By George Pohly

@GPohly on Twitter

Welcome back, Armada.

This is homecoming week in the northern Macomb County town, and the football team is brimming with confidence after two victories that followed a 12-game losing streak.

“It’s a lot more fun,” junior Jackson Mahaffy said as the Tigers gathered for practice Tuesday. “We actually can joke around a little bit, it’s not so tense.

“We now know what it feels like to win. We’ve got to keep working, and we’ve got to win this homecoming game.”

To say the Tigers’ season has been unusual would be an understatement.

On Labor Day weekend, they lost a Blue Water Area Conference game by 50 points to Richmond.

The following week, they beat Yale 15-13 and stopped a 12-game losing streak when a Bulldog intercepted a last-play pass, but was tackled by Mitch Shafer in the end zone for a safety.

And then last week, on the road against Imlay City, the Tigers committed five turnovers but wound up winning 35-24 to lift their BWAC record to 2-1. They are 2-2 overall.

“It wasn’t a clean game by any means,” senior quarterback Jared Couch said of the Imlay City contest. “But I think it was good that we could make a lot of mistakes and still come out with a win.”

The Tigers broke down footage of their 57-7 loss to Richmond and arrived at important conclusions.

“If you look at the score you think, ‘Oh, they just got blown out,’” Dylan Szafranski said. “But there was a lot of good to it. Richmond didn’t run a lot on us. We played a good game despite (giving up) a few big plays.

“We just figured that we’ve got to amp it up, that we’ve got to work harder.”

Todd Stump, the Armada coach, said the Tiger players themselves dealt with many of the issues they saw in the replay of the Richmond loss.

“The kids saw it, and they changed on their own,” Stump said. “We (coaches) didn’t do anything different. They said, ‘OK, we are that close. We just need to do a little more to get there.’

“They held themselves accountable, and it’s been fun.”

Against Yale, the Tigers showed Stump more of the positive vibe that he believed had been created since the end of Armada’s 0-9 season of 2015.

“Every time you watch film, you say, ‘They’re playing really, really hard,” Stump said. “You saw that the kids just kept playing, they kept fighting, kept working hard. That was a nice thing to see.

“They worked their tails off from the first play to the last play.”

The atmosphere at Armada in support of a team that had lost 12 in a row stuck with Stump.

“The fans were awesome,” the coach said. “Our new band director is awesome; he’s got the band going. The whole atmosphere was awesome.

“And I think the kids realized that that little bit of extra work, that little extra effort, can make a difference.”

Couch completed 14 of 26 passes for 152 yards and two touchdowns against Imlay City. He also ran for a touchdown as Armada climbed above .500 in the BWAC for the first time since Week 4 of the 2013 season.

Szafranski, an 11th-grader, had five tackles against the Spartans, and Mahaffy and junior Logan Newlands had four each.

“We didn’t play great,” Stump said. “We turned the ball over five times, but the kids kept answering the call. They still believed they could get the job done.

“We started slow, but they focused on the task at hand and then things fell in our favor.”

Almont is 1-2 in the BWAC and 2-2 overall. Armada hasn’t beaten the Raiders since 2004.

But Stump liked the approach the Tigers took to facing their long-time rivals, and he liked how they kept in perspective homecoming activities that can be distractions.

“They’re focused on what they’re supposed to be doing,” Stump said. “They’re on Hudl watching films of themselves and our opponent. They’re in my (classroom) asking questions.

“They’re just executing better. They’re starting to understand how the fine details work, how things fit together.”

The Tigers, it seems, are a study in the importance of study.

“All the games we’ve played, there’s been some positives,” Couch said. “We haven’t played a game we couldn’t learn from.”