Army and its ‘fanatical’ coach aim for perfection. But is that enough?

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Army and its ‘fanatical’ coach aim for perfection. But is that enough?

WEST POINT, N.Y. — Here is an Army football coach: Sunk into a large leather armchair facing other pieces of large leather furniture, in a room festooned with old drawings from his daughters and challenge coins gifted him by generals, wearing a gray knit sweater that’s a decent match for the crisply trimmed hair on his head, talking about obligation.

The idea of it changes the longer you’re here, Jeff Monken thinks. At first, the focus is immediate success in the job at hand. Wins and bowl games and so forth, in his case. Then, classes of cadets move on. Their new responsibilities make football look silly, but they tell you what they learned is helping them lead soldiers protecting a country. The outlines of obligation expand. And you start to appreciate the victories yet to be won.

“I could argue that I’m having more of an impact on people here than I could have anywhere else,” Monken says. “But personally – personally – I want to go play for a national championship. I’m not sure that can be done at an academy. Maybe it can. Maybe we can be the top Group of 5 and get into the playoff. But I can’t control that.”

It’s mid-October and this 19,000-acre museum of a place, home to actual Civil War cannons and the first forward pass, is an epicenter of modern college football astonishment. Army – yes, that Army – is undefeated and nationally ranked with a view of the College Football Playoff. Down the hill from centuries-old Fort Putnam, steel hammers steel and machines move earth as part of a $170 million project to construct a new east side of Michie Stadium, flush with suites and club seats and a bar with a huge fireplace. If then and now sometimes work at odds here when it comes to football, they’re in total agreement at the moment.

On Saturday, the No. 18 ****** Knights collide with history and No. 6 Notre Dame at ******* Stadium. By itself, it’s a movie. But what comes after could be a fascinating tangle of everything frustrating about college football, the demands of a place with a larger mission, and how far a coach and good soldier wants to go, assuming anyone notices him.

The Army is doing what it can to make it easier for its football team and the man in charge. But easier isn’t easy.

“Here, I got to be perfect,” Jeff Monken says. “It’s hard to be perfect at Army.”

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The current Cadet Chapel at the ******* States Military Academy sits atop its own hill, offering rapturous views of lower Hudson Valley foliage from the foot of its steps. It took over the spot from the first Cadet Chapel in the early 1900s. The old one giving way, though, was not the same as going away. It was disassembled, brick-by-brick, and then reassembled at the entrance to the West Point ********* a little less than a mile down the road. Which is another way of saying the people in this place aren’t afraid of painstaking work and heavy loads.

By comparison, rebuilding a football program might seem like the odd chore. But it certainly was a chore. Army had posted one winning season in its previous 17 seasons when it hired Monken on Christmas Eve of 2013. In the previous 50 years, the ****** Knights had been ranked in the Associated Press poll for a total of six weeks.

Most galling of all? Navy had won the Secretary’s Trophy 12 straight times. Nobody expected Army to be a modern-day powerhouse, but general football irrelevance and an annual broadside to morale was not an ideal regiment. “It wasn’t good,” says Luke Proulx, a defensive back when Monken arrived and now the program’s director of player development. “Everyone thought we were doing the things that we needed to do to win games. But it was made pretty clear that we were not doing the work requisite with getting a win on a Saturday.”

It took Monken three years to produce a bowl team and fewer than eight to become the second-winningest coach in program history. As of this week, he’s 42 victories shy of Earl “Red” Blaik, whose name adorns the football field and whose bronze statue dominates the football center lobby. A less quantifiable appraisal of his achievements here, though, might be a more telling one: When academy superintendent Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland addressed the football team in the preseason, he declared the head coach the most disciplined person on the installation.

“Most people, including some of our fans,” Army athletic director Mike Buddie says, “think that Jeff Monken is a West Point graduate.”

In fact, Monken played wide receiver for Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., a couple hours south of home in Joliet, where his football life began as a waterboy for teams coached by his late father, Mike, a member of the state’s high school coaches Hall of Fame. Monken’s own nine-stop coaching journey – “There’s nothing else in my life I’ve ever wanted to do,” the 57-year-old says – started with a graduate assistant gig at Hawaii, where his approach told his fortune. He was single, so the football office was home. Need someone to monitor disciplinary conditioning at 5 a.m.? Monken raised a hand. “He was not a partier, not a go-out guy,” says Paul Johnson, the former Navy and Georgia Tech head coach who was then an assistant at Hawaii. “He worked in the cafeteria so he could eat free. That was his deal.”

