An upset? Not really.

By Dan Nied [send email]

I heard it all over the place Last Monday morning.

“You guys must have been celebrating all night Saturday after that big win,”

Well, yeah. But not really.

I did celebrate Saturday after the Bowling Green football team’s 27-26 “upset” of No. 16 Purdue Sept. 6, but not because of the game.

No, I was celebrating because my friend Cameron was married that day in Findlay, Ohio, not because my alma mater had just beaten a ranked team for the first time in about 50 years.

It’s not that I wasn’t pumped about BG’s win (Oh believe me I was, after the wedding my friends and I stood in our hotel’s parking lot listening to the game on a car stereo, singing the unofficial BG fight song, Ay Ziggy Zoomba with every first down. Not a bad way to spend a post-wedding Saturday afternoon.) It was just that I did not think this ranked as the amazing upset everyone else did.

I wasn’t shocked that the Falcons burned Purdue, badly outgaining the Boilermakers in a game that shouldn’t have been decided by less than a touchdown.

Before graduating in the summer of 2002, I had covered this Bowling Green football team for four years at BG’s student paper. Last season I made it to nearly every home game, including a few that I was able to cover for various publications. I knew this team’s resolve and I knew how good it was.

I knew that Bowling Green might be the most underrated team in the country and that quarterback Josh Harris was a Heisman Trophy candidate weather anyone had heard of him or not (Harris, who sliced up Perdue’s secondary for 357 yards, is absolutely the most electrifying athlete I have ever covered. He is a poor man’s Mike Vick who can single handedly take over a game with a cannon arm and flubber-like legs.)

I watched Bowling Green play last season as the 16th ranked team in the country. So why would Purdue - a team ranked 16th in the preseason polls, who had not yet played, going through the motions in a game they most likely added on to the schedule circa 1999 when BG was 2-9 - scare me? The Falcons were 5-0 against BCS conference schools in the past two seasons.

This was an upset, but it wasn’t the second coming. People seemed to forget that BG was ranked for a while last year and still have their lethal weapon, “J5”, Josh Harris.

So while we were singing Ay Ziggy Zoomba at the wedding in front of 100 people who did not understand, I was thinking about the real upset to come.

BG’s got Ohio State this week.

I’ll celebrate then.