Tradition, discipline, brotherhood: What it’s like to play football at Army, Navy
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Heather Dinich
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Heather Dinich
Senior College Football Insider
- College football reporter
- Joined ESPN.com in 2007
- Graduate of Indiana University
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Chris Low
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Chris Low
ESPN Senior Writer
- College football reporter
- Joined ESPN.com in 2007
- Graduate of the University of Tennessee
THE STEEP CLIMB up Stony Lonesome Road is harrowing, even for the fittest of Army’s football players. When the shuttle buses aren’t running in the winter, team members hoof it from their barracks to the Kimsey Athletic Center for offseason mat drills at 5 o’clock in the morning, typically in freezing temperatures with a layer of snow on the ground.
The last thing they see before making the final left turn is the historic “Beat Navy” house, built in 1875 and used to accommodate distinguished guests. The building, with its illuminated sign out front, is a reminder that the football mission at Army is clear. It’s why you see “BEAT NAVY” signs everywhere in and around West Point, New York, from the Food Mart Go Army convenience store in nearby Fort Montgomery to the urinals in the football complex. Yes, the urinals.
In downtown Annapolis, Maryland, the waterfront home of the U.S. Naval Academy, souvenirs with GO NAVY BEAT ARMY are in storefronts everywhere — year-round — but on campus, everything ramps up during “Army Week.” That’s when the coaching staff double-checks every door is locked. It’s when mascot security is turned up a notch. (In 2012, Navy’s goat mascot went missing and was found next to a grass median on Army Navy Drive in Crystal City near the Pentagon.) It’s when the scout team wears black stripes on their helmets to mimic Army’s players.
Because of who the players are — and the soldiers they will soon become — the Army–Navy rivalry game, which will be contested for the 125th time Saturday in Landover, Maryland, is unlike any other in the country, drawing a global audience of our nation’s armed forces past and present.
But as the college football landscape continues to rapidly shift, the lives of students at Army and Navy have become a larger outlier than ever before.
“Their entire day is filled,” Navy coach Brian Newberry said. “And it’s not just classes, it’s legitimate classes. And they’ve got things in the evening within their company and military responsibilities. They don’t get sleep like you do at another place.”
There’s also no money for name, image and likeness — the Department of Defense prohibits players from endorsing any products or having any sponsorships. The academies do not allow redshirting. There are no sweeping roster changes from the transfer portal. Anyone who transfers into the U.S. Military Academy or the Naval Academy has to start all over as a freshman academically and go through the military training and dreaded “plebe” orientation, making it highly unlikely any junior football player wants to tackle that challenge.
And yet there’s still so much to play for.
“A lot of what we talk about is serving something bigger than yourself,” Navy senior fullback Daba Fofana said. “Now, there is that aspect of you want to put food on the table for your family and all of that, but the reason you play football and the reason that you serve in the military isn’t for yourself. It’s for the love of the game, love of your country, the love for your brothers.”
“I’m glad guys at other schools are getting paid big money in NIL,” Army junior linebacker Kalib Fortner said. “They should be. But that’s not our purpose. It’s the brotherhood that’s at the center of everything we do and fight for, playing for your brother that’s right beside you in the locker room, the one who lives down the hall from you in your barracks, every cadet who’s ever come through here, and most importantly, our country.”
ESPN shadowed Fortner, Army’s leader in tackles for loss this season (8.5), and Fofana, a team captain, attending classes with the players, as well as practice and position meetings — even Bible study — to illustrate what a typical day is like for an athlete at one of the academies.
As Army and Navy prepare to play the 125th edition of “America’s Game,” they do so entrenched in their military history, adhering to strict traditions in an era of college football that has drastically changed around them.
DABA, FROM THE Mandingo tribal word meaning hard worker, is named after his paternal grandfather. His father is from the Ivory Coast, but Fofana grew up in Cumming, Georgia, where he wrestled, ran track and played football.
It’s a long way from the Yard, the nickname given to the Naval Academy that dates back to the word “dockyard” during the Revolutionary War.
Like any college, the Yard is buzzing with activity — students with backpacks crisscrossing campus to get to their next class. Unlike most other places, though, you need a valid picture ID to get past the MA (master-at-arms) at Gate 1, and don’t even think about driving on campus without a credential from the Department of Defense or a Naval Academy ID card.
Not only is it hard to get in, the midshipmen need permission to get out.
There are more than 4,400 students in the Brigade of Midshipmen, and they all live in Bancroft Hall, a sprawling dormitory complex that includes 3.8 miles of corridors and eight wings divided into 36 companies.
Fofana wakes up each morning around 7 in a tiny dorm room that’s about 100 square feet, a utilitarian space devoid of any decorations, pictures or posters. He typically leaves around 7:20 a.m. and doesn’t come back until around 9 p.m. There’s no rug on the tile floor, and each room has a shower and a sink, but the bathrooms are communal. There are two raised wooden beds that each accommodate a desk and chair underneath, with no clutter on the desktops, save for a few neatly stacked papers. On the floor sits a black mini-refrigerator, which Fofana received special permission for.
“I just have the stuff that I need in here,” he said.
Fofana learned to quickly and expertly make his bed with hospital corners every morning before leaving his room, and any extra blankets have to be folded on top. It’s one detail that will be checked during two routine inspections each semester, “alpha and bravo.” Normally, he said, study hours are “sacred,” but once every semester, all midshipmen go through a white-glove test — a 40-point inspection called bravo that includes making sure the floors are waxed and that all uniforms are hanging dark to light, left to right. Students are allowed three “hits” on the inspection, and if they fail on a fourth, they have to take it again.
