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SouthernPigskin.com Staff Release/GoASU.com
Appalachian State and Elon enter gameweek for what will be the Southern Conference Championship Game.
BOONE, N.C. - It’s the matchup that most prognosticators have been pointing towards all season as the one that would likely decide the 2009 Southern Conference champion and those predictions have turned out to be true. The winner of Saturday’s game between No. 7/8 Appalachian State University (7-2, 6-0 SoCon) and sixth-ranked Elon (8-1, 6-0 SoCon) will clinch no less than a share of this year’s SoCon title and earn the league’s automatic berth in the NCAA Division I Football Championship field.
Saturday’s showdown comes later in the year than any other meeting between undefeated SoCon teams since the conference joined the NCAA Division I FCS/I-AA ranks in 1982. Teams with unblemished SoCon records have squared off with four weeks or fewer remaining in the regular season just twice in the past 26 seasons— on Nov. 9, 1996, when 6-0 Marshall topped 6-0 ETSU, 34-10, and Oct. 31 of last year, when 4-0 Appalachian routed 4-0 Wofford, 70-24, in a nationally televised affair at Kidd Brewer Stadium.
Due to the magnitude of Saturday’s matchup, the Southern Fried Football Tour, hosted by popular regional sports talk show host Mark Packer, has changed its schedule to be on hand for the de facto SoCon title game instead of its originally scheduled stop at the NC State-Clemson game in Raleigh. Regardless of Saturday’s outcome, the SFF Tour will make its scheduled trip to Boone on Nov. 21 for the Battle for the Old Mountain Jug between ASU and archrival Western Carolina.
Appalachian carries an 18-game winning streak in SoCon games — the league’s longest in 50 years — into Saturday’s matchup. The Mountaineers’ seven-game winning streak overall is also tops in the SoCon, one game better than the six-straight wins that Elon has reeled off since its only loss of the season, a 35-7 setback at Wake Forest on Sept. 19.
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