2007-9-12
This is the VOA Special English Education Report.
An exciting start to the college football season: A team that many people never heard of defeats one of the best in the country.
If you follow American sports, then you know we are talking about the Michigan-Appalachian State game. It happened on September first at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, in front of more than one hundred thousand people.
Appalachian State University is in Boone, North Carolina. Its team plays in a stadium that holds about twenty-five thousand people.
The Mountaineers of Appalachian State and the Wolverines of the University of Michigan normally do not even play each other. Michigan is in the newly named Football Bowl Subdivision, the top level of college football. Appalachian State plays in the Football Championship Subdivision.
But they decided to meet for the first time. Michigan agreed to pay Appalachian State four hundred thousand dollars, win or lose.
Teams like Michigan need victories, even a victory over a lower division team, to get into big, nationally broadcast bowl games. These games are worth millions of dollars at the end of the season.
Fans expected an easy Michigan win. After all, in the preseason, sports experts had considered Michigan the fifth best college football team in the country.
But Appalachian State is a two-time national champion at its own division level. And its players wanted to show they could play well against a nationally ranked team. And they did.
The final score was Appalachian State thirty-four, Michigan thirty-two. The game quickly became known as one of the greatest upsets in college football history.
The win has brought national attention to Appalachian State. Local stores reported a huge increase in orders for college clothing and other items. And the university chancellor expects more students to seek admission next year.
The university has more than thirteen thousand undergraduates and one thousand six hundred graduate students. It has four colleges and a school of music.
Last Saturday, at home, Appalachian State defeated another North Carolina school, Lenoir-Rhyne College, forty-eight to seven.
The Wolverines also played again at Michigan Stadium. And they lost for the fourth time in their last four games, this time to the University of Oregon. The score was thirty-nine to seven.
And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. Our reports are online at WWW.testbig.com. I'm Steve Ember.