There’s a laundry service that does the dry cleaning for the dress uniforms, and a cart comes around the halls once a week to collect other clothes. Everyone has to be in their company spaces by 11 each night, and sign a paper confirming it with the company deck officer.
“It was very much a culture shock,” Fofana said of his arrival at Navy. “At the beginning of plebe summer, as soon as I walk through my door, you walk in and you start getting yelled at all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Oh, shoot.’ And the first two weeks were a pretty hard adjustment, just because of the lifestyle and all that stuff. But after that, I ended up easing into things and figuring out a rhythm.”
After all, he’s got a PlayStation in his room. Both Army and Navy are in the EA Sports NCAA football game, but their players don’t receive any NIL money, unlike the $600 that players who have opted in at other schools receive.
“I’m just happy to be a part of the game,” Fofana said. “It’s a childhood dream of mine.”
FORTNER AND HIS twin brother Liam, a receiver at Army, grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. They won back-to-back state championships together at Central High School, and Kalib was a three-time all-state selection. They signed their scholarship papers with Army together on Dec. 17, 2020.
Up by 6:15 every morning, Kalib Fortner’s day begins at 6:50 when cadets assemble in the quad for predawn formation. Breakfast in the mess hall is mandatory and begins at 6:55 a.m. Fortner doesn’t return to his barracks during the season until 8:30 or 9 p.m.
Fortner lives on the second floor of the Eisenhower Barracks, named after former general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a 1915 West Point graduate. There’s very little space between the two beds in his room, which he shares with Charlie Barnett, a junior kicker. There’s a desk at the foot of his bed and two portable fans.
“The smell is nothing like it was my freshman year at Sherman Barracks, when we had to leave our windows open, but you still have to air it out sometimes,” Fortner joked.
The only real decor is a collage of pictures of Fortner’s longtime girlfriend, Morgan McSwain, just above his desk. The floor is tile, and there’s nothing on the walls, which are painted a bland off-white.
There’s no television. “Wouldn’t have time to watch it if I did have one,” he said. There’s no mini-fridge, either. Fortner uses his school-issued laptop to watch game tape and also has an iPad and may watch other games on it. There’s a sink in the room, but that’s it. The toilets and communal showers are at the end of the hallway. There aren’t any elevators in his barracks, which have six floors.
Every Monday, the cadets have mandatory main inspection. Fortner is up at 6:15, shaves, gets his uniform ready and climbs the seemingly endless flight of stairs to “The Shelf,” which overlooks the rest of the barracks in the main courtyard. Fortner is a squad leader in the First Regiment and has to inspect seven cadets in his company when they get to the top.
“Got to make sure their shoes are shined, their belts are in line, that they have their dog tags and proper haircuts,” Fortner said. “It’s a laundry list.”
AT 7:20 A.M., on a “tactical Thursday” when nearly everyone is required to dress in identical fatigues, Fofana walked through the side door of Bancroft Hall, which is essentially a food factory equipped to feed all 4,400 midshipmen in 20 minutes. By rule, he takes his hat off inside the building. A patch on the left arm of his uniform reads “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” and the pin with three gold stripes on the front of his chest indicates he’s a team captain, an honor recognized throughout the school.
“You’re at a leadership school,” longtime Navy assistant coach Ivin Jasper said. “That’s the role you’re going to be in once you leave school. It’s getting that early start on it.”
Each sports team has its own table in-season, and Fofana sat down for breakfast at table No. 42, which had a yellow FOOTBALL sign on it. He piled sausage and eggs on his plate and had a glass of orange juice. Several trays packed with pancakes were scattered around the table, with teammates grabbing food and passing it around like a supersized holiday dinner.
Fofana has a 3.69 GPA and is majoring in applied physics while pursuing a career in medicine; he hopes to be a doctor in the orthopedics field. This fall, he’s taking 16 credits and said the most difficult course is called Introduction to Aeronautics, a study of concepts such as fluid motion, airfoil and wing theory, and wind tunnels. (The students call the class “planes.”)
His class schedule on this particular Thursday began at 8:30 a.m. in Luce Hall Room 114 with Stoic Philosophy and Leadership. Fofana was one of the first students in the room.
“What do we want to know about each other today?” professor Marcus Hedahl said to start the class, asking each person in the room to share an album, song or artist they enjoy listening to.
The purpose of the class, Hedahl said, is to teach the midshipmen how to think, not what to think. It’s a leadership class that looks at diverse cultures.
As Fofana left his stoic philosophy class and made his way to Autonomy and Control Naval Weapons Systems in Rickover 1061, he joined a flood of classmates walking through a hallway adorned with posters of famous leaders, including Bill Belichick, Gregg Popovich and George Washington.
The focus of this next class is the mechanics of how weapons systems work. On the floor at the front of the room, in front of a dry-erase board, was a blue, inert (key word) 5-inch gun shell. If it’s blue, it’s a dummy weapon used for instruction.
The theme of the day was sensors, as in night cameras, smart watches and heart sensors. The students call professor Lieutenant Commander Christopher Jeffries, who is also dressed in fatigues, “sir,” and he stayed at the front of the room by a lectern as he taught, explaining to the small group that they need to know how a GPS works and not to depend on it — because sometimes it doesn’t work. He showed a video of an F-35 plane that continues flying even after the pilot has been ejected.
Before turning his attention to football in the afternoon, Fofana worked on his physics research project, where he used a confocal microscope to look at a sample DNA salt solution.
“There’s a lot of pressure, anxiety,” Newberry said of the academic demands on the players. “I want football to be an outlet for them. When they get over here, I really want it to be the best part of their day. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to do hard things. But we’re going to have fun in the process of doing those things.”
