I’d argue that several NDSU teams have been better than that App State team. They had the advantage of running a spread up tempo system in 2007 before it was a popular and when coordinators (ESP MICHIGANS lol!) had no clue how to stop it, evidence by the following week getting thrashed by Oregon.
Total aside, and not meant to discredit the FCS teams that win against P5, it just blows my mind sometimes watching these games how old school and antiquated some of these P5 college systems are. Running the old school pound it out 21 Pers offense under center requires such high levels of execution and plays into the strengths of a lot of these FCS squads. Or staying in a base 43 defensive front against 11 Pers spread teams. Just dumb .
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Come on guys actually read my post before replying. This is turning into a sorority telephone game. My point was Bison vs Ducks will be the first(*) time an elite FCS has played a near elite FBS team. The (*) was for app state vs MI, app state held up their end. MI dropped the ball and turned out to be not elite or even near elite that year. Good luck arguing against that.
Michigan was not elite later on in the year when they were hampered by injuries. The version that played against Appy and Oregon was absolutely a near-elite, top 10ish team. The loss to Oregon really made people really crap on UM at the time because Oregon was still unknown, but it didn't look quite as bad later in the year when the Ducks were a true national title contender. As QB11 said, Appy and Oregon were bad matchups for Michigan because they had no idea how to defend their offenses. Being a victim of 2 bad matchups doesn't mean they weren't still really good.
Apart from those first two games, they won all 5 games in which Henne and Hart were both healthy, including the bowl game against a real good Florida team.
The Mich team Appy beat would have never sniffed a 4 team playoff. They weren’t elite and were barely better than the Iowa team we beat. Hoping that OR is elite and that a Bison victory over them will go down as the undisputed best FCS win over an FBS