0-13 winners

[Dan_ref]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/sp...ll/04ARMY.html

December 4, 2003
For a Cadet Football Player, a Typical Day Is Rough Yet Rewarding
By BILL PENNINGTON

WEST POINT, N.Y., Dec. 2 — It was two minutes past 8 in the morning when Rob Davis, a sophomore Army football player, put down his pencil next to his physics exam. The test had asked him, for bonus points, to calculate the terminal speed of an object of a certain mass and cross-sectional area moving through a precise fluid of density due to a constant force of a specific magnitude.

Davis's day had begun in predawn darkness, as wind blew snow across the gothic, gray stone garrison campus at the United States Military Academy. He rose early to clean his room for daily inspection — making sure not just that his shoes were shined and aligned beneath a taut bed blanket but also that each of his six coat hangers was canted to the right and spaced equally apart.

He then stood at attention in formation outside the barracks before filing into the mess hall to eat breakfast with roughly 4,000 other West Point cadets. He also scrutinized the room of the freshman, or plebe, under his watch for lapses of academy protocol. He walked to physics, pausing to salute an officer or two along the way.

His exam ended at exactly 08:02:47, a deadline written on the classroom blackboard by the instructor, Capt. Ronald Hasz.

At a time when the major college football environment seems awash in academic scandal and adrift in a sea of commercial semiprofessionalism, this is how Davis, a starter for a Division I-A football team, spent the first two hours of a typical 18-hour day.

Perhaps tellingly, Army is 0-12 this season. With a loss Saturday in the 103rd meeting of Army and Navy, the cadets from West Point could become the first National Collegiate Athletic Association football team to finish a season 0-13. Navy is 7-4 and headed for the Houston Bowl. The other service academy, Air Force, has a 7-5 record. Army searches for a first victory.

"I don't want anybody feeling sorry for us," Davis said. "We have the talent on our team to win and we will get things straightened out. But it is tough on a Thursday, which is a heavy academic workday around here, when I know my teammates have been up half the night finishing papers because they are often due on Fridays.

"And then we go play somebody like Temple, and they might not even have gone to class Thursday. Maybe they watched film of us all day. Well, I wish I had more time to watch film. Or sleep."

At many big-time football powers, the players have academic tutors, and even guides who assist and escort players with poor attendance records to their classes.

At West Point, missing one class without an excuse can bring a penalty of 10 hours' marching in the central area, in full regalia with one's rifle. Repeatedly missing class may yield an official disciplinary review.

"I wouldn't want it any other way; this is why we came here," Davis, a free safety and Army's fifth-leading tackler, said Tuesday. "We are counted on to maintain certain standards. I think that's why some people probably want us to win — because we are doing it the hard way. That's not asking too much."

Tuesday was actually an easy day for Davis because a two-hour economics lab scheduled for the afternoon had been postponed. Still, by 11 a.m., besides formation, inspection and physics, he had attended a philosophy class — the topic was "Just and Unjust Wars" — and had taken notes furiously during a one-hour session with his calculus teacher. Military science instruction was next on the docket for Davis, who has a 3.6 grade point average this semester.

It was also his 20th birthday, something no one at the academy or around the football team seemed to know.

"Sir," Davis said to a visitor, smiling. "There is nothing to be gained by letting that get out. Not in this setting."

West Point cadets universally seem an engaged, vigorous lot, and their classes full of discussion, although the end of most sessions in Davis's schedule brought about an epidemic of yawning. Demerits are issued for falling asleep in class, so cadets are allowed to stand instead. It was not uncommon to have a handful standing in the final minutes of a class, which never numbered more than 18 cadets.

Davis remained awake, and seated, throughout the day, including a 25-minute film session with his defensive coach, which was arranged to take place in a tiny room six floors above the mess hall minutes after lunch. He then watched more film at the football complex, taking advantage of the postponed economics lab, though he did briefly interrupt that film study to nap.

Another 40-minute film session with coaches followed, preceding the two-hour practice set to start at 4 p.m.

