Until this year, Army and Navy had not each started the college football season 5-0 in nearly eight decades.
That was the fall of 1945, weeks after World War II ended, back in the heyday when service academies were powerhouses in the sport. Army, led by Heisman Trophy winner Felix “Doc” Blanchard, was declared the national champion that year by The Associated Press, the second of back-to-back titles.
The two programs have not been ranked in the AP Top 25 poll at the same time since 1960.
The Cadets at West Point and Midshipmen in Annapolis have put their teams back on the map with these unbeaten starts thanks to old-school approaches built around fundamental play and eschewing some of the game's modern elements on and off the field.
“You want to be relevant,” Navy coach Brian Newberry said. “This is a humble group. It’s a hungry group. It’s still a group that has a chip on its shoulder, which I love, but we want to be significant in the landscape of college football here."
His team and Jeff Monken's at Army have coached their programs back to prominence as most others around the NCAA rely on the transfer portal to upgrade their rosters and can use name, image and likeness money to attract talent. Army, Navy and Air Force are not permitted to give out NIL funds, which in addition to the military obligations of attending makes recruiting even more challenging.
“It’s different because these are guys you’ve worked with, gone to class with, have done all these military trainings with,” said Navy linebacker Colin Ramos, a senior captain. "There aren’t 50 new guys on the team each year.”
Monken, in his 11th season, said it is no different now than when he took the job, even though the business of college sports has changed drastically around him.
“We weren’t given NIL money then, and there wasn’t any transfer portal,” Monken recalled. “This is how we build our team here, and it’s how college football teams over the course of the history of college football have built their teams: recruit high school players, you retain them in your program, you develop them and hope you can put a team together that can win. That’s just how we’ve got to do it here.”
It's working.
Army is tied for the fewest turnovers in the 133-team Football Bowl Subdivision with one, while Navy has just two. They're each in the top 30 in total offense and top 10 on fourth-down conversions, Army has the ninth-best defense and Navy is tied for No. 1 in red zone efficiency.
“We still have yet to play our best game,” Army defensive lineman and senior captain Cody Winokur said. "Not patting ourselves on the back too much and saying, ‘Oh look at us, look what we’ve done’ and more looking how we can get better, how we can continue to strive and be a better team as the season goes on and play our best football the second half of the year.”
Army and Navy are each one win away from bowl eligibility, which is a major turnaround from last season, when they were 6-6 and 5-7 and had the 113th- and 125th-ranked offenses, respectively.
While still using the triple-option offense that is largely a football relic outside the academies, Navy has thrown the ball 68 times this season and embraced a style that Newberry said has opened the eyes of many players who ordinarily would not have considered going there. That's still the third-fewest passing attempts in the FBS, and Army has the fewest with 38 to go along with the third-highest time of possession.
“I guess some people may find that unappealing or boring, but what’s boring about winning?” Monken said. "That’s what you’re trying to do is win.”
Navy was picked to finish 11th in the 14-team American Athletic Conference and Army fifth.
“Our whole entire careers we’ve been doubted,” senior fullback and Navy captain Daba Fofana said. “Coming to an academy, we always have a chip on our shoulder.”
Navy and Army are just outside the AP Top 25, both receiving votes last week. Army is a 26 1/2-point home favorite Saturday against the UAB on BetMGM Sportsbook, and Navy after a week off could be favored by double digits when it hosts Charlotte on Oct. 19.
There is a chance the two could meet in the AAC title game — on one of their campuses — in December, eight days before facing off in the annual Army-Navy game in Landover, Maryland. Propositioned with that possibility, Monken joked, “Does Navy even have a football team this year?” before saying, “We’re not athletic enough, fast enough, big enough to look ahead to anybody.”
His players have bought into that mentality.
“We listen to Coach Monken all the time and say, ‘Do your job and follow the plan,'” senior receiver Casey Reynolds said. “He said if we do that, then everything we want will be right in front of us."
Navy could be 6-0 and ranked when facing Notre Dame on Oct. 29 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and Army could be 9-0 going into its game against the Fighting Irish on Nov. 23 at Yankee Stadium in New York. While Fofana acknowledged players' minds drift to the future, he believes he and Ramos and the rest of the leaders do a good job of not getting ahead of themselves.
“There’s a thousand different possibilities of how the season ends,” Ramos said. "We’re not worried about any of that. We’re focused on the next game ahead of us.”
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