This guy does:
Whether an Army or Navy player has a good game or a bad one is really inconsequential to his future. There are no contracts riding on his performance. He, not his agent, signed his contract four years ago, and millions were not involved, nor was there a signing bonus. Now he will serve out that contract without holding out for another million or renegotiating his free-agency; he has none. His rookie training camp next year will be at Ft. Benning or Pensacola or Quantico. He will be issued new “equipment” that Nike doesn’t label, and he will disappear from the sports pages forever. For the next few years he will spend this Saturday in December watching “the Game” (and “the ugly”) from a hot tent in some unpronounceable country at 3 a.m. or listening to it while standing watch on a ship’s bridge, or have it piped into his tank or cockpit. But he will not miss the “ugly.” No matter what, he will be there.
Yep.
I didn’t watch the game this year for the first time in 6 years.
I did, however, have ATC relay scores to me while I was out doing God’s Work (ASW).
I remember steaming in JAXOA one year during the game. CO told me (I was the Navigator, naturally) to find an anchorage as close as possible to the TV transmitter so we could pick up the game and pipe it on CCTV. Not so easy on a deep draft out of NORVA and nobody onboard who knew where the TV towers were in Jacksonville.
Army won, but we had a great steel beach barbeque for dinner after the game. Set the anchor watch overnight and holiday routine the next day. (And the CO was not a Boat School grad, either.)
I thoroughly enjoyed John Feinstein’s “A Civil War: Army Vs. Navy A Year Inside College Football’s Purest Rivalry.” It’s hard to beleive that it’s over 20 years old now. Some of the players then are probably 0-6s now.
And some of those Army guys are O-8. Ah well, you can’t win ‘em all.
MacArthur said it best, but unfortunately genetics has passed the service academies by. Pride and tradition dictate that they be competitive with the “big kids” (i.e., BCS schools) of college football, but size limiting requirements clash with the growing size of players and academic standards make this almost impossible. Bowing to reality all three have softened their schedules, but the felt necessity to continue to play national powers has unfortunately corrupted their recruiting and admissions process. This presents them with an almost insoluable dilemma: To continue to live the lie and continue an indefensible admissions process or admit they can no longer compete at the highest level.
I, for one, think the better part of valor is to admit that times have changed and play nothing but the Vanderbilts, VMIs and Tulanes of this world. They can’t play with the big kids as it is with any consistency even WITH a corrupt (and possibly illegal) admissions process–and they can distort the process only so far–to go any further would be so blatantly expose the current admissions practices for what they are as to cause a major firestorm. Better to give up the attempt rather than bring ultimate dishonor upon the armed forces. I don’t think the current fisade and status quo can be maintained for much longer.
If even “Pepsodent Paul” Deitzel, fresh off a 1958 national championship at LSU in his return to his alma mater in 1961 couldn’t ultimately bring back the magic even then when the performance gap was far smaller–as demonstrated by his leaving eventually for S. Carolina–what shot do the service academies have now? True enough, occasionally when the stars are aligned they make the big time as in Navy’s 1963 Cotton Bowl appearance with Roger Staubauch and Joe Bellino, but such things are becoming rare almost to the point of non-existence. Is it worth perverting the system and ruining the name and reputation of the academies on the off chance that someday in an unk future the stars will once again fall in alignment? Far better, I say, to play it straight and be satisfied with the good old college try. It won’t lessen the status of Army-Navy one whit.
A major scandal will….
We always watch the Army-Navy game. My father was also Air Force. He almost never watched the AF Academy play.