Davis, who is from Charlotte, has moments when he ponders what life would be like if he had attended William and Mary or Wake Forest, institutions that either had expressed interest in him or had offered a full athletic scholarship.

"I'll be sitting in my room at 11:30 at night studying and one of my buddies from North Carolina will call me on my cellphone," Davis said. "They'll be out in some college bar having a good time. I can hear girls in the background. Obviously, that's not my life here. But you know, it makes me feel proud of myself.

"If I had gone somewhere else, I would be a football player. I'm a part of so much more here. I have a goal, a mission, and I'll leave with a profession."

Davis, upon graduation, will also leave with a five-year military commitment. Whenever a service academy football team suffers through a difficult season, and Army has lost 23 of its last 24 games and recently fired the head coach, Todd Berry, the postgraduate military commitment is usually blamed. It is difficult, everyone acknowledges, for the service academies to attract top high school players when they know they would have to, at best, postpone a professional career for five years.

Pete Dawkins was captain of the last undefeated Army team, in 1958, a season in which he also won the Heisman Trophy as the country's most outstanding player. Dawkins concedes that the N.F.L., which was just gaining legitimacy in 1958, has become a prominent factor in the fortunes of Army football.

"But we can still compete and win in Division I," Dawkins, who has had a long and successful military and business career, said in a telephone interview. "It is clear we can't compete with the football factories, the Ohio States and Oklahomas, but I totally reject the notion that the Military Academy should retreat to the Ivy League or Division II. West Point is a national institution and needs to play representative teams across the nation."

Dawkins does foresee strategic changes in the program. The academy will withdraw from Conference USA after 2004, ending a brief, bizarre association that linked Army to institutions it has little in common with, traditionally or academically.

Like Navy and Air Force, it is likely that Army will soon return to some variant of an option-run offensive system, a scheme that minimizes the academies' noted disadvantages: smaller players and players with less top-end speed.

"People rightly point out the disadvantages, but they sometimes forget the substantial advantages," Dawkins said. "We have players who are bright and disciplined. It should be the hallmark of every Army team that it has fewer penalties and mental errors than anyone. Army's special teams should be superior because special teams is an attitude. Army teams should also be the best-conditioned teams in the nation.

"There is another important advantage. At a lot of other institutions, the football program is an appendage bolted onto the outside of a hall. At West Point, aspiring to be a winner is part of the core values. Football is the heart and soul of the institution."

On the way to practice Tuesday, Davis called it the best part of his day, something else that might set him apart from most Division I football players. "I just love putting on that gold helmet and running out there where Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard played or practiced," he said. "Especially this week."

This week is Navy week at West Point, which means bonfires, pep rallies and "Beat Navy" signs everywhere. Milk cartons, placed by the thousands on the hundreds of tables for 10 in the mess hall, are printed with these words: Go Army. Beat Navy.

Just before 5 p.m., it was bitterly cold as darkness descended outside Michie Stadium, Army's football home since 1924. Davis made a crunching tackle in a drill, cheered on by teammates. Shortly thereafter, a cannon fired a blank charge across the academy grounds by the Hudson River, the report echoing up the hill to the stadium.

The cannon signaled the nightly rite of retreat, when the American flag is lowered on the West Point plain. A bugler plays and everyone in the area stops, including those driving in cars. The cadets turn to salute.

By 7:30 p.m., Davis was back in his barracks beginning what he expected to be at least five hours of study. Earlier, he had discussed that morning's physics exam with an upperclassman.

"You know it's a tough test when a senior getting ready to graduate remembers everything about it," Davis said. "There is the West Point tradition everybody knows about and the traditions that are less known. But this is a special place. We are learning what have historically been very important lessons.

"You cannot separate the Army football tradition from that. You're not looking at Division I football the right way if you think Army doesn't belong in Division I football."

At West Point, on the plain outside the barracks, taps is played at 11:30 p.m. All cadets must be in their rooms. They are not required to switch off the lights. Cadet Rob Davis studied on.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company