Why the Naval Academy will continue to have problems with its football team

By Robert Goldich

Best Defense department
of third rail issues

Gee, what a surprise -- Naval Academy football players doing something bad. This is not the Navy per se at all. It is the result of
a perfect storm of rotten policies, all directed at making the Academy football
team able to compete in Division I and win games generally. I wrote about this
in a lengthy CRS report I did in 1997 on the service academies, but there are
no indications that things have changed at all, except possibly to get worse.
These policies, and a geographical factor, include: 

Turning
the Naval Academy Preparatory School into an institution designed to enable
academically weak athletes to scrape by at the Academy, a terrible turn from
the original intent of the institution (all three academies have them), which
was to give a leg up for deserving enlisted personnel who obtain an Academy
appointment. This really stinks. 




Using
football as a method for recruiting African-American midshipmen, all too many
of whom have both academic and behavioral problems that would keep anybody but
football players (regardless of race) out of the Academy, but are accepted into
the Academy because of a culture that says the athlete can do no wrong. There
is a really repulsive racist aura, that of the bigoted stereotype of physically
strong but mentally weak black men, operating here. Furthermore, it discredits
affirmative action to recruit minority midshipmen based on their potential to
be good officers, not primarily good football players




Whole
battalions of retired admirals and captains floating around Annapolis and the
whole DC metro area who exert enormous pressure on the Academy to excel in
football in the all too typical rah rah culture of alumni from schools where
football is a metastatic part of the culture (think Penn State).




One
factor for which neither the Navy nor the players can be blamed, and which
extends far beyond the football business: the geographical placement of the
Naval Academy right in the middle of a fairly large town which is a party place
and beach/sailing resort, creating many more opportunities for off-base
partying and lots of alcohol consumption. The contrast with West Point and the
Air Force Academy, both of which are much more geographically isolated and
distant from anyplace with fleshpots, is obvious.




Letting
football players have all kinds of special privileges at the Academy, which
creates in the minds of many a sense that they are untouchable. This includes
time off from various onerous duties that other midshipmen must perform and
pressure on professors to let the slide by with low grades.

The absence of one or two of these would probably
tamp down these offenses, but there are so many negatives that it's hard to
avoid incidents of this nature.

Robert L. Goldich  retired from the Congressional Research Service in 2005
as its  senior military manpower analyst.   Currently he is consulting and drafting a book on the history
of conscription.