A CIVIL ENGINEERING major, Fortner is taking 16½ credit hours this semester. His five classes include Structural Analysis and Platoon Operations. He took a heavier load during last spring semester (21 credits) and made the dean’s list.
In the spring, he took a class called Survival Swim.
“You had your uniform on, your rifle, everything,” he said, “and then there was also a class called Military Movement, essentially gymnastics, but I passed them both fine.”
During his Structural Analysis class, a required course for civil engineering majors, Fortner and his brother Liam worked together drawing frames on a chalkboard (yes, an old-school black chalkboard). They erased part of the structure they were drawing and started again. “It’s deflection of beams and frames, even harder than it sounds,” Fortner said.
After his final Wednesday morning class, Fortner hustled to pre-lunch formation, where cadets gather with their companies to take accountability and make any pertinent announcements before marching into the mess hall. This week, the week of the Air Force game, cadets wore camouflage fatigues, camouflage hats and brown boots. They walked briskly and alertly, always with their heads up and prepared to salute an officer, and seeing a cadet with his or her face buried in a cellphone would be akin to seeing Bigfoot.
The campus is referred to as “post,” and is very contained. West Point covers 16,000 acres on the west bank of the Hudson River, about the size of Manhattan. “But post is pretty condensed, making it easy getting to and from classes and meeting with professors,” Fortner said. Washington Hall is the mess hall, and just out front is a statue of the first U.S. president. A helicopter landed on the lawn adjacent to the statue just after the cadets sat down at their tables for lunch. “It’s probably a general,” Fortner said.
The mess hall houses 4,000 cadets, and Fortner sat at one of the first three tables with the rest of the football team. Breakfast and lunch are mandatory for cadets. On their table was a sign that read: “Heavy, Heavy,” meaning they get a little more food in a meal served family style. The players spoon out meat, green beans and macaroni onto their plates. There are bags of rolls on two corners of the tables, and a couple of pitchers of water (no ice). Some of the players drink Hoist, an electrolyte hydration beverage approved for use by the military.
Fortner sort of picked at his lunch and didn’t eat much.
“I don’t usually eat a whole lot here. I’ll get some snacks at the football complex before practice,” he said.
The mess hall is massive, majestic and full of history. There’s a huge raised platform in the middle known as the “poop deck,” and special guests will visit periodically to address the cadets, who greet the guest by standing at attention. The same goes for any formal dinner.
Among the guests during his time at Army: former President Barack Obama, Hall of Fame basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (a West Point graduate), multiple high-ranking generals and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. Even the Stanley Cup, won last season by the Florida Panthers, was raised on the poop deck in October, with team captains Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk and Aaron Ekblad whipping the corps into a frenzy. Panthers owner Vincent Viola is a West Point graduate. Barkov brought the house down when he screamed, “Beat Navy!”
“I’m not sure a day goes by when you don’t hear that, and it doesn’t matter where you are or who you run into,” Fortner said.
AT 3 P.M., Fofana grabs a seat at the end of the table in a small room for his meeting with the fullbacks and quarterbacks. He’s wearing his football pads and eating an Uncrustable while they watch film of the previous day’s practice. At the head of the table, working the video clips and running through film is first-year offensive coordinator Drew Cronic.
As the meeting broke, Cronic said, “Daba’s got it.”
“1, 2, 3, FAMILY!” the players yelled together.
There are 180 players on the Navy roster — there’s no limit to team size. Newberry said because other programs are so focused on the portal, more talented high school players are available for Navy to recruit.
“We’re being a lot more selective, and a lot more picky with who we’re taking,” Newberry said.
When practice began, it was unusually hot for a September afternoon.
At 4:10, as the Midshipmen were finishing up stretching, one player yelled, “Where else would you rather be?”
“Nowhere!” the team responded.
Fofana is listed at 5-foot-8, and that’s probably a little generous. Most of the players at the academies are noticeably smaller than the elite recruits who typically populate blue-blood football programs, but there’s a self-awareness about it that drives them.
“These guys are going to be bigger and stronger than you,” barked Jason MacDonald, who spent his first four seasons at Navy coaching the fullbacks.
“No offense, young man, but the linebacker you face will be bigger,” MacDonald told another player. “You gotta sink lower.”
Fofana is the No. 2 fullback on the depth chart, but he has received one of the highest honors a Navy athlete can get — being voted a team captain by his teammates. As a team captain along with senior linebacker Colin Ramos, Fofana also leads Navy’s leadership council, which is composed of one player for each position group.
“Be your own blocker,” MacDonald directed as Fofana ran through the spring-loaded machine with his eyes down. “Hit it, hit it, hit it! Eyes up!”
“That could be the difference between a 5-yard gain and a touchdown,” he said. “Hear me?”
“Yes sir!”
Newberry said Navy never has more than two hard days of practice in a row because “everybody can’t really handle it.”
“You have to be really conscious of all that they have on their plate, mentally and physically.”
At 7 p.m., following a long day, practice and more treatment — and ordering Chick-fil-A for dinner — Fofana headed back up the stairs in Ricketts Hall, where the pastor, Bill McKinney, was leading a discussion on faith, and his wife, Barbara, was handing out brownies and milk to about a dozen players in the room.
It’s September, and some players were wearing T-shirts that had BEAT ARMY written on their backs near the collar. As the pastor spoke, to his right on the wall behind him was a picture of Navy’s band, holding up poster letters that spelled “BEAT ARMY.”
FORTNER HAS A short window to go back to his barracks and change into his football practice shirt and shorts and maybe get in a little studying before the buses start running at 1:30 p.m. to take the players up to the Kimsey Athletic Center and practice fields adjacent to Michie Stadium.
