A Reminder

Just a reminder that for the rest of the regular season I will be blogging primarily over at the Navy Football FanHouse. If you'd like to get in touch with me, email me at guyontheright at gmail.com

Sunday Rewind

Well, that Sucked- It's never fun to watch your team lose 34-0, but to watch your team's starting quarterback go down for the year is just gut-wrenching.What we saw yesterday was a team which was completely dominated and completely demoralized. Give the Rutgers "D" a lot of credit, they flew to the ball-carrier and came off blocks which such speed and tenacity that the option never was able to gain a foothold. By the same token, it should be acknowledge that the focus of this Navy team just wasn't there yesterday, and that "dumb" mistakes (ie. penalties, blocked punts, blown assignments, dropped passes) kept Navy from even making this one close.

Read More

Navy Loses Hampton, then Game

As it stands right now, disaster may be an understatement. How else you would label a 34-0 drudging at the hands of Rutgers, I'm really not sure.

Not only did Rutgers dominate the Midshipmen completely, but Starting Quarterback Brian Hampton dislocated his left knee in the first quarter and may be lost for the rest of the season. Hampton's injury, which came about halfway through the first quarter, proved to be the deciding factor in the game, as Navy's offense could never recover its composure. Sophomore Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada was inconsistent and ineffective in relief of Hampton, although Navy's offensive woes ran much deeper then just poor quarterback play.

Read More

Kettani Gets the Call

Things aren't going so hot for Navy fullback Matt Hall. The former starter has had a bit of a fumble problem this season,a problem which effectively killed a Navy scoring drive against Air Force on Saturday. He's also turned the ball over in key situations against ECU and Tulsa. With these struggles in mind, and a need to provide a relief for Navy's primary bulldozing fullback Adam Ballard, Coach Paul Johnson has decided to insert much-heralded sophomore Eric Kettani into the lineup.

Read More

Navy More then "Lucky"

I, along with just about every other writer who covers Navy football, have no idea where all this sprang from. Most likely it had to do with some on-the-field trash talk or behind the scenes stuff that none of us regular people see or hear about. When asked if the source of the comment was an Air Force player, Johnson responded with a "sure was." However when Johnson elaborated on his team being the "luckiest team in America," Navy's head Coach maintained that it wasn't just coming form the Falcons.

Read More

Mids in "Others" of Harris Poll

The Mids are slated ahead of Wake Forest (9 votes), NC State (8 votes), Texas Tech (5 votes), Miami (3 votes), and South Carolina (1 vote). Despite numerous text messages placed to his cell phone from the author of this post, the Ball Coach was unable to comment on how little the Harris Poll thinks of his Gamecocks. Mike Leach, still in shock over the decline of his superior offensive genius, merely reaffirmed his fondness of hail.

Read More

Navy 24, Air Force 17

I'll be the first to admit that once the Falcons converted a late fourth quarter onside kick, I thought the game was over for the Midshipmen. Air Force, it seemed, just had too much momentum, and having been in a similar situation against Tennessee, would have the confidence and experience to get the job done. Yet, despite my overly pessimistic outlook, the Navy defense rallied with two minutes left in the game to shut the door on a concerted fourth quarter Air Force comeback attempt, giving the Mids their fourth consecutive win against the Falcons. With the win, Navy improves to 5-1 on the season, and with games against Temple, Duke, Eastern Michigan, and Army, looks almost assured of becoming Bowl eligible.

Continue Reading

Navy "D' Stands Strong

The Navy defense did a great job early, forcing key turnovers which allowed the Mids to seize the momentum and never looks back. After forcing a quick three and out on the games first possession, the Midshipmen defense came back onto the field and stripped UConn tailback Deon Anderson on a screen pass. The Navy offense capitalized, going up 14-0 in front of a stunned Rentschler Field. Then, on the very next possession, David Mahoney stripped Terry Caulley on a draw play, adding insult to injury for a UConn offense which had difficulty finding it's way all game.

Continue Reading

Mids Need to Overcome Penalties

Discipline, needless to say, is something of a hallmark at a military academy. Yet you wouldn't know it by watching a tape of Navy's 41-17 win over UConn on Saturday. The Midshipmen, who routinely finish amongst the least penalized teams in the country, committed a staggering 12 penalties for 110 yards. That's more penalty yards then the Mids had in the first four games of the season combined (101), which in and of itself was already fairly high by Navy standards. So what's going on here? Head Coach Paul Johnson didn't even need to be asked about the issue after Saturday's game, skipping right to the problem in his opening statement.

