Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Athlon Preview of Navy

I stopped in the local Barnes and Noble today with the intention of buying the Athlon Sports NCAA national Preview Magazine. However one of the drawbacks of a place like Barnes and Noble is they seem to have more magazines specialized towards homosexuals marsupials then they do of decent college football previews. This of course is an exaggeration, but since the Sporting News preview containing only a half page on Navy, I decided to forgo buying any National preview until Phil Steele's comes out June 13th. I did manage to pick up a copy of the Athlon ACC preview though, which comes with additional previews of Notre Dame, Navy, and East Carolina. I have to say though, I am a bit disappointed with the Navy preview, although we were ranked 42 (above Maryland, Virginia, Duke, and NC in the ACC). Here are some points that didn't seem to add up from my perspective.
  • 15 returning starters? Is it just me or hasn't it been an established fact that their are to be 18 returning starters? Ok, so maybe they considered KW as a starter, which makes 17, but all they had to do was look at the Prospectus...
  • Karlos Whittaker is featured as the "Rising Star". Should be the "Sitting Star" but I suppose that's not Athlon's fault.
  • In the "Scouting the Midshipmen" section, a random "opposing coach" says 'There's a reason they are 4-0 in Bowl games". I'm assuming this means under Coach Johnson, which in that case, we are only 2-1. Nice job, "Coach."
  • Jarrod Bryant is listed as the second QB, but I thought he was 3rd or 4th coming out of Spring Practice. Just because a guy gets one carry (and damnit it was a good carry, just ask Phat) doesn't mean he is slated as the Numero Dos next season.
  • Joe Cylc is listed as one of the starting ISB, although Clint Sovie apparently won the job this spring.

I've taken the liberty of scanning the two pages that deal with Navy. They arn't the best quality, and I will try to get some better prints later, but for now they should suffice. Enjoy, and let me know if you catch any other mistakes the Athlon people made.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Karlos wasn't a starter. Marco & Reggie were the starters at A-back last year. Not that "starter" really means much at that position because we rotate so many guys, but technically those two were tops on the depth chart.

As for the returning starters... I got Campbell, Ballard (or Hall), Tomlinson, Rossi, Gallion, Harper, Pritchett, Cylc, Chan, Caldwell, Mahoney, Tidwell, Price, Little, McGown, Thrasher, and Bullen. That's 18, 17 if you count the fullbacks as one. I don't know where they got 15 from, maybe they don't count the fullbacks or the kicker.

Anonymous said...

Considering it is even easier to look up Navy's bowl recond than count our returning starters, it's hard to put a lot of credit on this review. They must not have access to www.cfbdatawarehouse.com. Oh well, you know that Navy is just one of those teams that these publications just have to put in there when they really want to only cover the big schools.