How a federal policy changes the future of service academy athletes
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Kyle Bonagura, ESPN Staff Writer
ON MARCH 13, scouts from 18 NFL teams traveled to Colorado Springs, Colorado, for the Air Force Academy pro day. The event has never been a high-priority stop for talent evaluators ahead of the draft, but this time, there was an elevated sense of importance.
Part of that was obvious: Over the past three seasons, Air Force has the ninth-best winning percentage in FBS college football (.744) and the second-best mark among Group of 5 teams. And scouts were eager to see the talented players who made up such a winning program.
Another part was almost ceremonial. The academies will likely still hold NFL pro days next year, but they won’t function the same way given none of the graduating seniors will be eligible to play right away. As things sit, this will be the last year the United States government will permit service academy players — those at Army, Navy and Air Force — to jump directly from college to professional sports. Next year, athletes will be required to serve two years in the military — as had been a long-established process until 2019 — before having the option to pursue professional sports, while completing the rest of their service commitment in the reserves.
“Two years being away from the game is a tremendous setback,” said Chet Gladchuk, who has served as Navy’s athletic director since 2001. “We don’t guarantee anyone that they’re going to make the pros or that they’re going to get a tryout. But if you’ve got a young man coming up the ranks here and develops and realizes, ‘I’m good enough,’ why shouldn’t he get to take that shot?”
The ever-changing policy has been the subject of debate over the past several years, especially since December 2022, when a passage in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) stated a “cadet may not obtain employment, including as a professional athlete, until after completing the cadet’s commissioned service obligation.”
It created an uproar because, at the time, Army linebacker Andre Carter II was projected as a possible first-round NFL draft pick, and it gave the impression the rug had been pulled out from under him. The response was impactful. Legislators moved quickly to adjust the language, grandfathering in those who arrived at service academies in 2019 or earlier, thereby paving the way for football players to be eligible for the 2023 and 2024 NFL drafts.
But why have the rule at all? It’s something athletic department officials at all three service academies have struggled to find a good answer for and, uniformly, believe goes against the best interests of the United States military.
“It’s important to keep in mind that none of them would lose or shake their obligation to serve [if they went directly to the NFL]. It’s not like you’re letting them off the hook,” Gladchuk said. “Every one of them would still have to serve at one point or another.”
GROWING UP IN suburban Chicago, Bo Richter never really gave much thought about joining the military. It wasn’t until he was approached by an Air Force assistant at a camp at Northwestern that it even entered his consciousness — and then he was dismissive.
“I said to my mom, ‘It’s pretty cool, the Air Force Academy,'” Richter said. “I would never go there, but that’s awesome.
“Then we got the whole spiel, and we started figuring out what it was all about. Great academics, great football. It ended up being the best option for me.”
Richter wasn’t a recruit who fielded much Power 5 interest. He didn’t start playing football in high school until his junior year and — other than Air Force — was primarily sought after by schools in the Ivy League, MAC and FCS going into his senior year. For a recruit of his profile, the NFL didn’t factor into his decision in the slightest. He was more concerned about where he could go to prepare for a career in business.
His path is a typical one for a service academy player. Rarely do any of the three land a recruit with Power 5 offers; instead, they focus more on somewhat under-the-radar types with strong academic profiles.
“You’re trying to identify somebody that’s an exceptionally strong student that has the maturity and the character and the leadership qualities and someone you think can be a good Division I football player,” Air Force coach Troy Calhoun said. “They’re hard to find. We literally recruit the whole country. We have all five time zones on our team just because we have pretty unique people.
“First thing on the transcript: Is there pre-calculus? Is there chemistry? We’re still [standardized-]test-mandatory. The sheer candor of what’s involved to how you’re going to serve, you’re 22 years old and you’re going to serve on active duty. That’s hard to find.”