Continue Reading (Navy Fan House)

BlogPoll Week 5

Don't worry, it's that time of the week again.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Ohio State	--
2	Auburn	1
3	Southern Cal	1
4	Florida	--
5	Michigan	3
6	Boise State	8
7	Louisville	1
8	West Virginia	4
9	Notre Dame	1
10	Texas	5
11	Georgia	2
12	Georgia Tech	14
13	Oklahoma	2
14	Oregon	2
15	Louisiana State	6
16	Iowa	1
17	Rutgers	4
18	Nebraska	7
19	Purdue	4
20	Boston College	6
21	Brigham Young	5
22	Wake Forest	3
23	Missouri	3
24	Arkansas	2
25	Navy	1

Dropped Out: TCU (#7), Virginia Tech (#18), Clemson (#19), Tennessee (#20), Tulsa (#24).

God what a beautiful poll. Just a preliminary guess, but I may be in the running for Mr. Bold, although Brian always has some weird crap going on.

Several Explanations:

Auburn and Southern Cal flip-flop. Mostly because I hate Southern Cal.

Michigan moves up three. I'm not a fan of the school, but they have a damn good football team.

Boise St. gets the nod at #6, which is most likely to draw a collective WTF from my fellow BlogPollers (although this genius knows what I'm saying.) The Broncos just beat up on a good Utah team this week, and only have Nevada and Fresno St. (1-3) standing in the way of an unbeaten season. I'm a mid-major kind of guy, so it makes sense that I go with the Nation's premier Mid-Major team.

Notre Dame is ninth. What can I say, I'm Catholic.

Georgia Tech is a good team. I don't know why I left them out for so long.

Oklahoma is still better then Oregon.

Rutgers gets the 17th spot off of this very simple form of reasoning: Rutgers Beat Up on Illinois. Illinois defeated Michigan State. Michigan State should have easily beat Notre Dame. Hence Rutgers should have beaten Notre Dame. The Enlightenment at its finest people.

Why I had Nebraska so high last week, I'm not really sure. I figured I should bring them back down to earth.

Boston College moves up five spots after beating Maine. There is no good explanation for this, except that i dislike a certain university hailing from Berkley, California.

BYU was sick against TCU. Mad Props to the Mormons.

After shellacking UConn, Navy makes it back into the Top 25. If this team executes the way they did Saturday, Rutgers is in for a rude awakening.

Games I Watched:
BYU at TCU
Auburn at South Carolina
Rutgers at South Florida (taped of course, I do have a life)
Navy at UConn
Purdue at Notre Dame
Boise State and Utah (more or less)
USC at Washington State
Houston at Miami

Big East Fans Debate Navy's Success

I love message board chatter, especially when it's coming from a Big East message boards. Shortly after Navy's 41-17 shellacking of UConn yesterday, the Big East message boards erupted in debate about how bad UConn is, which inevitably led to some discussion of how good Navy really is. So far, the results are mixed...

Continue Reading

Vote Brian Hampton "Player of the Week"

Navy doesn't get a whole heck of a lot of attention from the the big media sources, but somebody must have noticed what Brian Hampton did to the UConn defense yesterday. That's because "a panel of ESPN college football analysts" have selected Brian Hampton as a nominee for the Cingular All-American Player of the Week after Navy's 41-17 win over the Huskies. Who's on this panel I can only guess, but it was nice to see Mark May of all people sporting Hampton's praise on lat night's College Football Final. And why shouldn't he? Hampton was magnificent in yesterday's win, leading the offense to over 600 total yards. He ran 182 yards and three touchdowns while passing for 142 and a touchdown, all en route to Navy's most dominating performance of the season.

Continue Reading

Navy Offense Rolls

A 77-yard Brian Hampton touchdown pass to Reggie Campbell from the first play of scrimmage set the tone. On the play, Coach Johnson had Hampton make a "dummy check" for a pitch play to the motioning slotback. Picking up on what they presumed to be a genuine audible, the UConn defenders jumped the fake, allowing Reggie Campbell to get behind the safety. Hampton made a reverse pivot to freeze the defense, then gunned the ball downfield to Campbell, who made a great cut and picked up a block from Jason Tomlinson to get to the outside and score.

Continue Reading
(Photo By Bob Child, AP)