Jeff Monken was asked before his first training camp 10 years ago at Army to list the biggest challenges facing his football program. His list had one item.
“Us,” Monken said.
Monken, then 47, had been hired away from Georgia Southern to take over a team in the pits. The Black Knights, who represent the United States Military Academy at West Point, had one winning record in the previous 14 seasons. Of much more importance, Army had lost 12 games in a row to Navy, their bitter archrivals.
That this year’s Army team will take an 11-1 record, a No 19 national ranking and a conference championship into Saturday’s Army-Navy Game is proof that Monken has won his challenge, nurturing big players who are confident and can punish opponents with precision.
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The turnaround has been gradual, but this season’s near-perfect march has delighted those who remember – or, more likely, those who read about – Army’s glory days, the seasons between 1943 and 1950 when the Black Knights won two national championships and were one of America’s top college teams.
True, Army are not one of the 12 teams that will compete in the expanded College Football Playoff this season. The Black Knights won the American Athletic Conference, not one of the so-called Power Five, and they will play Marshall in the relatively low-key Independence Bowl.
Not that the College Football Playoff matters for many observers, including myself. I covered the Army-Navy Game 11 times over the last two decades, and the pomp and circumstance around the game – and the fact that these players may fight real battles together when they graduate – are not the only reasons I enjoy it. This is no fancy airshow, or a glorified tryout for a professional football career, but pure competition.
Monken, an engaging but intense Illinois native, has brought back Army football from near oblivion through not just landing smart and talented cadets who play football on the side, but also by hard work with an obsessive attention to detail. There have been no shortcuts.
“I think, oftentimes, we’re considered a team that has little old guys and is not very talented,” Monken said after his team beat Tulane last week to win the conference title. “The fact is, we’ve got some talented guys. Are we as talented or more talented as the other teams we play? Maybe not. Probably not. But that doesn’t matter. You just have to have the best team on a particular day in order to win.”
Army have done this the old-fashioned way. Whereas most top college football players can opt for classes that are, shall we say, light on academics, entrance standards at the United States Military Academy are rigorous, and course loads and military obligations are taxing. Most Army football players attended the academy’s prep school two miles away before entering West Point.
Moreover, Monken and coaches at the other service academies are molding their teams without the help of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals, or through scooping up players through the meat market that is the NCAA’s transfer portal.
According to an academy spokesperson, Army athletes cannot accept NIL deals, which can earn the biggest college stars millions of dollars. That’s because Black Knights players are considered federal government employees and active-duty service members, precluding them from taking on outside employment.
Cadets can, and sometimes do, transfer from West Point. The academy does accept transfer students, but they are extremely rare because athletes have to start their college educations all over again as freshmen, no matter how much athletic eligibility they have.
(The same rules apply at Navy, whose football team is 8-3 under second-year coach Brian Newberry. After each team won games on 19 October, Army were 7-0 and Navy 6-0, opening the possibility that these old foes could play a second time for the conference championship. Navy’s losses to Rice and Tulane scotched that.)
Military metaphors tend to be overused in this rivalry, but the Army-Navy game is almost always won in the trenches, or at the line of scrimmage. This game should be played in mud. Army are No 1 and Navy No 8 in rushing offense among Football Bowl Subdivision teams.
They don’t shy away from waving the flag at the Army-Navy game. Keeping with recent tradition, Army will wear black uniforms honoring the legendary 101st Airborne Division, and Navy will wear white uniforms saluting its elite Jolly Rogers fighter aircraft unit.
But the rivalry had become so tilted in Navy’s favor – the Midshipmen would extend their winning streak over Army to 14 games before it ended in 2016 – that some wondered if Navy should, well, let Army win now and then.
“Because you have such great respect for them, you don’t want to see their pain of losing,” former Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo told me about Army before the 2014 game, a 17-10 Navy victory. “But you also don’t want it upon your team and yourself. It’s a hard question to answer. You do feel bad for them. But you don’t want your side to feel that pain.”
With the gray-coated Corps of Cadets and navy-coated Brigade of Midshipmen filling up several sections of the stadium, and with the US President sometimes in attendance, it is easy for most in the crowd to feel a surge of patriotism, especially when many are from military families. It is an American tradition, in an apolitical way.
So it does matter that both teams are formidable again. Navy took a little dip in the last four years, but Newberry has brought back the Middies this year. Monken’s first two Army teams won only six games combined, but Army have three 10-victory seasons since 2017.
In 2016, Monken told me, “We’re not as physically big and tall and long and heavy as teams we play. There are a lot of teams we play that are faster than us, more athletic than us. It’s getting these guys to maximize their potential and be the very best we can be.”
Army do not have an all-but-mythic Mr Outside (Glenn Davis) and Mr Inside (Doc Blanchard) as they did on those great national-title teams under Earl “Red” Blaik in the 1940s. The top college guys now take the NIL route – or enter the transfer portal if things don’t work out.
Monken could very well end up getting a better, higher-paying job in the part of the college football world with NIL and the transfer portal. That journey, however, would be sure to begin like his stint at Army did: with some blunt self-evaluation, as blunt as difficult as it can be.
