Jeff Monken was asked before his first training camp at Army 10 years ago to list the biggest challenges facing his football program. His list contained one item.
“We,” Monken said.
Monken, then 47, had been hired 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 fourteen seasons. Of far greater significance, the Army had lost twelve games in a row to the Navy, their bitter arch-rivals.
That this year’s Army team carries 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 and has nurtured great players who are confident and can outplay opponents with can punish precision.
The turnaround has been gradual, but this season’s near-perfect march has delighted those who remember the army’s glory days – or, more likely, those who read about them – the seasons between 1943 and 1950 when the Black Knights won two national won championships and were one. of America’s best college teams.
It’s true that Army is 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 quiet Independence Bowl.
Not that the College Football Playoff matters to many observers, including myself. I’ve covered the Army-Navy Game 11 times over the past two decades, and the pageantry surrounding the game — and the fact that these players can fight real battles together when they graduate — aren’t the only reasons I enjoy it . This is not a fancy air show, or a glorified try-out for a career in professional football, but pure competition.
A captivating yet intense Illinois native, Monken has brought Army football back from obscurity not only by recruiting smart and talented cadets who play football on the side, but also by working hard with an obsessive attention to detail. There have been no shortcuts.
“I think we’re often looked at as a team of little old guys and not very talented,” Monken said after his team defeated Tulane last week to win the conference title. “The fact is we have some talented guys. Are we as talented or more talented than the other teams we play? Maybe not. Probably not. But that doesn’t matter. You just have to have the best team on any given day to win.”
The military did this the old-fashioned way. While most top football players can opt for classes that are, shall we say, light on academics, the admission requirements for the United States Military Academy are strict, and the course loads and military obligations are onerous. Most Army football players attended the academy preparatory school two miles away before entering West Point.
Furthermore, Monken and the coaches from the other service academies form their teams without the help of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals, or by picking up players through the meat market who the NCAA’s transfer portal.
According to an academy spokesperson, Army athletes cannot accept NIL deals, which is the case make the biggest college stars millions of dollars. That’s because Black Knights players are considered employees of the federal government and active duty members, which prevents them from taking outside jobs.
Cadets can, and sometimes do, transfer from West Point. The academy does accept transfer students, but they are extremely rare because athletes must start their college education all over again as freshmen, regardless of 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 Oct. 19, Army was 7-0 and Navy 6-0, opening the possibility that these old foes could play for the conference championship a second time.
Military metaphors are often overused in this rivalry, but the game between Army and Navy is almost always won in the trenches, or on the line of scrimmage. This game must be played in the mud. Army is No. 1 and Navy is No. 8 in rushing offense among Football Bowl Subdivision teams.
They do not shy away from waving the flag during the Army-Navy game. In keeping with recent tradition, the Army will wear black uniforms in honor of the legendary 101st Airborne Division, and the Navy will wear white uniforms in honor of the elite Jolly Rogers fighter unit.
But the rivalry had swung so much in Navy’s favor — the Midshipmen would extend their winning streak over Army to fourteen games before it ended in 2016 — that some wondered whether Navy should let Army win every now and then.
“Because you have so much 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 win at Navy. “But you also don’t want it for your team and yourself. It’s a difficult question to answer. You feel sorry for them. But you don’t want your side to feel that pain.”
With the gray-coated Corps of Cadets and the Navy-coated Brigade of Midshipmen filling various parts of the stadium, and sometimes the U.S. President in attendance, it’s easy for most in the crowd to feel a wave of patriotism, especially when many come from military families. It’s an American tradition, in an apolitical way.
So it does matter that both teams are formidable again. Navy has had a bit of a slump the last four years, but Newberry has brought the Middies back this year. Monken’s first two Army teams won just six games combined, but Army has posted three 10-win seasons since 2017.
In 2016, Monken told me, “We are not physically as big, tall and tall and heavy as the teams we play. There are a lot of teams we play that are faster than us, more athletic than us. It ensures that these boys maximize their potential and get the best out of themselves.”
The Army doesn’t have an all-but-mythical Mr Outside (Glenn Davis) and Mr Inside (Doc Blanchard) like they did with those great national title teams under Earl ‘Red’ Blaik in the 1940s. The top students are now taking the NIL route – or going to the transfer portal if all else fails.
Monken could very well get a better, higher-paying job in the part of the college football world that has NIL and the transfer portal. However, that journey would certainly begin like his time in the army: with a blunt self-evaluation, as blunt and difficult as can be.