Embrace the Change

Navy's 1995 season opened on September 9 with a 33-2 win over SMU. It was one of the most pivotal moments in program history.

The Mids hadn't featured an offense in the top half of the country in scoring since the 1967 season that featured John Cartwright and Rob Taylor. Even during the George Welsh years, it was an elite defense that won games for the Mids; the 1978 Holiday Bowl team scored only 19.8 points per game. In the eight seasons under Elliot Uzelac and George Chaump, Navy only scored 30 points once against Division I-A competition: a 52-31 loss to #2 Notre Dame in 1990. In 1994, Navy managed to get by an 0-6 Lafayette team, 7-0, in a game where quarterback Jim Kubiak was sacked five times. To say that Navy wasn't known for good offense at the time is an understatement.

Everything changed against SMU. Navy's 562 total yards were, at the time, the fifth-most in school history. Their 424 yards on the ground were tied for third-most. The Mids' 33 points were the most the team had scored against a Division I-A opponent in 11 years. Quarterback Chris McCoy-- in his first start-- rolled up 398 yards of total offense to break Bill Byrne's school record of 375 set in 1985. By halftime, McCoy had already shattered Alton Grizzard's school record for rushing yards by a quarterback in a single game. He finished with 273, which was 58 more than what Monty Williams, Navy's leading rusher in 1994, had amassed all season. Navy managed only two runs of 20 or more yards that year. McCoy had runs of 72 and 69 yards in the second quarter alone.

This was the beginning of what has become known as Navy's "option era." The Paul Johnson-Ken Niumatalolo-Ivin Jasper playcalling trio rewrote the record books and led to the longest run of sustained success in school history.

One could use several measures to illustrate how the option era transformed Navy football, but my favorite may be the school record for career average yards per carry. Bob Craig, a member of the 1954 "Team Named Desire," set that record by averaging 5.7 yards per carry over three years. His teammate, Joe Gattuso (the elder), was number two on that list, with 5.5 yards per carry. Ned Oldham (1955-1957) was next at 5.2. Think of all the great Navy runners in the decades that followed: Bellino, Donnelly, Cooper, Meyers, McCallum. A Heisman winner. A two-time consensus All-American. None of those stars were in the top three.

Yet almost immediately upon the return of the spread option to Annapolis in 2002, that record was toast. Tony Lane wrapped up his career in 2003 after averaging a mind-boggling 8.9 yards per carry. That's over three yards per carry more than a record that stood for 50 years. Since 2003, Craig's once-untouchable average has been topped by seven Navy slotbacks: Lane, Eric Roberts, Reggie Campbell, Shun White, Gee Gee Greene, Geoffrey Whiteside, and DeBrandon Sanders. Malcolm Perry averaged 7.1 ypc playing two positions. A fullback, Noah Copeland, almost matched the old record at 5.6 ypc. Alex Tecza is averaging 6.0 ypc and is still going. And this is for players with a minimum of 100 career carries; guys like Dishan Romine, Zerbin Singleton, and CJ Williams fell just a few carries short of qualifying.

For all the talking heads who said the triple option was outdated, it was the option era that brought the Navy offense up to modern standards of the sport.

It also impacted me personally, since the offense was a primary reason I started writing. I am from San Diego, and growing up, I cheered for Navy and San Diego State. I watched a lot of WAC football, and it was then that I became enamored with Hawaii's offense under Paul Johnson. I knew nothing about it; I just knew it looked cool. It looked even cooler as a midshipman, seeing it run at Navy. However, the more I learned about it, the more frustrated I became with the stories I read about it. I noticed the same cliches over and over again, offering little insight and often treating the offense as a novelty. I decided to start writing the kinds of stories I wanted to read, and that eventually led to the creation of the sprawling media empire you now know as TheMidReport.com.

I mention this not to be self-absorbed but to demonstrate a point. If I can get over the end of the option era at Navy, you can, too.

Some people will balk at calling this the end of the option era, and I get it. There are plenty of option plays in the Wing-T, and we'll see them at Navy this year. But the "option era" wasn't about one play. It was a philosophy. While they each have their own individual styles, Johnson, Niumatalolo, Jasper, and Grant Chesnut are all practitioners of the same football orthodoxy. New offensive coordinator Drew Cronic, however, comes from a different background and will have his own way of doing things. He deserves the opportunity to do those things without others constantly bringing up the past.

Twitter is not real life, but it's a world I'm part of. Last year, it was miserable. Fans will always complain during a losing season, so that much didn't bother me. The nature of some of the complaints, on the other hand, did. The moment something went wrong in a game, my replies were full of people saying things like, "This wouldn't have happened under Niumatalolo!" or "Can we hire Kenny back?" It got very old very quickly. I was as upset as anyone when Niumatalolo was let go, but at some point, people need to accept reality for what it is and move forward. Indulging in dead-end frustration fantasies does nobody-- coaches, players, or fans-- any good.

I was disappointed when Niumatalolo was fired because I believed he was the best man for solving Navy's problems. But some people seem to believe in a revisionist history where there were no problems. There were. Lots of them. 2019 was a long time ago, and the offense has been broken ever since. We could rehash all the reasons why, but at this point, it doesn't matter. All that matters now is where the program goes from here.

I wrote last month that I believe triple option offenses are still viable based on conversations I've had with coaches. With a roster built to run the option, I thought it was Navy's best chance to have immediate success. But I also said to keep an open mind because it's a much harder call if you're the head coach. Navy spent the last two years trying to find an answer for the change in blocking rules and failed. The answer is out there, but if you're Brian Newberry, how much time do you have to keep looking for it? Do you stick with the same offense and have faith that things will be better the third time around? Or do you look for another proven system that could work with the players you have? I would have loved the former. I completely understand the latter.

So now Navy will run the Wing-T, and it makes a lot of sense. It's a different offense, but there is at least some carryover from what the Mids have been doing for the last 20 years. As far as personnel goes, it's nearly seamless, with the possible exception of the tight ends. It's also a lot of fun to watch; get ready to be frustrated by television cameras not knowing where the ball is. And to make the transition even smoother, we'll even hear all the same cliches we heard about the spread option: high school offense, not built for third and long, not built to come from behind, etc. Because it just wouldn't feel like Navy football without that.

More importantly, Newberry didn't just hire a Wing-T coach. He hired the Wing-T coach. Drew Cronic is an icon among Wing-T coaches, carrying the banner for the offense at the college level. Cronic wasn't just a Division I head coach; he was a successful one. In his first season in charge of Mercer, he led the Bears to their first SoCon winning record. In year two, his team ended the season second in the SoCon, their highest finish since joining the league. In year three, Mercer finished the season in the top 25 for the first time in school history. Last year, they made the FCS playoffs for the first time and advanced to the second round. That a coach of Cronic's caliber was willing to take a coordinator job at Navy says a lot, both about the school and about Newberry.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered about Navy's new offense, and we'll do our best to examine them over the next few months. Regardless of those answers, though, it's past time to accept the change. It's a new era of Navy football. It's more likely to be a winning one if you don't fight the people trying to make it happen.