Can’t begrudge a 20-something grunt making $439.76 a month some industriousness. And, in any case, it carried Monken from Honolulu to two years of high school and Division III jobs back in Illinois all the way to the head coach chair at Georgia Southern in 2010 and, so far, the decade-plus of life at the ******* States Military Academy. (Literally so. Army’s coaches are housed on post, where there’s a commissary with curbside pickup and a K-8 school. West Point even has its own ZIP code.) But, no, he is not an Army grad. Just looks and acts and sounds like one.

“You can’t win being void of talent,” Monken says. “We’re not void of talent. We got some talented guys on our team. But are we the most talented team on the field on Saturday? Probably never. But that means we got to do all the other things you’ve got to be tough for.”

The temperature registered at 1 degree on the morning of the first winter workout Monken ran here, on the Michie Stadium turf. Because lockers weren’t kept to the standard expected by the new coaching staff, many players already were relocated and dressed in a visitors’ locker room that didn’t have heat. The workout itself comprised 13 stations, theoretically. If anyone made a mistake, everyone started the station over. “I hope not to embellish too much,” Proulx says, “but I think we went for about an hour and 45 minutes, no one’s wearing sleeves, no one’s wearing gloves, and we didn’t even get through one station.”

It was an introductory lesson about both the program’s nonexistent margin for error and the fortitude required to avoid slippage. And since the Army hasn’t changed, neither has the approach.

When Monken discusses his $15 million indoor practice field – and, truly, it’s as accommodating as any Power 4 facility – he calls it “the lightning shelter.” As in: That is the only reason his team uses it. A bye-week Tuesday practice in 2024 is minutes old when Monken stops a drill, annoyed. “Hold up, coach!” he barks. To rehearse proper technique for a dip-and-rip off the line of scrimmage, defenders have to grab a white towel laying 6 inches in front and a foot to the side as they come out of their stance. But 6 inches in front and a foot to the side means 6 inches in front and a foot to the side. Not closer. Not by a turf pebble. “Move the towel back!” Monken says, and after a quick reset, the drill begins anew.

For two-plus hours, he stalks between fields and position groups, attentive to every technical success or glitch in any part of the operation. While “Born in the U.S.A.” plays during a water break, Monken leans down to attend to two yellow blocking pads. They’re partially unzipped. So Army’s head coach zips them all the way closed.

“Everything he does, sometimes you might think it’s a little extreme, but it’s how he lives his life,” right tackle Lucas Scott says. “When you keep pushing that on a group of people, either they’re going to be made for it or they’re not. The guys that are made for it last.”

Intimate instruction from the guy at the top of an org chart is uncommon enough. The ferocity of this is something else entirely. As he watched his very first practice as athletic director, Buddie saw his football coach picking up errant wrappers on the field. On a bye-week October afternoon, Monken walks into a conference room after a quarterback meeting disperses. While he makes small talk, he guides the chairs around the table back into place.

“There’s no guy who’s more fanatical about details and fundamentals,” defensive lineman Cody Winkour says.

Yet there’s only so much a coach can manipulate in this football program. There are only so many personal touches a man can apply when all the jersey nameplates read ARMY. Two phrases dominate the auditorium wall in the football building: DO YOUR JOB and FOLLOW THE PLAN. As Monken notes, the objectives and values were the same during a 2-6 start to the 2023 season as they are during the heady days of 2024.

The difference? It has something to do with the inevitability of identity.

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Military academy offense – so, ultra-run-heavy option football – forever has relied on cut blocks. Then the NCAA tightened its blocking-below-the-waist rules heading into 2023. It spurred Monken to hire offensive coordinator Drew Thatcher from Division II Nebraska-Kearney and overhaul the scheme to rely less on what Army always had relied on. The ****** Knights attempted double-digit passes in each game during that 2-6 start. They were shut out three times en route to being the lowest-scoring offense, on a per-game basis, of Monken’s tenure.

“I always felt like we could control games on offense here,” he says now. “I didn’t feel that way last year. It was a helpless feeling.”

