Amon G. Carter Stadium, the home of TCU football and the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl, is a labyrinth. Every time I've been there, I've made a wrong turn and had to ask for directions. This year, I got lost again after the Navy-Oklahoma game, taking the elevator down from the press box and wandering down a corridor looking for the postgame press conference. The route was a dead end, and tired of looking like even more of a doofus than usual, I decided to use a cheat code and cut across the field to get to the football pavilion on the other side. At least that way, I could see where I was going.
As I walked down the tunnel and onto the field, the trophy ceremony was wrapping up. Since everyone who would have been interviewed at the press conference was still there, I figured there was no rush to get to the conference room. Lingering for a while to take in the scene, I was a buoy in a sea of happy people: players, coaches, family, and friends all reveling in the moment. Smiles, hugs, and high-fives were passed around like Halloween candy. Getting lost turned out to be serendipity; I would've hated to miss out on the experience of witnessing all of it.
Over the last four years, I saw, and was part of, some hard conversations. They're part of the job if you're a coach or a player, but you still can't help but feel for guys coming out of the locker room to face the music after a loss. And if you think fans take losses hard, it's nothing compared to the people with skin in the game. Players, coaches, administrators, and support staff work tirelessly to put a winner on the field. People dedicate their professional lives to it. When it doesn't happen, it gnaws at them in a way only a Man in the Arena truly understands.
Those hard times give context to the celebration at the end of the Armed Forces Bowl. It wasn't only about winning the game; it was the cherry on top of a multi-year process. But the goal of that process isn't just to produce one winning season. It's to make winning seasons the norm in Annapolis; to have Navy playing games of national significance every year. To that end, a few relevant takeaways from 2024 will help determine if there will be more celebrations in the future.
Things were never as bad as people thought
When Brian Newberry was promoted to head coach following the 2022 season, the pick was met with mixed reviews. Those who followed Navy understood what Newberry meant to the program and were happy to see so much of the staff retained. National writers were less impressed. Stewart Mandel mocked the hire. Dennis Dodd also panned it, but he at least asked a reasonable question: Did it make sense to make an internal hire from a team that had just endured three straight losing seasons?
To answer that question, you have to understand what the problems were and what they weren't. There was no shortage of knee-jerk speculation about the cause of Navy's troubles, even (and maybe especially) among Navy fans. Some believed that recruiting had fallen off. Others said joining a conference had finally caught up to the Mids. Perhaps those teams had "solved" the option. The success enjoyed by Air Force and Army led some impatient fans to call for an overhaul of the entire program.
It's a good thing that didn't happen, because it would have erased the existing culture and infrastructure without addressing the real issues: rebuilding the roster after the pandemic and finding the right offense after the blocking rule changes.
Air Force's struggles this season should have been illuminating to fans wondering why Navy had underperformed over the last four years. After winning 29 games over the previous three seasons, the Falcons finished 5-7 in 2024. Their offense led the nation in rushing in 2021 and 2022 and was #2 in 2023. This year, they were #10, with a 100 ypg dropoff from their high-water mark in 2022. All of this happened as Air Force lost the benefit of having turnbacks, with no remaining players able to take advantage of the COVID redshirt year. While turnbacks helped in the short term, they hampered the long-term development of the roster. It's a good illustration of how changing the roster-building process can upset the winning formula at a service academy.
Air Force sent players home when the pandemic hit and created a de facto redshirt program. Army put the football team in an on-campus hotel and changed rules to give formerly ineligible players a chance to play an extra season. Navy did none of these things, and retention suffered, not just at USNA, but at the prep school, too. Success at service academies is dependent on developing whole classes of players and priming the pump so each one is ready as a group to step up when it's their turn. Multiple Navy classes were hit hard, and it would take time to recover from that, especially when all of Navy's opponents had unprecedented amounts of experience.
Today, the roster is stable. While year-over-year turnover is still expected like always, the pandemic's effects are no longer an albatross.
Finding the right offense after the rule changes was the other piece of the puzzle, and this one took more than the passage of time to solve. However, by effectively blending elements of the traditional Navy option offense with new ideas, Drew Cronic introduced an offense the roster could easily adapt to. I also think that Navy's schematic problems last year, not to mention injuries, hid much of the talent already there. Most of this season's playmakers were on the field last year, too.
Even when things were at their lowest, there were signs that the foundation was still in place. The defense always played at a high level. The 2023 team finished .500 in the conference and had a chance to beat 11-win Memphis on the last drive. The 2022 team took Notre Dame to the wire and defeated #17 UCF. I think there was a feeling around the program that if the offense could get back to even an average level, that would be enough to win.
Cronic even alluded to this at his introductory press conference.
"If you could score one more touchdown and not give up one more touchdown each game, all of a sudden, you have a 10 to 14-point swing," he said. "Now you're winning nine games. You're winning ten games."
Sure enough.
Navy didn't need an overhaul. They needed specific answers to specific problems, and they got them. 2024 wasn't lightning in a bottle but a return to form.
The "service academy game" formula has changed
I have no interest in gambling. For those who do, "service academy unders" has been as close to a sure thing as there is.
Games between service academies are usually low-scoring. The clock doesn't stop much because they all focus on running the ball. Because their offenses are so similar, the defenses are used to practicing against similar looks. This leads to plenty of drama but also a shortage of points.
This year, Navy broke the mold. Against Army and Air Force, the Mids had 841 total yards and won by a combined score of 65-20. In 2023, Navy averaged 1.9 yards per play against Air Force. This year, they averaged 7.3. At the same time, Navy's defense was as stingy as they've always been. One might be able to write these results off as a fluke if Navy had won one or the other in blowout fashion, but the fact that both Army-Navy and Navy-Air Force were so similar while Army-Air Force maintained the service academy stereotype suggests something has changed the dynamic.