This is not Calhoun complaining. This is him laying out the reality of what has been — and will always be — needed to fill a roster at a service academy. For him, players such as Richter and Trey Taylor, the 2023 Jim Thorpe Award winner, will always be the model for continued success: guys who needed to develop before growing into team leaders by the back ends of their careers.
Taylor and Richter are both viewed as possible late-round picks who will surely be signed as free agents if they go undrafted. They were among the six Air Force players who worked out in front of NFL scouts.
At pro day, Richter’s development was on full display. His 40-inch vertical jump and 26 reps on the bench would have ranked No. 1 among all linebackers at the combine; his broad jump of 10 feet, 4 inches would have been tied for third; and he ran a consensus 4.56 in the 40-yard dash despite pulling a hamstring on his first and only attempt. And during the season, he had incredible production, finishing with 19.5 tackles for loss and 10 sacks.
“Playing at the professional level is something that was a dream that I had no idea how realistic it was going to be until I got to this point,” said Richter, who was not a highly recruited high school player. “And now it looks like it’s a realistic one.”
After all, there are only six service academy players on active NFL rosters.
Richter plans on taking football as far as he can, but also spoke proudly of the assignment that awaits him as a commissioner officer working as a financial manager at Eglin Air Force Base whenever that time comes.
For Calhoun, others that come along in that mold — who come in unheralded before developing into potential NFL players — should also be given the opportunity to see how far football can take them.
THE NDAA FOR fiscal year 2024 was approved by both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate in December and was signed into law by President Joe Biden on Dec. 22.
Tucked deep in that bill was the call for the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the committees on armed services of the Senate and the House of Representatives by March 1. The report would include a legislative proposal to “update and clarify the legislative framework related to the ability of Service Academy graduates to pursue employment as a professional athlete prior to serving at least five years on active duty; and retain the existing requirement that all Service Academy graduates must serve for two years on active duty before affiliating with the reserves to pursue employment as a professional athlete.”
It also required a report that included every service academy graduate released or deferred from active service to participate in professional sports and a description of their career progress.
Spokespersons for the committees on armed services of the Senate and the House of Representatives did not reply to multiple messages from ESPN seeking copies of the reports and inquiring about the professional sports pathway for service academy graduates. A Department of Defense spokesperson declined to make anyone available for comment.
“It would’ve been nice if the athletic directors were engaged in the thought process a little bit more,” Gladchuk said. “It was pretty much handled at a level that was well above our influence.”
DURING THE SEASON, before the NDAA was finalized, Calhoun held out hope there would be another reversal, paving the way for players to head directly to the NFL.
On the possibility of keeping the two-year service term before attempting to go pro, Calhoun said, “Candidly, I think that would be a mistake for our country.”
Navy coach Brian Newberry is in a similar boat.
“It’s frustrating,” Newberry said. “A lot of players that we recruit, they’re not delusional about their ability to play in the NFL, but there’s certainly a large amount of kids that we recruit that have those ambitions and at least want the opportunity if it presents itself.”
It might be easy to write that off as a football coach looking for a competitive advantage, and while that is certainly part of it, there’s more to it.
“I don’t understand it. I think, for a lot of reasons, it would actually be good for the academies [to send players to the NFL],” Newberry said. “If, by chance, we have a player that can play in the NFL, what a great marketing tool for the academies and for the military. What great ambassadors they would be, and what you get out of that side of it far outweighs the deferment of their service.
“To me, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I hear the arguments on both sides, but I just think that the argument on the other side is uninformed.”
That argument boils down to this: When someone is admitted to a service academy, their military obligation is all that matters. The academies don’t exist to develop professional athletes.
After the two-year service period was reinstated in 2022, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., issued a statement in support of the reversal.
“While I wish all service academy athletes who wish to go pro the best, the fact is U.S. military service academies exist to produce warfighters, not professional athletes,” he said. “By enrolling in one of these institutions, they took a spot from one of the thousands of other highly qualified Americans whose dream was to attend a service academy and serve their country in uniform.”
