Bowl Recaps

The Armed Forces Bowl was a ringing success for Army and provided a proper showcase for Army's seniors

ESPN's instant analysis is a pretty good read.


Kingsley Ehie gets mention in Sal's reflection on the season.

And how could I forget the smile on senior Kingsley Ehie's face as he posed with the Armed Forces Bowl trophy and freshman teammate Justin Trimble.

Ehie epitomizes this Army team. This is a guy who was the starting fullback last season. Now, Ehie's role was reduced to a gunner on punt coverage and a reserve middle linebacker behind star Stephen Anderson.

Ehie, who downed a punt at SMU's 2, never stopped working or believing.

Steve Anderson and Mike Gann get spotlight pieces from Sal.


ESPN Dallas laments SMU losing their mojo to Army

After what can only be termed as a successful season, the challenge is to keep Army's own mojo going with consecutive winning seasons.

Ronnie McAda watched in admiration as Army celebrated its Armed Forces Bowl win over SMU on Thursday.

McAda tracked down quarterback Trent Steelman and fullback Jared Hassin after the game as Army's past met its present and future for the first time. McAda wanted Army's two sophomore stars to take a picture with his son, Ronnie Jr.

...

Then, McAda challenged Hassin and Steelman.

"All right, you got two more years, what are you going to do with it?" said McAda, who lives in nearby Mesquite, Texas. "Let's improve on this for the next two years. Get the tradition back."

ESPN's Ivan Maisel adds the service academies' winning records to his college football notes.

2. Army’s 16-14 victory over SMU in the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl means the Black Knights finished with a 7-6 record. You could talk all day about the rebuilding job that Rich Ellerson is performing at West Point. But let’s all salute Army, Navy (9-4) and Air Force (9-4) for having winning records in the same season for the first time since 1996. That is, unless there’s a Big Ten officiating crew lurking around.

It's a little late for this one and I should probably just let it go, but Phil Steele can suck my nuts.

June Jones has taken the Mustangs from back-to-back one win seasons to 8 wins last year and playing for the CUSA Championship this year. This is a great matchup for them as they played Navy each of the L/3Y and have improved vs the option having only all’d 337 yds this year. It is fantastic to see Army in a bowl game but, truth be told, it was vs a very watered-down sked this year. They have not seen this type of offensive fire power and the extra prep time won’t help them in this matchup.

PHIL’S FORECAST: SMU 31 Army 17

SMU may have improved against Navy and the option, but they are 0-4 against service academies in the last 3 years, so it is imperative to look at where SMU has improved from.

Army's improvement is clearly more notable. Knocking off a team that played for the CUSA championship shows Army's improved standing as a football program and further justifies Army's move back to football independent satus.


Danny Wild's photos are up from the game. Great stuff again from him, be sure to go and check out images of the game through Danny's lens.


The Hudson Valley Press has a great write up of the game, and GoArmySports.com has their game write up here.


A lot of good stuff to go around. I'm not done recapping the season, but I do look forward to taking up some of the projects that I left off before the 2010 season. The season by season thing should really take off in the next couple of weeks and more college yearbooks are being made available so there should be some stuff to do with that. I'm kind of at an impasse with the playbooks, since there is a limit on the amount of content I can upload to my google sites playbooks page. It should be a pretty easy work-around, but I haven't had the time to fix it or re-do it all, so maybe I'll get the playbooks back in my sights, though it is honestly a low priority.