Last of the Hard: How Army and Navy modernized the option

Would you believe me if I told you that two of the most explosive and fun offenses in college football only throw the ball maybe seven times a game?

When you think of explosive and efficient offenses in college football, you think of some of the hyper spread/Air Raid structures that serve as the lifeblood of the modern game. Everyone uses it on College Football 25: you spread it out and throw the ball deep to pick up big chunks of yards and maximize fun. Miami put up a bazillion points in 2024 with this offense, and Lincoln Riley at his peak was scheming up explosive plays through the air at Oklahoma and USC. Even Western Kentucky, which runs the Air Raid, has put together a fantastic offenses and sent many coordinators to bigger programs.

Yet, on the edges of college football, the service academies are running two of the most dynamic offenses in the nation.

Army and Navy are in the top-40 in offensive efficiency in college football this year, rocketing themselves from 113th and 125th in Adjusted EPA per play in 2023. At one point in the season, Army and Navy were both in the top-five of offensive efficiency as a triple option team. Despite the NCAA’s rules against cut blocking implemented in 2022, the Black Knights and Midshipmen football programs have both found sustainability in their triple option world, colliding in what is the most anticipated Army-Navy game in recent memory. How they did it is a result of reinvention and reinvigoration in the margins of college football, branching out in two different directions while using the same foundation.

“For teams like us, it gives us a chance,” Army head coach Jeff Monken said over the phone. “I wasn’t sure we could survive doing it, but I’m glad we figured out a way.”

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The NCAA’s rules against cut blocking outside the tackle box took Monken off guard. What the rule bans is essentially any blocks below the waist outside of the tackle box, in an effort to reduce knee injuries. As a triple option team, blocking below the waist was the engine of the option offense. If the option offense were a band, the cut blocking would be the bass guitarist; often overlooked, but crucial to the overall success of the group.

“[Cut blocking] is beneficial because our offense is designed to get the ball to the perimeter quickly,” Monken said. “The linebackers in the box were always the most difficult to block from the perimeter, so we had to block them below the waist.”

With the rule against cut blocking going into effect, the Black Knights initially tried to pivot, going to a more shotgun-based offense while still trying to use option principles, as Monken said. In the 2023 season, Monken changed coordinators and Army got into the shotgun a lot more while still using the option, with the hope being that they could still be unique enough to cause opponents problems. However, instead of reinvention, it was something completely different.

The results were, quite frankly, not great. It’s like if you took Randy Johnson’s fastball away from him, or Michael Jordan’s fadeaway jumper. Sure it might still look the same, but it just feels different. And the results reflected it.

“What I found is that teams were able to defend us much like they were defending everybody else,” Monken said. “Structurally, they could line up and and just call their their defenses and be able to defend us.”

With the athletic disadvantages that service academy football has to play with, this wasn’t a way for Army to level the playing field. In fact, it tilted the odds back the opposite way.

Despite finishing 2023 eighth in rushing yards per game, Army finished the season 113th in Adjusted EPA per play, 91st in Yards per Rush and finished the season 6-6. Monken knew something had to change, but found evolution in going back to their roots.

“My frustrations kind of grew with the fact that I just didn’t feel like we were different enough to equalize who we were,” Monken said. “We’re not a team that we can really hurt people with great speed, and we’re not so big that we can just manhandle people. So we’ve got to do things to equalize the playing fields for who we are physically.”

Before the 2024 season, Monken went back to the roots of the triple option, promoting Cody Worley to be his offensive coordinator. Worley was the quarterbacks coach for Army since 2020 and had extensive experience running the triple option while at Kennesaw State as well. Monken knew that in order to regain their edge, he had to take Army football back to the option—but with a twist.

“We were going to have to do things a little differently than we had done them in the past, because we don’t have the ability to deal with cut block and it meant we were going to have to change just how we call plays and the plays that we considered our bread and butter.”

The bread and butter of the offense is the option, yes. But because of the rules against cut blocking, the offense simply decided to dress up some of the traditional concepts you see from any college offense, but using the triple option. Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay talks a lot about the “illusion of complexity”, making really simple things look complex using motion and formation alignments. The new (old?) Army offense does that perfectly.