None of the players want to miss the bus because they know how grueling that climb to the top can be. The buses don’t run when the weather is nasty in the winter, and Fortner said the summer bus schedule can be tricky too.
“I know what it’s like climbing that hill when it’s 20 degrees and a foot of snow on the ground,” he said. “I think one of the hardest days I ever had was going from there to boxing class. Demanding doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Treatment for the players begins at 1 p.m. followed by weightlifting for different groups. Fortner also had a leadership council meeting. The team meeting was at 3:20 p.m., followed by Fortner’s inside linebackers position meeting.
Army’s inside linebackers coach is Justin Weaver, who was also Fortner’s coach the year he was in the academy’s prep school in 2021. As the linebackers watched tape together, Weaver barked, “Every first-down marker is a trench, but we had sawed-off shotguns in all those trenches.”
There’s never any doubt, even in football position meetings, that you’re at a military academy.
“When y’all go out and lead soldiers and set up training, expect them to execute. Trust your training,” Weaver said as he looked around the room.
“Consistency over time is toughness. Anybody can do something once.”
Army coach Jeff Monken likes to refer to his program and his players as the “last of the hard.”
“I brought it with me from Georgia Southern,” said Monken, who coached there from 2010 to 2013 before coming to Army. “This is the last generation willing to accept the hard, and these kids at Army embody that. You hear people in all walks of life saying they’re soldiers. We are. That’s why we’re here.”
Just like the players’ academy duties, Army’s practices are regimented, intense and unrelenting. At one point Monken climbed on top of a cart and screamed, “It’s time to f—ing start practicing the way we’re supposed to. Are we going to talk about it or f—ing be about it?” The level of discipline on the Black Knights was clear in their 35-14 win over Tulane last Friday in the AAC championship game, when Army became the first FBS team in at least 20 years to have no turnovers, no penalties and no punts in a game, according to ESPN Research.
Army has an indoor practice facility but uses it only when severe weather forces its hand. The backdrop for the field, especially once the leaves begin to turn, is gorgeous. And you know you’re not at just any practice when midway through, a group of parachuters comes sailing in over the fields. And then a few minutes later, Army helicopters come roaring overhead.
As the players spread out to stretch toward the end, coaches bellowed, “Finish the day!”
The team dinner, catered by a local restaurant during the season, is served at 7:55 p.m. on the fourth floor of the football complex. The players chowed down on wings, then slowly made their way to older-looking school buses painted white, and back down the hill to their barracks.
The “Taps” bugle call is played at 11:30 p.m., when all cadets must return to their rooms. Even after a 12- to 13-hour day, Fortner finds himself up past “Taps” on some nights.
“There’s no such thing as wasting time here at West Point,” he said. “You find time to study, nights when you get back from practice, pockets during the day and sometimes in the early morning hours.
“It’s not easy here and not for everybody. People ask, ‘How do you juggle it all?’ My answer is that being on the football team here forces you not to be a procrastinator. Time is money. Time is valuable, and time is important.”
Fortner’s “lazy” day during the season is on Sunday when he might sleep in until 9. But then it’s time to get up, and he says, go “kick some ass” the rest of the week.
FORTNER DOESN’T HAVE a car. Cadets aren’t allowed to have one until the second semester of their junior year. But he has heard the stories of high-profile players around the country driving Lamborghinis.
“Is that true … Lamborghinis?” Fortner asked with an incredulous smile.
No Army players receive NIL money, although Fortner said he gets a $358 monthly stipend from the military. Much of that is used for incidental expenses such as his laundry and haircuts. There’s only one transfer player on the team, backup center Kyle Kloska, who came from Central Michigan.
“Part of what’s so cool about this place is that it hasn’t changed. It’s not going to change,” Fortner said. “We’re not here to cash checks. We’re here to serve each other on this football team and later on our country.”
The midshipmen also receive a monthly stipend, but they pay for everything they have — things like their computer equipment, laundry, haircuts and uniforms — making it basically an interest-free loan that they’re paying back over their four years. As a plebe, more is taken out. There is also an opportunity to take out a $32,000 loan when they are juniors at an interest rate somewhere around 4%, a benefit also available to cadets at Army.
“We’re a unicorn right now,” said Navy’s Newberry, whose roster does not include any fifth-year players. “We still truly are a developmental program. Everywhere else in the country, rosters are flipping over semester to semester — not year-to-year. How do you really build a culture? In relationships, trust takes time. We have that here.”
Monken said “society has a head start” on Army when it goes out to sign high school players on the recruiting trail. Like Newberry, he doesn’t operate in a world with NIL or the transfer portal.
“Kids have been told they should look out for themselves and build their own brand, and so the music and the social media and TV is about individual success, wealth and power,” Monken said. “That’s completely opposite than it is here. We are fully committed to training these young men to be servant leaders. So you bring guys like that in here, and they’re already wired that way to serve the team and to do what’s best for the team.
“We don’t promise a jersey number. We don’t promise starting time. We don’t have money to say, ‘Oh, we’ll give you this much money.’ No, it’s just to be a part of this. We sell this place and what this is and what it can do for them for their future, our culture.”
Army athletic director Mike Buddie, who pitched in the major leagues, said it’s not easy to find 17- and 18-year-olds who are willing to serve their country and give up five years of their mid-20s to do so, even if they go in as officers. Plus there’s always the specter of war.
“But for the ones that it does resonate with, once they’re here, they’re here and they’re committed,” he said. “For the most part, they’re coming here for the mission of the academy. They’re not coming here to improve their [NFL] draft status. I think we have fewer distractions. It’s a hell of a lot easier to build cohesion and chemistry.
