Army Football Preview: STAP

We're all jonesing for some football, am I right?  I mean, we're ready to start talking about the season?

Sure we are.

So okay.  This post serves two purposes.

First, I want to hit you up one last time for donations to Team RBG's Swim Across the Sound fund.  Three members of the Army Swim Team, Class of 1995, are hitting the water on Saturday in support of St. Vincent's Hospital's Cancer Center.  For those of you who know or knew the guys on the team, it'll be me, Kurt, and Andy swimming alongside my buddy Chris, a former Navy corpsman turned Connecticut-based hospital executive.  Chris very graciously stepped in when our teammate Dave couldn't make it, and he's raised $1500 for the cause, and that's awesome.  But folks, we need to crush that, yeah?

We'll be swimming in memory of Andy's late wife, who passed just a few short months ago after her own prolonged battle with cancer.  We'll be swimming in support of a program that does community outreach for cancer screenings locally here in Connecticut, that also supports families going through the grind of cancer treatment.

Army Swimmers, Class of 1995, at our 20th reunion.
From left to right: Dave, Coach Bosse, me, Matt, Andy, and Kurt.

If you can't support that, I don't know what to tell you.  Cancer doesn't discriminate.  It could've been you or me as easily as it was Andy these last few years.  My story is here, if you're interested.

2017 P-Wins Rankings: Army vs. the 2018 Schedule

The second purpose for this post is to give you fine folks some summer school-type homework.  We're doing a post on Army's offense in a few weeks that gets into the details of triple-option theory.  For that, I want you to watch a couple of old games with specific viewing emphasis.  Each of these games runs about two and a half hours without commercials, which is why I'm giving them to you now, a couple of weeks ahead of when we're actually going to talk about them.

First up: the Heart of Dallas Bowl, 2016.

What to watch:

• They ran a lot of Speed-Option in this game, getting the slotbacks outside the tackle-box.  Much more than we typically saw in 2017.
• By comparison, they made less use of the Rocket Sweep.
• Despite the increased use of the Option outside, critical points in the game still turned on individual efforts from QB Ahmad Bradshaw.

Second game: Duke at Army, 2017:

What to watch:

• How well Army's defense played.  In fact, both defenses were pretty good.  Really, this game was decided by turnovers and mistakes.
• How similar Duke's offense was to Army's.  Really.  Duke ran a bunch of spread-option concepts, and especially once they started struggling with the pass rush, they gave QB Daniel Jones a lot of run/pass options.  The QB Keeper eventually came to serve the same basic purpose in Duke's offense as the Fullback Dive did in Army's.
• Army didn't pitches outside much, and when they did, it didn't work very well.
• FB Andy Davidson had a monster game.

The Heart of Dallas Bowl is due in two weeks, on August 14th.  The Duke game is due two weeks after that, on August 28th.

Go Army!  Beat Training Camp!!!