The first time I covered a Navy football game from the press box at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, my friend Christian, who was still writing for the Post at the time, was kind enough to show me around. The best tip he gave me was to walk through the visiting team's coaches' box after the game. Coaches are usually in a hurry to get to the locker room and occasionally leave behind a few pages of their game plan. Finding these scraps can be an invaluable peek behind the curtain for someone like me who enjoys football for the Xs and Os. It's also a great way to stay humble; once you see actual football plans written by actual football people, you realize that you don't know nearly as much about the game as you think.

Armed with the knowledge that I don't have much knowledge, I try to ask coaches about Xs and Os whenever I get the chance. I don't always get a straight answer-- nobody ever wants to reveal state secrets-- but every nugget of information I do get brings me (and hopefully you) one step closer to understanding.

That's what I was thinking when I asked Ken Niumatalolo about his team's offense at the media luncheon before Navy kicked off spring practice in 2019. The offense had many problems the year before, and I wondered if he planned to make any changes. Niumatalolo eventually got around to answering my question, but only after he spent a good 2-3 minutes talking about the importance of team culture.

"I don't look at schematic stuff; I look at the cultural stuff that we have to do," he said at the time. "When we've won, we've been a close team. We've been looking at other games from other years, and it's similar stuff schematically. But the way guys play, buying into what we're doing, those are the things, I think."

Some people would be annoyed at that answer. It's easy to roll your eyes when coaches talk about team culture. Coaching is a profession where it's hard to tell who is genuine and who isn't; many guys have a public face that looks different from what is said behind closed doors.

With Niumatalolo, though, talk of team culture is more than just lip service.

"Your culture has to be strong," he said. "Strategy comes and goes, but if the foundation of your culture is strong, I think your program stays strong, staying true to your values and what you're about."

Niumatalolo isn't alone in stressing the importance of culture. Many coaches do, which makes sense. Culture is set at the top, but it's something that the players can own and control. While the coaches set the example to follow, the best teams don't need them to enforce it; the players do that themselves.

Because team culture is so internalized, it's understandable that players take it personally; they feel a sense of ownership. I thought about that after last year's Army-Navy Game. Navy linebacker Diego Fagot ruffled some feathers with his postgame comments, alluding to differences in each team's culture when answering a question about his team's response to an early Army touchdown.

"They say they're the 'last of the hard,' and quite frankly, we took that to heart," he said. "They think their culture's better than ours, and you can clearly see how they scored in the opening drive, and they thought it was gonna keep going their way throughout the whole game. But I mean, we're not gonna lay down for them. And so I think we were just consistently coming back, coming back, coming back, and it ended up in our favor. So I don't really know if they're really the last of the hard."

He wasn't done. Asked about the Navy defense's performance in the second half, he had this to say:

"Again, it kind of goes back to that culture piece. We've faced a lot of adversity this year, and guys keep consistently coming back and battling and not giving up. And so, especially in the second half, regardless of the score, we're gonna keep playing as hard as we can. We pride ourselves on that. I mean, I can't say enough about how they think they're the last of the hard, but that's just not the case. They're our little brothers."

He expounded on those thoughts on Twitter the next day.

All of it ruffled some feathers at the time. Admittedly, that "little brothers" comment was unnecessarily antagonizing, and it's almost certainly plastered all over the Army locker room this week. As for the rest of it, though... Was anything he said wrong?

Every school hypes itself on social media to market itself to recruits, Navy included. Army's brand of puffery is a little different, though. They tend to award themselves superlatives, declaring themselves winners of non-existent contests (National Champions of Toughness! Last of the Hard! America's Team!). As an outsider, it just makes me roll my eyes, but I've always wondered if players paid attention to that kind of thing. Fagot's comments certainly answered that question.

The whole affair had slipped my mind until earlier this season when ESPN did a story on Andre Carter II and his NFL prospects. While there, Ryan McGee took us on a tour of the Army football facility's bathroom, featuring Air Force and Navy logos in the urinals.

Ah yes, peeing on the other guy's logo. So hate, much rivalry. McGee's comment was that this was a service academy thing, but it's not a service academy thing. It's an Army thing, like leaving the star off of Navy's logo or not capitalizing "Navy" even in an official capacity. Again, this is all sort of cringe-worthy stuff in a vacuum, and if that's what they need to motivate themselves, great. But with Army, it's really just the tip of a cultural iceberg that, as Fagot noted, revolves around hating Navy.

Consider Fagot's introduction to the Army-Navy rivalry. While he was at NAPS, David Corley Jr., then the wide receivers coach at Army, took to Twitter to trash-talk Navy players:

Sort of odd to think that someone who just ran for 250 yards was "shook," but I digress.

Lest you think this was just some assistant going rogue on his way to his next job, here is Lawrence Scott, Army's Director of Player Development at the time, mocking the anguish of Navy players later that year:

If you're wondering what a Director of Player Development does, here was his job description:

In this role he directly oversees the personal, professional and leader development modules of the Army football team. He also provides academic, personal, emotional and spiritual support for the team, ensuring they have all the resources they need in all areas of life to be successful.

It is hard to reconcile someone with that job description-- the guy overseeing leadership development and providing spiritual support to the team-- taking to Twitter to mock another team's players. It's one thing for coaches to take jabs at each other and for players to do the same. But coaches, the supposed adults in the room, tearing down players? That's a horse of a different color, and it's hard to fault Fagot for simply noting what members of the Army staff were saying themselves in public.

It also stands in sharp contrast to the image of Ivin Jasper and Buddy Green consoling a heartbroken Trent Steelman after his fumble cost Army the 2012 game.

Different culture, indeed. When Jeff Monken says that Navy can kiss his ass, that isn't him getting carried away at a pep rally. He means it. That's his culture.

So be it. The players can sort all this out; as an outsider, it doesn't make much of a difference to me. It is a little sad, though, if you're one of those people who still hold onto the romantic notion that the Army-Navy Game was a contest of brothers-in-arms who were on the same team every day but one. Those days are long gone, if they ever truly existed.

The only real shame to me is from a branding perspective. Army-Navy has always been popular in part because everything about it just felt different. Team A hating Team B isn't different; that's a cliche in college football. To be fair, the chest-thumping has been fairly muted from official Army channels this year as far as I can tell. I don't know if that's because of last year's result or this year's record, but it's a pot just begging to boil over either way.

For better or worse, the rivalry has changed.