Army 1-0

Option attack victory for Rich Ellerson's Black Knights.
AP article here. Recap from Yahoo/Rivals
Recap from CBS. (gee, thanks) One more from ESPN.

Interdonato's Varsity 845 coverage.

Youtube highlights courtesy WEMU


Nice. Big first win for Ellerson. The team showed some real drive on offense. This win was Army's first away season-opening victory.

There are other teams that played well this week, Army themselves deserve a lot of credit. Army looked good, moving the football, changing the point of attack... but they could be a lot better.

Patrick Mealy ripped off a gamebreaking 75 yard run. What a game. Josh McNary was a force inside. Does that say 3 sacks? Eastern Michigan tried to run the ball first and mixed in a couple of early passes one of which was intercepted setting up Army's first score. Army got lucky again later when they recovered a fumble on the Eastern Michigan goal line. There's no question EMU wanted to run the ball, but once they got down they just aired it out. EMU's numbers ended up looking pretty balanced.

The Black Knights did what they had to do to win, but there are a lot of things that need to be cleaned up. The penalties along the lines, movement stuff; the mental pemalties - these types of things have to be avoided if Army wants to keep winning. Ellerson used the quarter intermission to his advantage overcoming some of the early miscues and utilizing some decent field position. Overall you got the sense that Army was getting some breaks, but their strong early play indicated that they deserved the luck they were recieving.

Not a bad start to the season, can't wait for the next game. Speaking of which what happened here?