But to those on the campuses, that stance lacks nuance and implies these athletes are attempting to circumvent their service obligation, something that has never been on the table. They believe giving football players an NFL runway straight out of school actually functions as an extension of their military commitment.
Take Carter, for example. Even though his draft stock slipped and he ended up going undrafted, he still signed with the Minnesota Vikings last year and appeared in 12 games as a rookie. For the duration of his NFL career, he’ll carry significant value as a marketing asset for West Point and the U.S. Army.
Consider this: Last month, the Army released its 2025 fiscal year budget overview that called for a 10% increase to its recruiting and advertising budget, bringing it to $1.1 billion.
“Andre Carter’s best opportunity to help the Army’s recruiting is for him to lead the league in sacks as a Minnesota Viking,” said Mike Buddie, the athletic director at West Point. “If you win a Rhodes Scholarship, we pause your military responsibility and let you pursue the Rhodes Scholarship because that’s the best use of your skills. I view professional athletes very similarly to medical school and to Rhodes Scholarships. Especially with the fact that they’ve all agreed and they all understand that the minute that their professional sports career is over, their five-year clock starts ticking.”
And at that point, they’ve been around a professional setting and are, perhaps, more prepared to serve as a commission officer.
Added Newberry: “The amount of kids that actually have that opportunity [to play in the NFL] is so minuscule that I don’t think it impacts what the academies’ missions are in the long term.
“They’re not trying to get out of their service. I think that’s the most important thing to understand, is these kids come here, they choose to serve, they want to serve. But that window for them is so small, so to require a two-year delay just makes no sense.”
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Andrea Adelson
ORLANDO, Fla. — Scott Frost walks into the UCF football building and into his office, the one he used the last time he had this job, eight years ago. The shades are drawn, just like they used to be. There are drawings from his three kids tacked to the walls. There are still trophies sitting on a shelf.
He still parks in the same spot before he walks into that same building and sits at the same desk. The only thing that has changed is that the desk is positioned in a different part of the room.
But the man doing all the same things at the University of Central Florida is a different Scott Frost than the one who left following that undefeated 2017 season to take the head coach job at Nebraska.
UCF might look the same, but the school is different now, too. The Knights are now in a Power 4 conference, and there is now a 12-team College Football Playoff that affords them the opportunity to play for national championships — as opposed to self-declaring them. Just outside his office, construction is underway to upgrade the football stadium. The same, but different.
“I know I’m a wiser person and smarter football coach,” Frost said during a sit-down interview with ESPN. “When you’re young, you think you have it all figured out. I don’t think you really get better as a person unless you go through really good things, and really bad things. I just know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
Out on the practice field, Frost feels the most at home — he feels comfort in going back to the place that has defined nearly every day of his life. As a young boy, he learned the game from his mom and dad, both football coaches, then thrived as a college and NFL player before going into coaching.
He coaches up his players with a straightforwardness that quarterbacks coach McKenzie Milton remembers fondly from their previous time together at UCF. Milton started at quarterback on the 2017 undefeated team, and the two remained close after Frost left.
“I see the same version of him from when I was here as a player,” Milton said. “Even though the dynamic in college football has changed dramatically with the portal and NIL, I think Coach Frost is one of the few coaches that can still bring a group of guys together and turn them into a team, just with who he is and what he’s done and what he’s been through in his life. He knows what it looks like to succeed, both as a coach and a player.”
Since his return, Frost has had to adjust to those changes to college football, but he said, “I love coming into work every day. We’ve got the right kids who love football. We’re working them hard. They want to be pushed. They want to be challenged. We get to practice with palm trees and sunshine and, we’re playing big-time football. But it’s also just not the constant stress meat grinder of some other places.”
Meat grinder of some other places.
Might he mean a place such as Nebraska?
“You can think what you want,” Frost said. “One thing I told myself — I’m never going to talk about that. It just doesn’t feel good to talk about. I’ll get asked 100 questions. This is about UCF. I just don’t have anything to say.”
