The football coaching carnage in the American Athletic Conference is enough to make you wonder: Did Jeff Monken and the Army Black Knights just saunter right in and break the league?
Five schools have fired their coaches in the past month. The East Carolina Pirates got rid of Mike Houston on Oct. 20, the Rice Owls terminated Mike Bloomgren on Oct. 27—and then came Black Sunday/Monday this week: the Temple Owls parted ways with Stan Drayton; the Florida Atlantic Owls trapdoored Tom Herman; and the Charlotte 49ers ended it with Biff Poggi.
It might not be a coincidence that four-fifths of them were Monken’d during the Black Knights’ inaugural season in the conference. Army beat FAU by 17, Rice by 23, Temple by 28 and East Carolina by 17. Charlotte was spared its spanking by the AAC schedule makers.
Army also blew out two other league opponents with second-year coaches who are doing notably poor work. The Knights beat Tulsa, 49–7 (Kevin Wilson is 7–15) and UAB, 44–10 (Trent Dilfer is 6–16). They might get third seasons, but Army has helped put them both on the hot seat.
When a program with few modern advantages storms in and immediately goes undefeated (7–0 so far) and makes the AAC title game, it presents some uncomfortable truths for the competition. In a transfer portal era, Army takes none. In the NIL era, Army has nothing to offer (though all the cadets, athletes or not, do receive a government salary). In a spread-and-throw offensive era, Army tightens it up and plays smashmouth football. And there’s the whole, five-years-of-military-service component after graduation.
If a program facing those hurdles in recruiting still is beating the brakes off your team, that’s a bad look. And it’s a contributing bad look when Army’s brothers-in-arms at the Naval Academy are 7–3 overall, 5–2 in the AAC, and were in contention for the league championship game until last weekend.
The service academy successes can make a coach’s excuses for why he isn’t winning ring hollow. You can’t persuasively complain about lack of NIL resources, losing players to the portal or being new to the league when Army and/or Navy are kicking your tail.
As realignment has sent tremors through the college football landscape, the AAC has remained a ’tweener league—caught between high-major and low-major. There is struggle, but there is opportunity.
The loss of 2021 College Football Playoff entrant Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston to the Big 12 in ’23 damaged the American’s overall strength and left it more on par with the Mountain West Conference, after previously being above it. But the arrival of the 12-team playoff presented the easiest path yet to at least dream of a national title, and to sell that dream to fans and recruits alike.
The automatic Group of 5 conference champion berth—for as long as it lasts—is an available winning Powerball ticket. Realistically, it will come down to a résumé contest between the Mountain West champ and the AAC champ most years. Perhaps the Sun Belt can muscle into the conversation sometimes, but generally speaking it’s a two-league race.
Given that, everyone in the AAC should have been gearing up for 2024. There is less competition within the conference and a great chance of making the big show. Instead, half the league has been caught flat-footed and falling.
East Carolina and Rice dawdled too long with coaches who had proven they can’t do it—Houston was on his sixth season with the Pirates, Bloomgren on his seventh season with the Owls. Temple’s Drayton was a longtime assistant coach in college and the NFL—most recently working for Herman at Texas—who never demonstrated he could handle a hard job in three seasons. Herman was another brand-name rebound hire and quick fire for FAU athletic director Brian White, who previously did this dance with Willie Taggart. Poggi was a goofy, gimmick hire that predictably failed.
Dilfer is trending the same way at UAB as Poggi went as Charlotte. Wilson is a power-conference rebound hire in his own right, having been the head coach at Indiana and then an assistant at Ohio State—his current plight is slightly more surprising. Second-year North Texas coach Eric Morris is 10–12 and fired his defensive coordinator last week, amid a five-game losing streak. UTSA has taken an unexpected step back in its second season in the league.
The league’s two best remaining football brands were the Tulane Green Wave and Memphis Tigers. The Wave made a great hire in Jon Sumrall from Troy and could be favored in the AAC title game against Army. The Tigers are still winning games, but not at the level they did under Mike Norvell.
Against that backdrop, and into that vacuum, here came Army. What the Black Knights lack in overall talent and the ability to improve it via the portal, they make up for in a couple of key areas: fully established team culture under 11th-year coach Monken; and a distinct football identity. Army knows who it is and what it needs to do to win. That self-awareness and self-discipline have translated perfectly into a wide-open league.
Monken have a couple of advantages over his non-Navy rivals: He’s got a roster size of about 160; and he’s a prep-school feeder system where players out of high school can learn the offense and defense and general demands of the program. The Black Knights are a well-seasoned, well-trained cast of thousands.
With an iron-willed Texan senior quarterback in Bryson Daily running the option and veteran leadership on both sides of the ball, Army was ready for its moment. An advantageous league schedule—no regular-season meetings with Tulane or Memphis—helped get off to a fast AAC start. Now here Army sits at 9–0, playing arguably its biggest regular-season game since the 1950s on Saturday against Notre Dame.
Win or lose, that won’t affect the conference race. Army will still play Tulane for that title on Dec. 6. And doing so in Year 1 seems to have broken the rest of the AAC.
