A year of highs and lows. Every year is. Were the lows lower ? The highs a bit muted? What is the mood of the Mountaineer faithful? How would you grade the athletic year ?

Football: C-
Basketball: C+
Baseball: B-

All ended on a downhill trajectory. Probably the first time ever that I have more confidence in the Basketball and Baseball programs to perform better than Football.

Hard to grade overall. Maybe a C to B-
Wrestling still continues to be good even with losing kids to portal.
I learned we are a tennis school, pole vaulting and women's freshman golf school..
And cross country school. Got roped into one of the meets at the Greenway by mistake last year.
Went for a jog. Actually enjoyed watching the runners coming over the bridge for the last circle in the infield grass. I hope I make the same mistake in the future.
Baseball was better than I thought we would be at beginning of season. Softball got my hopes up early on in OOC play., however, did not pan out in conference.
Men's basketball was about what I expected.
Football was about what I expected as believed our D was going to be a multi year project given how depleted.. Got hopes up after the Charlotte game in that I thought we would be decent in conference. USM was disappointing we had opportunities to put them away early, however, we shot ourselves in the foot so to speak. JMU and Boise were frankly embarrassing. We got taken out to the wood shed. Our A$$es were sand-papered versus us sand-papering some A$$.
There are other sports, however I do not follow closely.

Football..D+
Basketball..B-
Baseball..B
Other sports B

Pre - NIL era grades: D, C+, B-, overall C

Current reality: C, B, B+, overall B

I think that most feel like it was a down year, but that is primarily driven by the lack of success in football. Two consecutive losing seasons is a tough pill to swallow at App State and tends to leave a black cloud over all other sports. But if we can peak around that cloud, I think we actually had a better overall sports offering than most years.

I think what we showed was that even in this new era, we can compete at the G6 level in all non-football sports. That is a good sign. Football is what it is. We will get some flash in the pan years and make some runs, but most of our seasons will be 6-8 wins.

We did better than our SB main rivals except for CCU

https://sunbeltsports.org/sports/2025/1 ... kings.aspx

and they sponsor a lot more SB teams than us. A shame SB does not sponsor wrestling and Field Hockey.

Overall C. Not good enough.

Some good steps forward across the board, but plenty of work to do. Can each sport improve next year?

McLeansvilleAppFan wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 11, 2026 3:19 pm

We did better than our SB main rivals except for CCU

https://sunbeltsports.org/sports/2025/1 ... kings.aspx

and they sponsor a lot more SB teams than us. A shame SB does not sponsor wrestling and Field Hockey.

We finished above JMU, Marshall, and GA Southern. That's good enough for me.

If Football was the program it once was and we land 15 points instead of 3, we finish tied for 2nd in the standings. Looks like we are better overall than we were a few years ago (minus Football)

McLeansvilleAppFan wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 11, 2026 3:19 pm

We did better than our SB main rivals except for CCU

https://sunbeltsports.org/sports/2025/1 ... kings.aspx

and they sponsor a lot more SB teams than us. A shame SB does not sponsor wrestling and Field Hockey.

Not sure if it is a good thing that two of our best sports last year are the non-SBC ones. I mean who had field hockey earning a national ranking this year, even briefly, on their 25-26 bingo card?