In a matter of months, Army has shed a sort of football personality disorder and once again thrives on complements. The retooled offense is voracious and efficient under new coordinator Cody Worley, ranking No. 1 in the country in rushing yards per game (334.9) and 22nd with 35.2 points scored per game. The defense, typically solid in most years under Monken, ranks second in the country in fewest points allowed per game (10.33, just .03 points per game behind Ohio State).

The symbiosis – offense chews up clock, defense gets off the field quickly, repeat – is basically Army being all it can be. Consider a win at North Texas on Nov. 9: The ****** Knights went up two scores after a 21-play drive that lasted longer than a half-hour of real time, and then two fourth-quarter interceptions snuffed out the hosts’ attempts to rally. “That’s this place,” defensive coordinator Nate Woody says. “You don’t have to drill that into guys. It’s inherent in what they do every day: Working together, communicating, solving problems, doing it as a unit or as a team.”

Another successful marriage of then and now.

Thatcher left after that one disappointing season. Worley, who’d been on staff as quarterbacks coach since 2020, up-shifted into the coordinator role but didn’t roll a sizzle-reel of World War II-era offense to mark his promotion. Not every idea from 2023 was a bad one. It was maybe just too much of one idea. “We probably overcooked it,” is how Worley puts it. So he and the offensive staff pursued fusion and flexibility, not reinvention. Doing the predictable in unpredictable ways.

Against East Carolina on Oct. 19, knowing its opponent had two weeks to prepare, Army was equipped to flip its season-long tendencies and run offense out of the shotgun twice as much as usual. And after a while of that, the ****** Knights called what Worley describes as a “Day 1, core play.” Quarterback Bryson Daily took a traditional snap, a linebacker mis-fit an assignment and the result was a touchdown. “Different presentations,” Worley says. “It may be the same play, but the speed is different. The fits are different up front. Even though it’s the same for us, it’s different for the defense.”

Some stars aligning helps, too. Woody says leading tackler Andon Thomas reminds him of former Army linebacker Jon Rhattigan, who’s currently with the Carolina Panthers. The offensive line, in Monken’s estimation, is the most talented and possibly most ornery unit he’s had at West Point, all the way down to wrestling each other to settle arguments about who’s tougher. Savages, is how Daily refers to that group. “Mean. Tough. Violent,” right tackle Lucas Scott says. “The standard is really, really high in our room.”

But when Worley describes the team’s personnel as “perfect,” there is no clearer illustration than the 6-foot, 220-pound Daily, who has evolved into a concrete thunderbolt. The Texan who had zero offers to play offense anywhere else in the Football Bowl Subdivision has accounted for 28 total touchdowns in nine games after 14 all of last season. An interception thrown against North Texas was his first of the year. Daily has rumbled his way into the periphery of Heisman Trophy chatter, bye-week appearances on “The Dan Patrick Show” and his head coach needling him by announcing he’ll be available for autographs after a team meeting.

“I’ve been put in great situations and I’ve been lucky enough to capitalize on the situations I’ve been put in,” Daily says. “I think every time the guys see a post about me or post about an individual doing good, the guys internalize that, like, ‘Hey, that’s us. That’s us as an offense.’”

All jobs on all fronts well done, at a place where failures are magnified tenfold when they’re not.

Many of the current ****** Knights relearned this the hard way. They’ll sort of sidle up to a concession that, even at a place like West Point, some football orders might’ve been questioned early last season. That egos compounded the schematic hiccups. That the 4-0 finish to 2023 was a quietly critical realignment preceding all the noise they’re making in 2024. “Every guy on the team is taking personal ownership of, ‘This is what I gotta do today,’” second-leading rusher Kanye Udoh says. “Last year, when we were 2-6, there wasn’t the same level of everybody being bought in, up to that point, as it is now.”

Nothing changes and everything changes. The Army football team wakes up before sunrise and leaves the practice field after dark, unbeaten and almost too busy to notice anyone noticing. Good day or bad day, there’s formation at 6:30 a.m.

How they’re doing it is no mystery. How long it lasts is another story.

Because nearly anywhere else, it’s enough to not be perfect.

