The Eastern Michigan Eagles beat Purdue on Saturday in West Lafayette, 20-19. The Eagles drained the clock until there were four seconds left and kicked a chip-shot field goal to win.
EMU upset Purdue and became the MAC’s first-ever PIRATE FLAG team
Additionally, the Boilermakers appear to be bad.
That’s a cool upset for EMU, which had been 1-38 all-time against the Big Ten and has been one of FBS’ more generally moribund programs for some time now.
It’s not a cool upset for Purdue, which was one of the darling teams of 2017 but has now started 2018 0-2. The Boilers were hurt by a late penalty in their season-opening loss to Northwestern way back on the Thursday before Labor Day, and they were hurt by one again as EMU marched toward the Purdue end zone at the end of the game Saturday.
But the most important development of all from this game:
The MAC’s commissioner explained this to SB Nation’s Morgan Moriarty:
On MAC football media day, commissioner Jon Steinbrecher announced the conference’s adoption of a pirate flag. The flag, Steinbrecher said, will be displayed by teams after they do notable things like upset Power 5 teams or win bowl games.
“For four years now, we’ve put together kind of a little tote board in our office that lists all of our teams’ non-conference games and the bowl opportunities,” Steinbrecher told SB Nation. “And every time they’d get a win, we put a pirate flag in each of those spots, and then I would email out our pirate flag with just a little congratulatory note saying fly the flag. And it was just a fun way to rally the troops.”
Congrats to EMU, and raise the jolly roger.
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