“When we run inside zone, it’s inside zone that everybody in college football is running. We run the power, it’s the power that everybody else in college football is running. We run GT, counter. I mean, everybody college football does that,” Monken said. “I’m watching other teams every week do that, so it’s just a presentation that’s different.”

Let’s look at this touchdown by the Alabama Crimson Tide, using GT Counter. You see all those pullers? Those sweet, sweet down blocks? That’s pure football, modern football. Everyone runs it in college football, and for the most part, it looks like this.

You know who else ran GT Counter with a lot of success this year? Army! Let’s look at this 14 yard run by Army QB Bryson Daily against UTSA. Do those pulling linemen look familiar? All those down blocks ring a bell? Yep, that’s GT Counter. The way Army is dressing up their offense to run the same concepts everyone else is, while still being in the triple option, was the exact edge that Army needed to keep them unique.

This resulted in major offensive success for the Black Knights in 2024, their first season in the American Athletic Conference. The Black Knights finished third in offensive Adjusted EPA per play, 17th in Yards per Carry and ran for an NCAA-leading 314.4 yards per game en route to an AAC Championship in their first season. The engine behind the offense is star quarterback Bryson Daily. Daily has run for 1,480 yards and tied for the NCAA lead with 29 touchdowns on the ground, and earned the moniker “Captain America” from the college football world.

However, this Captain America was also Steve Rogers at one point. Daily is a coach’s kid from Abernathy, Texas who didn’t run the triple option in high school.

“I was a gun spread, QB power and zone,” Daily said in a phone interview. “[running the Army option] is a big, big jump when it comes to technique, a lot of time to perfect and get right. It took me until my sophomore year to really run it all in a game setting.” Daily was the starting QB for the Army offense in 2023, but in 2024 he noticed how much quicker—and how much more violent—the triple option hits under center. “There was a lot of carryover, so I got a lot of good experience last year from running that. But the main thing is just the violence and the physicality of running under center how we do now.”

That violence fits Daily perfectly, a QB who plays the position more like a linebacker than a quarterback. I’m sure you’ve all seen the stiff arm heard around the world, a punishing run against UAB that saw Daily send a poor Blazer defender into the turf at lightning speed.

That violence Daily talked about is something he embodies when he gets on the field, and it’s one of his head coach’s favorite qualities about the signal caller. “He is rugged, physical and tough,” Monken said of Daily. “He has the mentality of wanting to carry the ball, and he’s grown as a runner from a year ago and years past.”

The Black Knights first season in a conference has gone just about as well as anyone could’ve dreamed, and it’ll culminate with Army-Navy and facing off against Marshall in the Independence Bowl. People will tune in, and they’ll see an option offense that came back from the brink of extinction punish opponents in 2024. Monken uses the slogan “the last of the hard” to describe his teams, and this Black Knight team embodies it.

Photo by G Fiume/Getty Images

What do you mean, they call it the “Gen Z Wing-T”?

Navy head football coach Brian Newberry found himself in the same situation as Monken after the 2023 football season. The Midshipmen finished 5-7, came in at 100th in Yards per Carry and didn’t adjust to the new cut blocking rules very well. However, where Monken and Army went back to their roots of the under center triple option and added basic run concepts with it, Newberry and Navy took an unconventional route.

“The cut blocking rules forced us to evolve and be a bit more creative in the things that we’re doing,” Newberry said over Zoom.

Newberry hired former Mercer head coach Drew Cronic to be his offensive coordinator at Navy. Cronic uses more Wing-T principles in his offense, more motion and misdirection, but uses more shotgun formations and RPOs as well — a noticeable shift from what Navy was used to, but Newberry knew it could work.

“[Cronic] has been able to evolve and adapt everywhere that he’s been,” Newberry said. “We want to use the tight end here and be able to create three and four man surfaces, while running the option and doing some stuff out of shotgun.”

“Here you have to be different, you have to be unique to give yourself an edge, but the way we do it is the most important thing.”