“It makes it easier for coaches to coach and develop and hold kids accountable because these kids are held accountable from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed.
“It’s just part of their DNA, which I think they respond very well to coaching.”
JASPER, THE LONGTIME Navy assistant coach, said it has been a tradition of his to get dressed early and walk around the field at the Army-Navy Game.
“I love coaching in that game,” Jasper said. “It’s hard to really explain it, to be on the winning side. And the other side? You don’t even want to think how the other side is feeling. It is devastating. People don’t understand it. If you’re not in that inner circle where you understand, you don’t understand.”
“The truth is, you could lose every other game and beat Army and Air Force and people would be happy,” Newberry said. “I wouldn’t be happy, but people would be.”
Mike Viti, Army’s assistant head coach for the offense, played in the rivalry as a fullback for the Black Knights from 2004 to 2007. He says this game is “sacred” for both sides, and when he speaks, everybody connected with the Army program listens. After graduation, Viti served a deployment as a platoon leader in the Arghandab River Valley in Afghanistan and earned a bronze star and combat action badge. He lived on an outpost that was attacked virtually every day by the Taliban.
“I believe in my heart that this place is already a magnet for personalities like a Fortner and many other guys like him. They seek and respect and value the rawness of what this is,” Viti said. “They came to this place and games like Army-Navy to actually become who they want to become in life.”
A year ago, Fortner was the star of Army’s 17-11 win over Navy. He had a strip sack of Navy quarterback Tai Lavatai in the third quarter, picked up the fumble and returned it 44 yards for a touchdown. He also made a touchdown-saving tackle in the final seconds.
How did his life change after being named MVP in a win against Army’s biggest rival?
“Probably more officers coming up to me walking to class and saying my first and last name, even some instructors recognizing me on post,” Fortner said. “You hear a lot of ‘Beat Navy’ wherever you go around here, but I heard a lot of that the next week.
“People remember what you do in that game. … You’re at a place where presidents went to school, famous generals, the best of the best in our country. Yeah, it’s a football game, but you’re representing all of those people.”
Monken has seen the rivalry from both sides. He was an assistant under Paul Johnson at Navy from 2002-07, and when he arrived at Army in 2014, the Black Knights had lost the last 12 meetings. Monken wasn’t bashful about saying it was time to make it a rivalry again.
A soldier’s duty is to complete his mission.
“We hadn’t been completing our mission in this series,” Monken said.
There are “Beat Navy” signs everywhere — on stair steps, on the weights in the weight room, on the walls in team meeting rooms, the sides of trailers, in the locker room, even in the bathrooms. As the players walk onto the practice field, there’s a clock counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to the game.
Contrast that to when Monken took over at Army.
“There was a little sign about this big underneath the upper cabinets,” said Monken, holding up his hands a couple of feet apart. “That was it. Nowhere else.”
Entering Saturday’s game, Army has won six of the past eight meetings with Navy. The Midshipmen won every game in the series from 2002 to 2015 until Army upset No. 25 Navy 21-17 in 2016.
The pendulum has swung, but Monken knows any momentum in a rivalry like this one comes with a caveat.
“It’s only as good as this year,” he said.
With its AAC championship victory, the Black Knights reached the 11-win plateau for just the second time in program history. For Monken and everyone else associated with the team, while the first conference championship in the history of Army football has punctuated a season to remember, it will hardly define it.
“We take pride in holding ourselves accountable in everything we do,” Fortner said. “And in football, that means beating Navy.
“That’s how you’re judged here, and that’s the way it should be.”
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Ryan Hockensmith
HE IS HALF ASLEEP when he feels his dad slam the brakes of his van. Larry Pickett Jr.’s head darts up from the back seat, and he squints his eyes to try to understand the mayhem on the road in front of him.
Smoke rising. Cars stopped. Wires down. People standing around. A man stuck in a car — is he alive? Sparks buzz underneath his vehicle.
It’s midnight on Aug. 31, a few miles south of West Point, New York, where Pickett is a sophomore safety on the Army football team. About 20 different things are happening at once, with just enough headlights aimed in opposite directions to make it more blurred than illuminated in the cool late summer air. Fifty yards away, a closed Dunkin’ store provides a slight orange and pink tint in the background.
All six people in the van — Pickett, his mom, dad, two sisters and his girlfriend — are racing to synthesize what happened before they arrived. This is one of those rare moments in life that people stumble into, where they have to decide whether to run toward danger or stay safe on the perimeter.
Why isn’t anybody helping the driver? Why are they just standing there?
Pickett’s brain is different. He wanted to be in the Army when he was a preschooler, wearing camo for Halloween and watching “Saving Private Ryan” with his mom. He wasn’t drawn to the idea of war; he loved the military’s structure and insistence on thinking of others before oneself. So, when he had offers from schools such as Duke, NC State and South Carolina near his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, he chose Army to try to do something of maximum service with his life, as his parents and his Christian faith preach.
The whole scene is coming into focus now. A man clearly hit a utility pole, causing the power lines to fall and begin sparking about 10,000 volts of electricity into the air near the driver’s side door.
Pickett sits up in his seat but doesn’t say anything. Then a familiar voice cuts through the air: “Larry, you have to get that man out of the car,” his mom says. Pickett, 20, streaks out of the van, toward the car, the power line flopping and spraying electricity near the car.
He didn’t know it at the time, but in about 60 seconds, all four tires will pop, and the car will explode in flames.
WHEN PICKETT GETS to the car, the man isn’t moving. He’s staring off into space, blinking but frozen. Pickett notices a power line directly under the driver’s side, and he pauses for a moment. He feels heat pouring from inside of the car and he can’t help but wonder if the man is being electrocuted.