Army coach Jeff Monken, 57, is the second-winningest coach in program history. (David Jensen / Getty Images)

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Jeff Monken grew up on Tom Osborne and Woody Hayes and Joe Paterno. Or at least the college football coach archetype they represented. Longevity. Championships. There was a caption to the picture of them in Monken’s mind: I’m going to do that.

Also, none of those guys coached at Army.

“I’d like to have an opportunity to have that challenge at the highest level,” Monken says. “This is a hard job. People talk about other Power 4 (schools) – ‘That’s a hard job.’ ******* than the one I’ve got? What’s ******* than this job? Which one?”

It’s not a complaint. He enlisted in his own way, though Johnson at the time did tell his former assistant that the Army job would afford Monken patience and a better salary. And Monken had the blueprint from his time at Navy, to boot. “Where he is,” Johnson says, “is a really good fit for him.” The results prove that. Over time, there have been conversations and maybe even close calls with schools inquiring about his services.

And Jeff Monken is still the Army football coach.

“If he gets the opportunity and it’s the right one, he’ll pursue it,” Buddie says. “He’s in Year 11. He’s earned that opportunity.”

The part about the right one matters. Some places aren’t for Jeff Monken and Jeff Monken might not be for some places. The coach and his athletic director have discussed that very topic. Why haven’t there been any right ones, though? There’s loyalty involved – Johnson just about kicked Monken out of his office when Monken told him he might stay at Georgia Tech instead of taking the Georgia Southern job – and there are also biases and boosters and message boards afflicting the people doing the hiring.

“There’s so many misnomers out there about, ‘You can’t recruit to the offense’ and ‘Fans won’t like it,’” Johnson says. “If somebody finally gives him a chance, they’ll be really happy they did.”

In the meantime, Army offers a well-insulated refuge from transfer portal chaos and name, image and likeness negotiations. “That’s just a stressor, causing animosity among teammates,” Scott, the offensive tackle, says. The ****** Knights have two full-length practice fields and that indoor facility. They strive for power-conference level travel and technology. Nutrition is a priority, given the demands of a cadet’s day; there are the mandatory pair of robust mess-hall meals – “Heavy” and “Heavy Heavy” are the two options for the amount of food served at each table – and a nightly catered dinner at the football facility. “We maximize all of it,” Monken says, “because our guys need it.”

Army finally started an athletic association in 2017 that allows it to profit from apparel and broadcast deals, raise funds and, as Buddie puts it, pay a head football coach “the going rate.” And while Army has clinched a spot in the ********* Athletic Conference championship in its first season in the league, membership alone creates an annual path to a College Football Playoff spot, however steep it may be. (A schedule ranked

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underscores that, as well as the significance of the Notre Dame showdown.)

Inescapably, it is still the ******* States Military Academy. When Udoh talks about team bonding, he’s referring to eight days of Cadet Field Training and wearing night-vision goggles on two hours of sleep and ******* blank rounds into the dark. The program will never have “Taj Mahals with marble floors and fondue chocolate fountains and barber shops and slides,” as Buddie puts it, because it’s the Army. It’s supposed to be tough. It’s supposed to be a choice between two worlds.

“I’m not going to be all ‘Pollyanna,’” Buddie says. “If a Power 5 had offered (Monken) a job in the last four or five years, would he have taken it? Maybe? But he’s not just, like, looking to get out. Now more than ever, I think people realize that the grass is not always greener. The challenges that we have here grow exponentially when Russia invades Ukraine – that makes it ******* for us to recruit. But he’s not having to negotiate with agents. He’s not having to negotiate with his starting quarterback every offseason. And I think there’s value in that, too.”

Monken sees it. He grabs a notecard from his desk and starts the walk to a team meeting that begins at 1400 hours sharp. He points to a mostly empty hallway. “You know how many coaches got a line outside their office with kids wondering if they’re going to get paid more, are they going to get more playing time, or guys that walked in after four games and said, ‘I’m going to redshirt’?” Monken says. “I don’t deal with any of that.”

Maybe it’s not worth losing sleep over in the end. Maybe it is, if he’s afforded the chance.

Soon, he’s at the front of an auditorium with hip-hop music blaring over rowdy conversations. Nobody in the world wants to get shot at, as Monken notes, but there are people willing to do so for the sake of their country. And they’re in that room. “This place is hard,” Monken says. “Everything they do is a challenge here. But they stay here. They’re here for a reason.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)

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