Frost says he has no regrets about leaving UCF, even though he didn’t get the results he had hoped for at his alma mater. When Nebraska decided to part ways with coach Mike Riley in 2017, Frost seemed the best, most obvious candidate to replace him. He had been the starting quarterback on the 1997 team, the last Nebraska team to win a national title.
He now had the coaching résumé to match. Frost had done the unthinkable at UCF — taking a program that was winless the season before he arrived, to undefeated and the talk of the college football world just two years later.
But he could not ignore the pull of Nebraska and the opportunities that came along with power conference football.
“I was so happy here,” Frost said. “We went undefeated and didn’t get a chance to win a championship, at least on the field. You are always striving to reach higher goals. I had always told myself I wasn’t going to leave here unless there was a place that you can legitimately go and win a national championship. It was a tough decision because I didn’t want to leave regardless of which place it was.”
Indeed, Frost maintains he was always happy at UCF. But he also knew returning to Nebraska would make others happy, too.
“I think I kind of knew that wasn’t best for me,” he said. “It was what some other people wanted me to do to some degree.”
In four-plus seasons with the Cornhuskers, Frost went 16-31 — including 5-22 in one-score games. He was fired three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to Georgia Southern.
After Frost was fired, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where his wife has family. He reflected on what happened during his tenure with the Cornhuskers but also about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He tried to stay connected to the game, coaching in the U.S. Army Bowl, a high school all-star game in Frisco, Texas, in December 2022. Milton coached alongside him, and distinctly remembers a conversation they had.
“He said, ‘It’s my goal to get back to UCF one day,'” Milton said. “At that time, I was like, ‘I pray to God that happens.'”
If that was the ultimate goal, Frost needed to figure out how to position himself to get back there. While he contemplated his future, he coached his son’s flag football team to a championship. Frost found the 5- and 6-year-olds he coached “listen better than 19-year-olds sometimes.”
Ultimately, he decided on a career reboot in the NFL. Frost had visited the Rams during their offseason program, and when a job came open in summer 2024, Rams coach Sean McVay immediately reached out.
Frost was hired as a senior analyst, primarily helping with special teams but also working with offense and defense.
“It was more just getting another great leader in the building, someone who has been a head coach, that has wisdom and a wealth of experience to be able to learn from,” McVay told ESPN. “His ability to be able to communicate to our players from a great coaching perspective, but also have the empathy and the understanding from when he played — all of those things were really valuable.”
McVay said he and Frost had long discussions about handling the challenges that come with falling short as a head coach.
“There’s strength in the vulnerability,” McVay said. “I felt that from him. There’s a real power in the perspective that you have from those different experiences. If you can really look at some of the things that maybe didn’t go down the way you wanted to within the framework of your role and responsibility, real growth can occur. I saw that in him.”
Frost says his time with the Rams rejuvenated him.
“It brought me back,” Frost said. “Sometimes when you’re a head coach or maybe even a coordinator, you forget how fun it is to be around the game when it’s not all on you all the time. What I did was a very small part, and we certainly weren’t going to win or lose based on every move that I made, and I didn’t have to wear the losses and struggle for the victories like you do when you’re a head coach. I’m so grateful to those guys.”
UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir got a call from then-head coach Gus Malzahn last November. Malzahn, on the verge of finishing his fourth season at UCF, was contemplating becoming offensive coordinator at Florida State. Given all the responsibilities on his desk as head coach — from NIL to the transfer portal to roster management — he found the idea of going back to playcalling appealing. Mohajir started preparing a list of candidates and was told Thanksgiving night that Malzahn had planned to step down.
Though Frost previously worked at UCF under athletics director Danny White, he and Mohajir had a preexisting relationship. Mohajir said he reached out to Frost after he was fired at Nebraska to gauge his interest in returning to UCF as offensive coordinator under Malzahn. But Frost was not ready.
