go with that, and the UMass defense can take the ball away from pretty much any offense, as it showed in the semis and quarters against some of the best offenses in the nation in Montana and New Hampshire. I think it will be a UMass victory tonight. I’ve doubted them before this point, including against New Hampshire in the quarters, and it’s like what Sean Salisbury said after the Pats beat the Colts 20-3 in the 2005 playoffs: I will never bet against the Patriots again. Well, I’ve come to that point with UMass. They always seem to find a way to win, even against the best competition around. My vote is with UMass tonight.

Posted at 5:46 on Dec. 14: I knew that working at the Daily Collegian this year would take me to parts of the country that I never even knew existed or, even if I did know they existed, I would never want to waste my money trying to find.

So far, it’s been Annapolis, Maryland for the UMass-Navy game, then Villanova, Towson, and Durham. All of those places have Division I-AA football teams with the exception of Annapolis, which had a pleasant stadium and equally pleasant people – not a small feat for a football crowd. The obscurity defines the I-AA existence, because if they weren’t obscure, they’d be I-A. That’s not an original idea by any means, but it’s a true one.

The Massachusetts football team has made it the national championship game via Amherst for the first two rounds and Missoula, Montana (which I had to miss because I would have flunked out of school if I made the 10-hour, connector-flight journey to the middle of nowhere) for the national semifinals.

Now it’s on to Chattanooga, Tennessee against Appalachian State. For those of you who haven’t seen the “Appalachian State is HOT! HOT! HOT!” video on youtube.com, you really need to check it out. It will make you embarrassed for the entire App. State student body. Type in “App. State is hot, hot, hot” and enjoy.

Appalachian State resides in Boone, North Carolina. For the record, I have been to Boone for trip to see one of my friend’s cousins, and it is as desolate as it sounds. There is about three miles in between each house on the country roads and woods surround the hilly, tucked-away university, and god knows how that school gets applicants from anywhere outside of North Carolina. How would you find it?

It was hard enough to get to Loui
sville, Kentucky for the men’s basketball game on Wednesday night, and I hitched a ride for a five-hour car ride to Chattanooga, Tenn., the site of the national championship and a ridiculous, ridiculous hotel called the “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” No lie. When you call up the concierge (and I suggest you do if you have some spare time in between studying – a.k.a boozing – during finals) you will hear train noises. It’s corny to the extreme.

So yeah, it was Louisville on Wednesday for a 7 p.m. start against Rick Pitino’s Cardinals and the much-publicized storyline of The Apprentice (Travis Ford) vs. The Mentor (Pitino). Pitino is a UMass alum and played with Al Skinner and Dr. J back in the early 1970s before he challenged Jack Parker for BU supremacy, became a college basketball coaching god and then destroyed the Boston Celtics for the better part of a decade.

The two teams played at Freedom Hall in Louisville, which looked like the remains of a Soviet bunker. An empty amusement park surrounded the parking lot – giving a strange, horror-movie feel to the whole scene – and the Louisville football stadium (they’re pretty good this year, actually) was adjacent to the arena.

Ford coached against his mentor Pitino and, like Oscar Robertson said to his tutor after he got a higher grade than her on a test, “I learned what you taught me and then I learned some on my own.” Ford could’ve dropped that line against Louisville on Wednesday when the Minutemen played well in front of a hostile road crowd to beat the Cardinals, 72-68.

For me, that was the beginning. With the next morning came up early wake-up call and a five-hour drive to Chattanooga, Tennessee yesterday to watch the UMass football team play in the national championship against the defending champions, Appalachian State on Friday.

The drive yielded nothing but nothingness – woods and plains and mountains and that was about it. I stopped at a local diner to get some breakfast to go before I hit the road. Bad idea. The place was called the “Country Plaza”, and the breakfast sandwich that I ordered came in a monstrous Styrofoam box, so I knew that it was going to be a sub par sandwich.

By the way, during the game against Louisville I saw more Southern-type people than I could have ever imagined. You ever seen “My name is Earl”? Yeah, it was 20,000 of those guys screaming at the top of their lungs. Great time.

Now I’m in Chatanooga with my esteemed colleague/enormous loser friend Jon Pelland, typing this piece of garbage that nobody will probably read. The lights are on here at Finley Stadium and UMass coach Don Brown, James Ihedigbo, Steve Baylark, and Liam Coen are sitting in the empty stands watching the grounds crew outline “Minutemen” in maroon in one of the end zones. I’m going to try and find a local hotel somewhere. I’ll be back at it tomorrow.