He hesitates for a moment, then says a prayer before he reaches his hands under the man’s armpits.
Phew. No jolt.
The car has become what electricity expert John Averrett calls a “Faraday cage,” which is a structure meant to conduct electricity — even from a lightning strike — without harming the person inside. The rubber tires can dump the voltage from the metal car into the ground without shocking the person inside.
Averrett, an electrical engineer who is licensed in 20 states and has done energy work for several NASA shuttles, has actually seen cases where people in cars think they are OK, then get out of the car and are killed by the voltage in the ground.
When Averrett analyzed the circumstances around what the Picketts encountered, he says that the scene was so hazardous that even if police or fire had gotten there first, they would have likely had to just watch the car go up in flames. “It’s in their training to not go within about 30 feet of potential live wires before the electricity is turned off for the entire area,” he says.
He pauses for a moment and then says, “If people knew more about electricity, they probably wouldn’t want it in their homes.”
Pickett feels nothing, though, as he grabs the driver’s body from behind the steering wheel. The man, David Denton, is lodged and motionless, and Pickett quickly realizes as he yanks on his body that he isn’t going to be able to maneuver the man out of the car and not hit the wire.
He pulls again, managing to get Denton angled out the side of the car, but he isn’t sure if he will be able to lug him any farther. The entire car seems to be getting hotter by the second. He feels like the clock is ticking down fast and he needs help.
That’s when he realizes someone is beside him at the exact moment he needs him. It’s one of his heroes — his dad, Larry Pickett, Sr.
THE HELP KICK-STARTS Pickett Jr. He muscles up and pulls the man’s torso out of the car. Larry Sr. gets under the man’s legs, but he immediately loses his footing and falls to his hip on the ground, dangerously close to the downed power line.
But he manages to scramble back to his feet and help carry the man across the street as another tire pops. “The best way to describe it is that it was like there were fireworks going off,” Pickett Jr. says.
His mom, Shawnonne, gets his 15-year-old sisters, Lauren and Olivia, into the van, as Lauren films most of the rescue. The scene is terrifying, even from a distance, but Shawnonne is heard on video urging them on.
Three decades earlier, she met Larry Sr. in what would be a great rom-com setup. Larry, 17, was riding in a friend’s car on Dec. 23, 1996, when a beautiful 15-year-old girl named Shawnonne (pronounced Shuh-known) Taylor made her way through a crosswalk in front of them. He felt like he was meant to talk to her, but his friend drove off before he could. An hour later, when he ran into her on another street in Raleigh, he felt like fate had swiped right on them.
Next, he pulled off an approach that will forever be a part of their family lore. He introduced himself to her, but instead of asking for her number, he wrote down his and handed it to her. She thought he was very good-looking and appreciated that he didn’t ask for her number — she considered it gentlemanly to leave her feeling no pressure to ever call. And the fact that he had a Nokia cellphone certainly didn’t hurt.
So, she did call — for 55 seconds. Back then, Pickett had a cellphone plan that allowed for one free minute before the rate jumped to 99 cents per minute. So, she started calling him to say she was home, then he would hang up and find a landline to call her back. Their relationship was forged on those calls, one 55-second “Hey, I’m home” at a time.
They started dating, and they haven’t stopped. They’re that couple who won’t stop saying nice things about each other, even if their spouse isn’t around. They go to church together and insist on a date night every week, usually to a local Steelers bar and restaurant, Overtime Sports Pub. Shawnonne’s brother, Ike Taylor, won two Super Bowls as a corner in Pittsburgh, so Pickett Sr. became an honorary Steelers fan. He even has a tattoo of the date they met and the GPS coordinates of the crosswalk. Everyone should love the way they do.
On the night of the accident, it’s her voice propelling son and husband along. She yells from the van as Larry Sr. and LJ (that’s what everybody in the family calls Larry Jr.) drag Denton across the road. Both of them are shocked at the visual of Denton’s eyes — open but empty, his arm dangling and scraping across the pavement of Route 9W. Police and fire crews arrive a few minutes later and set up a perimeter as they work to get the power company to shut down electricity to that corner of the town.
In the background, the car goes up in flames, all four tires melting down until the metal touches the ground. That amount of heat, Averrett says, will cause an explosion in just a few seconds, and that’s what happens. With the power off 20 minutes later, the local fire department is able to douse the flames before they reach a nearby propane tank.
Averrett is at a complete loss for how Denton and the Picketts survived such a dangerous scene. On a Zoom call, he just looks off into the distance and says, “You always hear that God has his hand on a lot of things. This may have been one of them.”
A month after the accident, Shawnonne sits beside Lauren and Olivia across the table from Larry Sr. and me at Overtime Sports Pub. I run through all the different ways that that night could have gone horribly wrong. All of the Picketts are attentive people — when someone is speaking, they never seem to be waiting to respond. They leave space for whatever someone is saying to them.
There’s silence when I get through with my list of terrible possibilities. A few seconds go by and nobody says anything. The girls’ eyes move from mom and dad, and then over to me. At first, I couldn’t quite decipher what the looks mean.
Then Larry Sr. speaks. “I’ve had people say we should have waited for the police to arrive,” he says. “But there’s no way he would have gotten out of that car.”
He’s not dramatic when he says it. It’s very monotone, like he’s reading off road directions. I stare over at Shawnonne, and so do the girls. I’m expecting her to have some second thoughts, to contemplate the idea that maybe in retrospect, they might have been a little more cautious.
But that’s not how the Picketts walk through the world. What happened that night was what needed to be done, and so it was done. They believe the right thing can sometimes be scary, but that’s because it’s the right thing, there shall be no handwringing, regardless of the outcome.