This time around, Mohajir learned quickly that Frost had interest in returning as head coach. Mohajir called McVay and Rams general manager Les Snead. They told him Frost did anything that was asked of him, including making copies around the office.
“They said, ‘You would never know he was the head coach at a major college program.” Mohajir also called former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts to get a better understanding about what happened with the Cornhuskers.
“Fits are a huge piece, and not everybody fits,” Mohajir said.
After eight conversations, Mohajir decided he wanted to meet Frost in person. They met at an airport hotel in Dallas.
“He was motivated,” Mohajir said. “We went from coast to coast, talked to coordinators, head coaches, pro guys, all kinds of different folks. And at the end of the day, I really believe that Scott wanted the job the most.”
The first day back in Orlando, Dec. 8, was a blur. Frost woke up at 3:45 a.m. in California to be able to make it to Florida in time for his introductory news conference with his family.
When they pulled into the campus, his first time back since he left in 2017, Frost said he was in a fog. It took another 24 hours for him and his wife, Ashley, to take a deep exhale.
“Rather than bouncing around chasing NFL jobs, we thought maybe we would be able to plant some roots here and have our kids be in a stable place for a while at a place that I really enjoyed coaching and that I think it has a chance to evolve into a place that could win a lot of football games,” Frost said. “All that together was just enough to get me to come back.”
The natural question now is whether Frost can do what he did during his first tenure.
That 2017 season stands as the only winning season of his head coaching career, but it carries so much weight with UCF fans because of its significance as both the best season in school history, and one that changed both its own future and college football.
After UCF finished 13-0, White self-declared the Knights national champions. Locked out of the four-team playoff after finishing No. 12 in the final CFP standings, White started lobbying for more attention to be paid to schools outside the power conferences.
That season also positioned UCF to pounce during the next wave of realignment. Sure enough, in 2023, the Knights began play in a Power 4 conference for the first time as Big 12 members. This past season, the CFP expanded to 12 teams. Unlike 2017, UCF now has a defined path to play for a national title and no longer has to go undefeated and then pray for a shot. Win the Big 12 championship, no matter the record, and UCF is in the playoff.
But Frost cautions those who expect the clock to turn back to 2017.
“I don’t think there’s many people out there that silly,” Frost said. “People joke about that with me, that they’re going to expect you go into undefeated in the first year. I think the fans are a little more realistic than that.”
The game, of course, is different. Had the transfer portal and NIL existed when Frost was at UCF during his first tenure, he might not have been able to keep the 2017 team together. The 2018 team, which went undefeated under Josh Heupel before losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, might not have stayed together, either.
This upcoming season, UCF will receive a full share of television revenue from the Big 12, after receiving a half share (estimated $18 million) in each of his first two seasons. While that is more than what it received in the AAC, it is less than what other Big 12 schools received, making it harder to compete immediately. It also struggled with NIL funding. As a result, in its first two years in the conference, UCF went 5-13 in Big 12 play and 10-15 overall.
Assuming the House v. NCAA settlement goes into effect this summer, Mohajir says UCF is aiming to spend the full $20.5 million, including fully funding football.
“It’s like we moved to the fancy neighborhood, and we got a job that’s going to pay us money over time, and we’re going to do well over time, but we’re stretching a little to be there right now, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people and a lot of commitment from a lot of people,” Frost said. “So far, the help that we’ve gotten has been impressive.”
Mohajir points out that UCF has had five coaching changes over the past 10 years, dating back to the final season under George O’Leary in 2015, when the Knights went 0-12. Frost says he wants to be in for the long term, and Mohajir hopes consistency at head coach will be an added benefit. Mohajir believes UCF is getting the best of Frost in this moment and scoffs at any questions about whether rehiring him will work again.
“Based on what I’m seeing right now, it will absolutely work,” Mohajir said. “But I don’t really look at it as ‘working again.’ It’s not ‘again.’ It’s, ‘Will it work?’ Because it’s a different era.”
