Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32 – greatest upset in college football history? If not, it’s certainly among ’em. But I’d lean toward a West Point-Carlisle showdown featuring a couple of guys named Thorpe and Eisenhower as my favorite. It had far more penetrating social impact – Nov. 9, 1912, when Pop Warner’s lightly regarded Carlisle Indians romped, 27-6, past a befuddled Army club suffering its only loss of the season.

In 1950, the Associated Press voted Centre College of Kentucky’s 6-0 upset of mighty Harvard in 1921 the greatest college upset of the first half of the century. Last year, ESPN Classic rated it the top upset of all time. Harvard had won the 1919 Rose Bowl and had a 25-game unbeaten streak. Centre was the smallest school ever to go against an Ivy League outfit.

Now back to my Army-Carlisle stunner featuring Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. Nine of the West Pointers who played that day wound up as noted Army generals; many regard Thorpe as the greatest athlete of all time. Coach Warner was a crafty innovator who devised a devastating double-wing offense, all kinds of deception, hit-and-run tactics featuring great speed and passing formations far ahead of the legendary Notre Dame air game.

Only 22 years before that 1912 titanic, on Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Army had massacred Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee in the last major confrontation of our military and Indians. Feelings among the Carlisle guys were what you might expect.

As Sally Jenkins writes in her Carlisle treatise, “The Real All-Americans,” Warner told his players he didn’t really need to prepare them. “Just go to your rooms and read your history books.” It was a match of a massive, powerful, bruising Army and speed-and-deception Carlisle.

In maybe the best locker-room sizzler in history, coach Warner said, “Your fathers and grandfathers are the ones who fought their fathers. These men playing against you today are soldiers. They are the Long Knives. You are the Indians. Today we will know if you are warriors.”

Thorpe had won the Olympic pentathlon and decathlon earlier in the year and was incomparable. Army guys said trying to stop him was like “trying to catch a shadow.” Defense? Army didn’t even get a first down in the second half. Dwight Eisenhower from Kansas was a 5-11, 180-pound halfback-linebacker. He impressed the swift and rock-hard Thorpe with one tackle, then was knocked out of the game attempting another. Ike loved football, but had to give it up after a knee injury in 1913.

He, Omar Bradley and the other would-be generals staged a nifty comeback in time for World War II. But this day belonged to the wheeling-dealing Indians sparked by Thorpe.

Sally Jenkins says Warner, Thorpe and Carlisle made football the popular sport it has become and proved that Indians, despite their detractors, were as smart and able as anyone and deserved approval and honor. “The game, like the country in which it was created, was a rough, bastardized thing that jumped out of the mud. What was football but barely legalized fighting?” writes Jenkins. The swift 22 Carlisle heroes changed all that.

That was the only game the Army juggernaut lost; Carlisle finished 11-0-1 with greatly enhanced respect. Few dreamed the small but deceptive Indians would actually embarrass Army. Did they ever!

You can saddle up with Appalachian or Centre. I’m riding with the Indians on this one.