In a slow but emphatic voice, Shawnonne finally says, “I would change nothing about it,” and the whole table nods.
NEARLY 10 MINUTES after arriving at the scene, the Picketts sit across the street with Denton. He’s wide awake now but completely woozy. He’s on his butt on the ground, his back against Pickett Jr.’s legs.
“What car was that?” Denton asks.
“Your car,” Pickett Sr. says.
“That wasn’t my car.” Denton argues.
“It’s your car,” Pickett Jr. insists.
“You got to be kidding me,” Denton says.
They go back and forth some more with Denton, who seems disoriented and in disbelief. The entire time, he rests with Pickett Jr. as his backstop alongside the road. Eventually paramedics arrive and cart off Denton, who has only minor bumps and bruises. The Picketts have an Airbnb nearby, so they turn the van around and they all go home.
For the next few hours, adrenaline still surges through the entire family. They talk about the accident and try to piece together what must have happened. Their guess is about the same as what the facts ended up being: Denton, a 66-year-old MTA worker from New York City, had been at a party near West Point. On the trip home, he missed a turn on Route 9W, which is a treacherous, twisty four-lane road that runs beside the Hudson River to Army. Denton, who hadn’t been drinking, had driven straight through a curve into a telephone pole. But now he is going to be fine.
“I’m just thankful that we were in the right place at the right time,” Pickett Jr. says. “A lot of different things had to go right that night for it to work out the way that it did. I was just a small part of what happened.”
Larry Sr. is a wizard with cameras and video editing (he owns a multimedia company in Raleigh), so he takes the footage that Lauren had shot earlier in the night and makes a Facebook post before they go to bed. He keeps telling Pickett Jr. that he is a hero, and his son just smiles and shakes his head.
He’s a stoic 6-1 young man who is 195 pounds of “yes, sir” and “thank you, ma’am” and might very well be a starting safety for Army a year or two from now. But he is also very warm, with a smile that is easily accessible. Teammates gently goof on him for being so straightlaced, like the time players went around the room announcing their celebrity crush. When it was Pickett’s turn, he said, “My girlfriend,” and everybody yelled, “Shut up!” at him.
“She is my celebrity crush,” he insists.
Pickett Jr. continues to try to stiff-arm the compliments as he turns in for the night. But Larry Sr. is just too proud to not tell his son — and the world — what an awesome kid he has watched grow up. By the time Pickett’s head hits the pillow at around 3 a.m., he’s done cringing at his family for the night.
His last thought is, Wow, that really happened tonight.
Little does he know that as he brushes his teeth, a few million people around the world have begun to go wild over the Gen Zer who saved a guy’s life.
KIDS THESE DAYS, RIGHT? Perhaps no comment summarizes today’s youth better than this popular quote: “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants.”
Here’s the thing, though — that quote is from 1907, and it’s not even about the young people of 1907. That quote is pulled from a college dissertation written by a 24-year-old college student named Kenneth John Freeman, and he was actually summarizing how Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and the ancient Greeks panicked about the lazy, entitled, luxury-loving next generation of young people. Turns out, middle-aged humans have been using the same critiques for at least the last 2,500 or so years.
This age-old generational divide is, of course, a two-way street. Aristotle’s daughter was probably rolling her eyes as he told her to go touch some grass, then responding with her own version of “OK, boomer.”
But the Greeks never had smartphones, you’re probably saying. And that’s a fair point. Recent studies are showing that the digital world — specifically social media — might indeed have unprecedented ugly effects on brains, especially young brains. “There are reasons to be concerned,” says Maria Rosario de Guzman, a professor of child, youth and family studies at the University of Nebraska. “But it’s important to remember that we don’t know yet. Worrying about technology’s effects on kids is certainly not new.”
Rosario de Guzman cites remarkably similar moral panics over the past few centuries from middle-aged people about the next generation’s relationship with new inventions. The English freaked out in the late 1700s over the incredible brain rot that novels were creating for kids. Americans then had now-hilarious meltdowns in the 1930s over the dangers of the radio, followed by the same freak-outs in the 1950s about TV, the 1980s about Nintendos, the 1990s about the internet and now social media for the foreseeable future.
British psychology researcher Amy Orben recently coined a term for this consistent societal dread: The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics, named for the Greek mythological character doomed to an eternity of pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down over and over again.
Rosario de Guzman is one of many experts who share those worries but also say to take a deep breath and try to zoom out to see the whole picture. Kids will always be one big sauce, a blend of ingredients that has, for centuries now, mostly ended up coming out just fine. “As we discuss all the problems facing this generation, just try to realize there are things to celebrate, too,” she says.
Touching grass is a foundational principle at Little People Preschool in Raleigh, where a young boy named Larry Pickett Jr. enrolled 17 years ago. This is the Pickett family business now — Shawnonne has gone from a teacher when Pickett Jr. was a toddler to co-owning the school with her husband. Larry Sr. joined her after a very successful 20-year career in auto sales. They loved the school so much that they had to buy it.
They had big ideas for the preschool. They wanted the kids to be around nature every single day, so they got two goats and a bunch of chickens and ducks that the students had to go feed and take care of daily. They also started growing flowers and vegetables in the backyard of the school with hopes of the kids tending to the garden themselves. Their goal was to be able to grow, harvest and cook some of their own vegetables for school lunches. Larry Sr. says that when former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper visited the school in 2023, Cooper toured the outdoor section and said, “I wish this place was around when my kids were in school.”