To that end, Frost says success is not recreating 2017 and going undefeated. Rather, Frost said, “If our group now can help us become competitive in the Big 12, and then, from time to time, compete for championships and make us more relevant nationally, I think we’ll have done our job to help catapult UCF again.”
You could say he is looking for the same result. He’s just taking a different route there.
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Max Olson
Houston transfer safety A.J. Haulcy committed to LSU on Sunday, his agency, A&P Sports, told ESPN.
Haulcy, the top player still available and No. 1 safety in ESPN’s spring transfer portal rankings, committed to the Tigers after taking an official visit Sunday. Miami, Ole Miss and SMU were also contenders for his pledge.
The 6-foot, 215-pound senior defensive back has started 32 games over his three college seasons and earned first-team All-Big 12 honors in 2024 after producing 74 tackles, 8 pass breakups and 5 interceptions, which tied for most in the conference.
LSU has assembled one of the top incoming transfer classes in the country this offseason with 18 signees, including six players — wide receivers Barion Brown (Kentucky) and Nic Anderson (Oklahoma), linemen Braelin Moore (Virginia Tech) and Josh Thompson (Northwestern), cornerback Mansoor Delane (Virginia Tech) and defensive end Patrick Payton (LSU) — who ranked among the top 60 in ESPN’s winter transfer rankings.
The Tigers also landed USF transfer Bernard Gooden, one of the most coveted defensive tackles in the spring transfer window.
Haulcy began his career at New Mexico in 2022, earning a starting role as a true freshman and recording 87 tackles, including a career-high 24 against Fresno State, and two interceptions. The Houston native entered the transfer portal at the end of the season and came home to play for the Cougars.
As a sophomore in 2023, Haulcy recorded a team-high 98 tackles and received votes for Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year from the league’s coaches.
Haulcy chose to re-enter the portal April 21 after Houston’s spring game, as did starting cornerback Jeremiah Wilson, who’ll continue his career at Florida State. Wilson and Haulcy were the Nos. 11 and 12 players, respectively, in ESPN’s spring transfer rankings.
BYU picked up a pair of key transfer portal additions Saturday, as brothers Bear and Tiger Bachmeier told ESPN that they have committed to play for the Cougars next season.
The brothers are transferring from Stanford and project to be key players of the immediate and long-term plans for the BYU program.
Bear, a quarterback, committed Saturday morning at the end of his visit, he told ESPN. He is a class of 2025 recruit who committed to Stanford out of high school and enrolled there this spring.
Both Bachmeiers elected to transfer in the wake of Stanford’s dismissal of head coach Troy Taylor in March. After visiting BYU coach Kalani Sitake’s program in recent days, the brothers committed.
For Bear, he is expected to be one of the backups for successful incumbent quarterback Jake Retzlaff in 2025 and compete for the starting job at BYU in 2026.
Bear was attracted to BYU’s open offensive scheme and a rich history of quarterbacks that includes a strong recent run under offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick. He also referenced BYU’s historical success, which stretches from Jim McMahon to Ty Detmer to Steve Young.
“The ability to come in and win games and [Coach] Roderick’s scheme and the pedigree of quarterbacks they have produced in history and recently is enticing,” Bear told ESPN.
Tiger told ESPN he committed to BYU later Saturday. He’ll arrive at BYU having graduated from Stanford in two-and-a-half years with a degree in computer science. He’ll enroll in a graduate program at BYU, he said.
Tiger will be expected to be an immediate contributor at wide receiver. He caught 46 balls over two seasons at Stanford for 476 yards and two touchdowns. He has two years of eligibility remaining.
Bear and Tiger are the second and third brothers to play major college football in their family. Their older brother, Hank Bachmeier, played quarterback at Boise State, Louisiana Tech and Wake Forest, where his college career concluded last year.
There is one more Bachmeier brother remaining: Buck Bachmeier will be a freshman in high school in the fall.
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