Cronic’s Gen-Z Wing-T mixed with the Navy triple option? It feels like the fever dream of every coach in America, but Cronic was able to bring it to life with the Midshipmen, to major success. This season Navy has averaged 6.42 Yards per Play, 38th in the country and a major step up from where they were in 2023. The fun amalgamation of Wing-T principles with the flexbone option is just that to Cronic, who is also the son of a coach.

“I haven’t done a lot of triple in the past, a little bit of option principles but nothing like what we’re doing now,” Cronic said. “It’s been an unbelievable amount of fun to blend those principles together.”

This blend Cronic talks about is the mixture of the flexbone run game principles, but still being able to throw the ball using pro-style concepts. I mean, how many offenses are you going to see line up in the flexbone and run counter option:

Then drop back and throw sail concepts from the shotgun? This feels like something out of a CFB 25 playbook that someone would dream of, and Cronic brought it to life, while breathing new life into the Navy offense.

Cronic’s signal caller, Blake Horvath, is the key to the success of the offense. Having a guy that can carry the ball like an option QB, but throw the ball like a spread QB, is incredibly rare, and Horvath’s development into that has been special this season. Entering 2024, Horvath knew that there would be things he needed to change as the new offense was implemented, but immediately noticed how much more effective it was.

“The offense is dependent on us now,” Horvath said over Zoom. “We’re the ones that send the motion, the ball has to be snapped at a certain time. The offense operates under you, and that’s the biggest thing about the Wing T, it operates under misdirection and timing.”

How this blend came to be is partially founded on who Newberry has on his offensive staff. So many different minds from so many different trees all coming together to create this wonderful Frankenstein of an offense, pulling from each other to add into what would become Navy’s offense in 2024. Offensive line coach Jay Guillermo played at Clemson under Dabo Swinney, but came to Navy after being at Mercer with Cronic and East Tennessee State. Quarterbacks coach Ivin Jasper is in his 25th year at Navy, bringing the option experience to the room. Tight ends coach Jon Williams was the tight ends coach at Birmingham-Southern before the school shuttered its’ football program. All of these different minds coming together to create the offense is what makes it special, according to Cronic.

“It’s important that everyone is valued in the room,” Cronic said. “My job is to corral up the ideas everyone brings and make sure it all fits.” Cronic mentioned being systematic when it comes to building out the offense, wanting concepts to build off of each other and plays to protect other plays. “We gotta understand what we want to be and what our players are good at, in order to put our kids in good situations.”

The offense has put Navy in more than good situations this season, en route to an 8-3 record before the Army-Navy game. The Midshipmen found their sustainable offense through the Wing-T, and through collaboration between Cronic, Newberry and the entire staff, one of the most fun offenses in football was created.

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After being pushed to the brink of extinction in 2023, the triple option is back with a vengeance. It cannot be killed, you must only learn how to contain it. Yet, with the evolution of both Army and Navy’s offensive outbursts this season, you can see where they took two different paths. While Army condensed back to the traditional under center triple and added more concepts like GT Counter and inside zone, Navy pushed the limits of what the option can be, adding motion and Wing T misdirection. The best part is? Neither answer is wrong. Both are effective, and each coach shares a respect for the other side.

“You got some things we do differently, but they run a lot of option,” Monken said when talking about Navy. “There’s a great history of this offense in college football and in the game of football, and it gives us a chance.”

“You can still run the option and be successful,” Newberry said. “It might require some smoke and mirrors in the way that you do it but it can be done.”

Which leads us to Saturday. Army-Navy. The standalone game of all standalone games. Monken believes the game sells itself. “We can schedule that game in a parking lot at a Walmart, name the place anywhere in America, and two teams are going to battle.” However, what stands out about this years’ game is how both service academies have revolutionized their offenses, proving that option football can and will be successful despite rules preventing it from even existing.

I believe Monken said it best: “It’s good for college football that Service Academy football is relevant,” he said. “I’m glad that we’ve figured out a way to be able to continue to execute this offense and have success, because I think that’s good for college football.”