College football Week 16 thread

I find it weird that a team that calls itself "Air Force" is nothing of the kind.

 

Army did abandon option football after Bob Sutton was fired in 1999. It was a disaster under Todd Berry, who brought a wide-open passing attack with him from Illinois State. Then they returned to a more ground-based offense under Stan Brock and Bobby Ross and returned to option football under Rich Ellerson, who came from Cal Poly in 2009.

Monken got it turned around, with three major changes helping: They dropped out of C-USA, eased up on scheduling, and loosened many of the off-field restrictions placed on players, as Navy had done many years earlier under Paul Johnson and Ken N. Monken was a Navy assistant and would not take the Army job if those changes weren't made.

 

Air Force has only had six coaches in 64 years of football. And one of them, the aforementioned Parcells, was only in charge for one year. (Interim, I guess.) Pretty wild.

 

What were the off-field restrictions that were "loosened"?

 

Parcells was not interim. When he got to Colorado Springs he he stayed a year and then resigned. According to Wikipedia he took an offer with the Giants as an assistant, backed out of that and sold real estate for a year and then decided to take the Giants assistant job.

 

I did some digging and found with considerable surprise that in the 2000s, Army threw the ball 42% of the time -- not to far below the national average of 45%. They found religion in the next decade, however.

 

Houston playing the Fighting Verlanders.
(Look at the side of Hawaii helmets for the punchline)

 

One reason I've always heard is the (relatively) smaller offensive linemen. Service academies can't have the 6-foot-8, 350-pound behemoths who apparently are needed to pass block in a modern college offense.

So Army, Navy and Air Force stick to the option, which involves plenty of cut blocks from the O-line rather than trying to physically overpower people.

 

The method they are taught to throw a grenade -- kind of an overhand windmill -- is not conducive to throwing a football. They just can't do it. And nobody wants to practice catching the grenade.

 

Bit of a tangent, but they did attempt to develop a grenade during WWII that was the same size and shape as a baseball. The idea was that American boys were used to throwing baseballs, so they designed one that had the same characteristics. It never saw widespread use, though.

There's also a cool story in Band of Brothers about Buck Compton killing a guy with a grenade. He'd been a catcher for UCLA's baseball team before the war. They were raiding a trench in Normandy and some of the Germans were running away. Compton pulled the pin on his grenade and threw it down the trench, just like he was throwing down to second base. It exploded right as it hit one of the Germans in the head.

 

Condensed summer field-training exercises/leave in the summer, more time for off-season workouts run by the S & C coaches; Navy started that in 2002..

Ability to take summer-school classes, lessening the load in the fall by one class.

Higher salaries for the coaching and training staff.

Among other things.

I also think some of the weight restrictions have been eliminated in-season. Army's linemen are considerably larger under Monken than in the past.

 

That's a good point. There's no real limit on weight as a student, but they have to be down to a (relatively) slim weight when their post-academy service begins. Nobody wants to be in a position where they have to lose 75-100 pounds.

Someone as tall as 6-8 (the maximum) can't weigh more than 250.

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