Browsing: Conference USA

With wins last weekend, both the Navy Midshipmen and the Air Force Falcons improved to 5-3 on the season, one win away from bowl eligibility. Navy has no teams above .500 remaining on its schedule and hosts 2-6 Florida Atlantic this Saturday; Air Force visits 1-6 Army on Saturday and has a date with Hawaii (1-6) in Colorado Springs on Nov. 16. Coaches and players can’t take wins for granted, but bowl projections have to. And if some of the most well-known postseason guessers  — CBSSports.com’s Jerry Palm, college football wizard Phil Steele and ESPN projectors Mark Schlabach and Brad…

Three quick service academy football hits, before everybody gets their hoops fix this evening: 1. Sullivan Award video. As After Action tweeted earlier this week (Hey, let’s all follow that account, could we?), Army linebacker Andrew Rodriguez was presented with the James E. Sullivan Award on Tuesday, given to the top amateur athlete in the country. It’s an elite club, with names both historical (Army’s Doc Blanchard) and contemporary (Michael Phelps, Peyton Manning and, yes, this guy). Head here for a West Point-produced behind-the-scenes video of Rodriguez at the awards ceremony. 2. Dowd gets his due. A 3.9 GPA. In…

Consolidation. Improved “stability.” An “exciting new venture.” Sure, it sounds like the spin the military might put on the latest budget cuts, but it’s actually the spin the Mountain West Conference is putting on the latest college-conference shakeup: A merger of schools from the MWC and Conference USA to create an as-yet-unnamed superconference starting in 2013. Air Force will be a charter member of the new league, which is slated to have 16 football teams in its first season. According to the release, the superconference will look to expand to 18-24 teams and will be the first to set up…

During the Jan. 24 teleconference that welcomed Navy football into the Big East starting in 2015, conference commissioner John Marinatto was pretty clear: “I’m not done with regard to our expansion efforts.” Less than a month later, he’s apparently made good. Multiple reports, including one from USA Today, have Memphis joining the conference in all sports as of 2013. If the rest of the conferences’ arrivals and departures go off as scheduled, Navy will enter a 12-team football league, likely split into two to-be-determined divisions, in 2015. Memphis leaves Conference USA to join the Big East, creating a reunion of…

As the rumblings of Navy and Air Force joining the Big East as football-only members become more than rumblings, some fans might wonder why Army has been the odd service academy out. Why wouldn’t the Black Knights want to become a football-only member of a conference without a regional identity? Well, it didn’t work last time. Army finished 10-2 in 1996, with a 10-1 regular-season record tarnished only by a road loss to Syracuse and an up-and-coming Chunky soup spokesman. The next year, the Black Knights announced they’d begin play in Conference USA in 1998. From 1998 to 2004, the…

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