That something is Drew Cronic. Army and Air Force rolled out the same defense they always do against Navy, but last year's defenses couldn't stop this year's Navy offense.
Interestingly enough, this was the effect that Jeff Monken was going for when he let longtime offensive coordinator Brent Davis go after the 2022 season. He hired record-setting coordinator Drew Thatcher from Division II Nebraska-Kearney to implement a new offense. On the record, Monken gave two reasons for the change. One was seeing the writing on the wall regarding what the cut-blocking rule change meant for option offenses. The other was that he was frustrated by being unable to move the ball in service academy games. Against Navy and Air Force, Army averaged only 108 yards per game on the ground in the two seasons before the change. Since Newberry became Navy's defensive coordinator in 2019, Army has yet to score more than one offensive touchdown in the Army-Navy game. Monken was tired of it.
"Those games are like if you said, 'O.K., two guys are going to fight. You each get a sledgehammer, and you hit him as hard as you can with a sledgehammer, and then he gets to hit you back with his sledgehammer, and then you hit him back with a sledgehammer, and the last one standing wins,'" Monken told Sports Illustrated at the time. "I'm not saying this offense is all of a sudden going to blow the doors off of it and we're going to score all these points. I have no idea, but I know we need to give ourselves a better chance to win the football game on offense and score more points."
The new offense didn't work, so Monken doubled down on his sledgehammer and returned to a more traditional look. Navy's change, however, did "blow the doors off of it" in service academy games, which puts Air Force and especially Army in a difficult position.
For years, Army has crafted their schedule to prepare for the Navy game. In the ten seasons from 2014-2023, Army had three weeks off before the Navy game seven times. In 2018, those three weeks were preceded by games against Colgate and Lafayette. In 2020, the game was an actual Army home game. From 2021-2023, Navy had decimated rosters while Army had more than a dozen players getting an extra season of eligibility. To their credit, Army has turned these advantages into six wins in those ten years. But those wins were all the same nail-biters that Monken described. The moment Navy got its act together and Army didn't have those advantages, the Mids won comfortably, and against the winningest team in Army history.
Obviously, none of this is a guarantee that Navy is about to go on another streak of seven straight CIC Trophies. But it's a good sign that the status quo will no longer get the job done.
Some changes might be coming for next year, no matter what. Air Force will almost certainly be better in 2025. Their biggest problem was experience, and after a season of taking their lumps, now they have it. Army may also look a bit different. If their power-heavy offense was built to suit the players they had, with quarterback Bryson Daily and three offensive linemen on the way out, a new cast of characters might have different strengths they'll try to highlight. However, I think it will take more than just a natural evolution to solve the problem.
Either way, the pressure is now on Army and Air Force to prove they can either slow Navy down or keep pace. The days of every service academy game looking like a three-hour rugby maul are done.
The team learned how to win
Before Navy's slide over the last four years, the program had the longest stretch of sustained success in its history. This year can be viewed as a return to Navy's winning ways. But while that's true from a program perspective, it isn't the case as far as the team goes. There is a difference. None of the players on this year's team were part of the 2019 Liberty Bowl squad. None of them had been part of a winning season in Annapolis. For them, there was no getting "back" to winning. They had to learn as a team what it takes to win in the first place.
A team "learning how to win" might sound like a coaching cliche, but this year's Navy team was a great illustration of what that means. The Mids won their first six games by an average of 25 points. They didn't have the weight of expectations at the beginning of the year, and opponents were caught off guard by Navy's new offense. But after the hot start, the vibe started to change. The Mids were in the top 25 and getting a lot of media attention going into the Notre Dame game, and after coughing up six turnovers in a blowout loss, Newberry felt that the spotlight might have gotten to his team. The following week against Rice, the Mids had to play through delays, weather, and a slick playing surface, and they did a poor job dealing with the curveballs. When they had another opportunity in the spotlight against Tulane, Blake Horvath got hurt, and the Mids laid another egg.
At that point, Navy was a team that had yet to learn how to win. When faced with unusual or adverse circumstances, they didn't perform to the best of their ability.
But over the last three games, something changed. You could almost see the moment it happened in the second quarter of the ECU game. Horvath was injured, and the Mids seemingly couldn't move the ball no matter what they tried. But they rallied for 34 second-half points behind Braxton Woodson. Against Army, they stepped into the brightest spotlight they had all season and played arguably their best game. Then against Oklahoma, the Mids dug themselves out of a 14-0 hole to take the lead against an SEC opponent and held on with a great defensive play at the end. In their last three games, the Mids overcame almost all of the same situations that sank them earlier in the year.
When I was 12, my brother taught me how to drive in his old Jeep. On the way home from the beach, we'd stop at the 7-11 on King's Grant Rd. for a Slurpee. When we came out, he'd toss me his keys and say, "Well, you're getting us home." His Jeep had a manual transmission, so it wasn't pretty. But one day, he tossed me the keys, and everything clicked. There wasn't a gradual learning curve; I just sat in the driver's seat, and for whatever reason, I knew what I was doing. I rowed through the gears like I was at LeMans. I can't explain why I understood. I just did.
I feel like Navy experienced a similar epiphany at the end of the season. They didn't understand what it took to win until suddenly they did. Whatever trials they faced throughout the season, they learned from them. In doing so, they turned a "making progress" season into one that ranks among the most memorable of the last 50 years. It bodes well for the future.
