An unnamed player for West Point’s football team, the Army Black Knights in 2024. (West Point Football via Twitter)
(Tribune News Service) — Somewhat surprisingly, it is a good time to be a service academy in college football.
Navy and Army are each 4-0 for the first time since 1945 and outscoring opponents by more than three touchdowns per game. Air Force (1-3) is off to a rough start with an inexperienced team but has averaged 10 wins over the past four full seasons and last year spent time in the College Football Playoff top 25 rankings as it surged to an 8-0 start.
“I think it’s great recognition for our academies and men and women in uniform,” said Navy coach Brian Newberry when asked about the attention Army and Navy are garnering this year. “I think it speaks to our times a little bit, you know, the academy teams are unique. They’re developmental programs. They’re not dealing with the portal and NIL, and I think it speaks to character of the teams and how close the players are. There’s a lot to be said for playing with guys you love and trust and have been together and have relationships with — teams that play for each other and are certainly playing for something else.”
A fraction of a second can mean everything in sports, and it’s in those fragments of time that Navy quarterback Blake Horvath has found his niche.
Saturday will bring the first meeting of the year between service academies, when Navy visits Air Force at 10 a.m. in Falcon Stadium.
A quick unpacking of the issues raised by Newberry that the academies are fighting and, at this point, overcoming.
First, the top NIL players are cashing in, but those aren’t the players the academies have ever targeted. It’s extremely rare for an academy to sign a four-star recruit, let alone the five-star athletes who can set their own markets. The NIL availability for teams from Group of Five conferences with which Air Force, Army and Navy are competing for players is still evolving and doesn’t always trump the guaranteed job that comes with graduation and active-duty service that the academies can promise economically minded prospects.
Plus, there’s the darker side to NIL. UNLV experienced this last week when it lost its starting quarterback when he felt he hadn’t received what he was promised in NIL money and left the team in the middle of an unbeaten start to the season. The academies aren’t training mercenaries and don’t have to worry about what happens when the checks bounce.
Air Force has lost three in a row, while Navy is unbeaten and receiving Top 25 votes.
The portal has proven to be a bigger challenge, as it allows for the free movement of talent. Recent years have shown that Group of Five teams can frequently land players from Power Four teams who weren’t pleased with their situations. And the best players from the Group of Five routinely jump to the power conferences. This keeps rosters stocked with talent, though there are challenges that come with routinely turning over large percentages of rosters.
The academies must always replenish from within, where their opponents can routinely scour the open market to plug gaps.
“If there were 32 teams in the NFL and 31 of them were able to bring in free agents and one wasn’t. Let’s be real, if you were that one, you would like to have it where that field is a little bit level,” Air Force coach Troy Calhoun said in August. “But it’s not. So what you do is we’ve got to try to create some experience with guys. Can you do that in practice? We’re sure going to push it, see how much we can.”
But the results have shown this disadvantage hasn’t proven insurmountable, even against some of the best resourced teams in the nation. Air Force, after all, has won five of its past six games against teams from Power Five conferences. The Falcons have also won their past five bowl games dating back to 2016.
The advantage that Air Force coaches have mentioned in the days of the portal is that they can focus their recruiting effort on high school players while other programs are monitoring so many different avenues (portal, junior colleges, high schools and recruiting their own players so they don’t leave). Falcons coaches can stay in one lane. To borrow a Calhoun-esque baseball analogy, your batting average will only improve if you see the same hurlers over and over and can better recognize the pitches.
And, while most schools have to secure their commitments early, the academies don’t have to allocate a finite number of scholarships and can sift through the leftovers to uncover talent that had been overlooked. Air Force has a number of players like this, including two who figure to start in the backfield Saturday — quarterback John Busha and fullback Dylan Carson.
“A lot of those things are true,” Air Force offensive coordinator Mike Thiessen said in August of the recruiting challenges facing the Falcons that also face the other academies. “But they can very easily be flopped the other way around.”
The biggest advantage the service academies have created for themselves is found in their style of play. In choosing to be different, particularly on offense, they present challenges most teams don’t often see. And by relying heavily on ground-based attacks — with variations coming in formations and play designs — they alleviate the need to compete for top-end talent at the skill positions.
“Our offensive coordinator Cody Worley always says you have to be better or be different,” Army coach Jeff Monken told The Athletic. “We’re not going to be better athletically than our opponents, so we’ve got to do something different. What we’re doing this year again makes us different from most other people.”
Should Army and Navy continue thriving, the national attention on the academies figures to intensify. This week The Athletic, CBS Sports and Forbes were among the outlets featuring the pair and how long it has been since they have each jumped to such strong starts. This begs the question, does the rising tide lift all three boats? Will recruits on the fence be more prone to consider the military commitment if the football opportunity is enhanced? And as a result, will the recruiting pool from with the three programs fish grow larger?
Calhoun dismissed the suggestion of Army and Navy success carrying over to Colorado Springs, saying his program needed to just worry about itself.
Monken went further in his interview with The Athletic.
“Here’s hoping they lose every game,” he said of Navy.
The success may be different. The rivalries have remained unchanged.
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