Ken Niumatalolo doesn’t sleep. During the season, the Navy head coach sets his alarm for 3:14 a.m., the minute equaling the number of games he wants the Midshipmen to play in each season. Usually he’s awake before it goes off.
3 years into conference life, Navy isn’t good for a service academy team. Navy’s just good.
Since leaving independence for the Group of 5, Ken Niumatalolo’s got an annual contender.
Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images
“I’ll just get up and go into the office. I can’t stop. It’s what you’d expect: ‘What is Army doing? What is Air Force doing?’ But also, ‘What is Scott Frost doing right now?’” Niumatalolo says.
If you think of Navy as merely the best of the academy programs, Niumatalolo’s restlessness seems unnecessary.
He’s 9-1 vs. rival Army and has six Commander-in-Chief’s Trophies since taking over as head coach in 2007. Of the three academies, the Midshipmen have been the standard since Paul Johnson revamped the program in 2002.
There’s a large monitor just to the side of his desk, with UCF film on pause.
“They’re probably the best team we’ve ever played in this stadium, other than Houston. We play Notre Dame, but not here. We’ve played some good offenses or some good defenses, but this is the most complete team to come here.”
What eats at Niumatalolo is breaking out of the context that what Navy has done in his decade as the winningest coach in program history is good for an academy football team.
“I want to win the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy, but I also want to be the Group of 5 team in the New Year’s Day bowl. And I know when I first started saying that, people laughed. My kids would. We have family goals every year, and I said, ‘This year we’re going to go to New Year’s bowl.’ And my kids said, ‘Can you just make sure we get to a bowl game at all?’’
As a dominant member of the American Athletic Conference, Navy is just a good football program. Full stop. If a “regular” 5-1 team was 17-4 in conference play with one division title through its first three seasons in a conference and hosting an undefeated UCF (No. 20 in both polls, No. 9 in S&P+) this Saturday, we’d probably be talking more about a hot program to watch and a hot new name in coaching.
But it’s a triple option team at an academy. It’s hard to tell which of those two scarlet letters creates the bigger stigma.
“That’s a good question,” Niumatalolo said. “It’s probably still the military, but it’s close. At least you can always pitch running backs when you recruit with this system.”
For all his concern, Niumatalolo seems to have cracked the code on creating a consistent winner at a military academy. By virtue of the Naval Academy’s stringent academic and conduct policies, that means winning “the right way.” This year, the Midshipmen are featured on Showtime’s A Season With series, an ongoing all-access documentary that previously featured Notre Dame and Florida State, Playoff contenders with normally strict access.
“I just thought it was cool, as soon as I heard about it. We don’t have a budget ourselves for this kind of marketing. It’s great for our program, and we don’t have anything to hide, either. I told them to come on in. It’s not like when you’re inviting someone over and kicking dirty laundry under the couch,” Niumatalolo said.
The Midshipmen enter Saturday’s game vs. Frost’s Knights on the heels of an uncharacteristic five turnovers in their first loss of the season vs. Memphis. Still, for the third time in as many years, Navy is a contender for the AAC title and the G5 spot in the New Year’s Six.
Life as a member of a conference has worked.
Navy is playing bigger and better games (especially entering November) than it was as an independent. And thanks to non-conference agreements with Notre Dame, a consistent Air Force, and a rapidly improving Army, it has one of the best resumes in the G5 every season.
“I think initially, our administration was a little wary, back when we were approached by what was then the Big East. They were worried if we’d have to change our academic standards. I just felt like the landscape was changing, and I didn’t want to get left out,” Niumatalolo said.
“There were two sides to it. One side said, ‘Hey, if the landscape of the game is fundamentally changing and we have to go I-AA or Ivy League, that’s fine.’ And I said, ‘Sure, that’s fine, but I don’t want to do that. I want to compete.’”
Flash forward to the Midshipmen’s upset of Tom Herman’s Houston last season in Annapolis and an AAC West title. (Navy requested to the join the West for the recruiting exposure in Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana.)
Navy has had to adjust to the AAC as much as the conference has to deal with Navy’s option.
Offensive coordinator Ivin Jasper said that with the exception of former UConn head coach Bob Diaco, who coached against Navy as a defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, every AAC program has played a completely different scheme vs. the Midshipmen each season.
The AAC offers a miserable variety pack of offenses for defensive coordinators. Navy isn’t immune to that problem, which is why defensive coordinator Dale Pehrson has installed blitz-heavy man schemes, something conventional wisdom said wasn’t possible for academy players going against the FBS.
“The intensity has picked up naturally. Innately, I think defensive players want to be aggressive. You take that away when you play passively. They’ve taken a lot more ownership in the aggression than I saw them take when we were a rush-three, drop-eight type of team,” Pehrson said.
“To go to another level, we have to continue to get man-cover guys with that kind of speed. But I think we’re as athletic now as we’ve been.”
Recruiting is the last barrier for Navy.
“When I first got here in 1996, I’d visit a high school, and the coach would bring 10 people in to talk to me, and it was always, ‘Hey, he’s got a 3.6 GPA and he’s never missed practice. Coach, he’s your kind of guy. He might be a backup center by his senior year, but he’s your kind of guy!’ And I’m trying to tell them, ‘Well, we do have to play Notre Dame every season,’” Pehrson said.
“You get some of that from when we’re on TV. ‘Oh, it’s undersized Navy. They’re a step slower. They’re not as big.’ And the kid at home thinks, ‘Hey, that’s me.’ It’s the whole stereotype.’”
Now Navy assistants are seeing a different reaction on the road. High school coaches and players can immediately recall big games they’ve seen Navy in.
“I would go back to the year we played Ohio State in 2009 at their place,” Jasper said. “We had played really, really well. We got down, came back, scored two touchdowns late and had a chance to win in OT. Something about that game, everywhere I went after that in recruiting, the country had just fallen in love with Navy. They saw kids that they thought didn’t belong on the field with Ohio State going to the wire.”
Senior co-captain Darryl Bonner was one of the best pure athletes at his high school in North Carolina, but at 5’7, he was only offered a preferred walk-on status at Wofford and Appalachian State and a partial scholarship by Division II Wingate. He’s now averaging 6.8 yards per carry as a senior slotback.
“Obviously everything works out for a reason, but you come here, and at times we’ve been ranked. So you see your team ranked and teams you would’ve loved to play for aren’t. Or you just beat them. That feels really good. I don’t want to say anything bad, but ... yeah, it’s satisfying.”
“Our talent level has definitely improved,” Niumatalolo said. “Are we SEC? No. But the days of us getting the admiral’s son, of going to a school and it’s the Eagle Scout that always wanted to come here, that’s over. We’re getting really good kids, and character is still important.
“Because no matter what we do, there are still only two other teams in the nation that look like us. If we have guys getting arrogant, we’ll get pummeled. Playing as a team is the only way we survive.”
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