The biggest idea of all, though, was a different way to work with parents. On tours of the preschool, Shawnonne makes sure to let parents know that they have high standards at Little People for them, too. She tells them that any time there is a behavioral issue, the Picketts will want to discuss with them their attitude, not just the kids’ behavior. They truly believe that when they see a kid struggling, acting out or attached to devices, the parents should be held accountable, first and foremost.
“Kids are innocent and hopeful,” Shawnonne says. “Why are they trying to fill space in their lives with screens? That’s on us as adults. They have only been clouded with whatever you provided for them.”
If the Pickett kids are the end result of Little People Preschool’s “start with the parents” brand of raising kids, then it might be time to franchise the business nationwide. Larry Jr., Lauren and Olivia Pickett are all ridiculously nice and respectful straight-A students. Pickett Jr. calls home from West Point every evening to say goodnight to his 15-year-old sisters. Lauren loves drawing and the theater and thinks she wants to be involved in show business someday. Olivia is a little more reserved than her sister, but her parents believe she will be a fierce attorney someday. They’re all proud Little People Preschool graduates.
“My parents have always had a great passion to just help the kids of our generation — help nurture us, love us, help the kids love each other,” Larry Jr. says, “so that hopefully we can grow up in this world and go and do great things as we share that same love and compassion toward other people.”
The 2025-26 class of tiny humans at Little People Preschool are 100%, not from concentrate organic joy. Knox, Kylie, Nairobi and Ryley follow Miss Shameeka into the animal pen, and the goats, Ava and Goatie, come trucking out to greet them with a blast of bleats. The kids all scream, but it’s not a scared scream — more like exuberant kids if Mickey Mouse or Moana walked into the room. They feed the animals every day, even on this sloppy Wednesday in October. Miss Shameeka does most of the actual feeding as the kids goof around in the pen and pet the animals. They are close to nature and loving it, and Mr. Larry still belly laughs as he watches from the side of the pen as the kids jump around near the goats, ducks and chickens. The grass is wet and muddy on this day. But they’re touching it.
The 4-year-olds all go inside a few minutes later for a math lesson that Miss Shawnonne is going to teach. She comes in with one onion and a basket of tomatoes that she had gotten at a local farmer’s market a few days before. She puts the basket down and asks the kids to each pick out a tomato as she sets down a scale on the table.
The kids take turns grabbing a tomato. Then Miss Shawnonne wants them to compare the sizes of their tomato with the onion.
“I love tomatoes,” a little girl says. “They make ketchup!”
Miss Shameeka and Shawnonne both nod their heads as they set up a scale.
“But onions are nasty,” one boy says. Other kids all agree.
“They do have a strong flavor,” Miss Shawnonne says with a smile. “But they also are a part of lots of meals where you probably don’t even notice that they’re in there.”
For the next 15 minutes, the kids all make their predictions about weights for the onion and tomatoes, and there’s more joy and open-mindedness in this small classroom than in any screeching think piece about the participation trophy generation on the horizon.
After the lesson, Miss Shawnonne takes the vegetables into a small kitchen area outside the classroom. She washes them, then chops up and starts to fry everything — one “nasty” onion and about 10 tomatoes.
While the vegetables cook, Miss Shawnonne talks about how optimistic she is about the future. She believes these precious little humans will be awesome big people someday. “They’re going to be OK,” she says. “But we have to do our jobs as adults, too.”
Another 15 minutes later, the pasta and sauce are ready. The kids sit in their tiny chairs, with their tiny silverware and bowls, and they eat the lunch they had helped to make. They love their sauce, and maybe we should, too.
AT BREAKFAST THE morning after the accident, Pickett Jr.’s phone lights up with text messages in a group chat of Army defensive backs. A few of the guys had seen the video as it circulated overnight, and word quickly spread to the coaching staff.
By the time Army has a team meeting that Sunday afternoon, everybody knows — though Pickett is caught off guard when head coach Jeff Monken starts the meeting by saying, “It looks like we’ve got a hometown hero on this team!” Everybody whoops and hollers, and Pickett stands up to tell the story of what happened.
The coaches notice that when he tells the story, he recites the same basic facts that the video shows and that his dad described in the Facebook post. But they spot that his version emphasizes his dad’s role, and that Pickett’s dad had emphasized Pickett Jr.’s role. “That tells you why Larry is the person that he is,” Monken says. “They went together, then his dad took no credit. Then Larry tells the story and credits his dad.”
The next few months are a wild ride for the Picketts. News outlets across the U.S. write about them. And the whole family flies to Long Island, New York, for the Fox Nation Patriot Awards in November, where LJ is honored as a hero. He accepts the award and speaks for about a minute, thanking his family and Army.
At the end, the three Fox hosts announce there is a surprise guest: “David Denton, come on out.”
The crowd roars as Denton comes on stage and says to Pickett Jr., “You saved my life. God sent you as an angel that night.”
Denton then walks to the microphone. “If it wasn’t for him, I would not be here today,” Denton says. “And that lesson taught me a lot. … I’m always going to be in my life out there helping other people.
“I appreciate you. I thank you. Such a selfless act.”
ON NOV. 10, a week after visiting Pickett Jr. at West Point, I drive my daughter and her boyfriend to New York City for a Broadway show. They’re both awesome kids, high school seniors with big hearts and bright futures. They make me feel the same optimism as the Pickett family about the next generation.
But they’re also teenagers who speak a foreign language to a 48-year-old like me. For the first 30 minutes of the two-hour trip, I try to listen and participate in the conversation. There is talk of group texts, other group texts about those group texts, people liking Instagram posts but not liking others, people being “sus” or “crashing out” and a situation that required my daughter to say several times, with authority, “Facts.” (I believe that means something is, like, extremely true.) At one point, I suggest a pizza place in NYC where we could eat, and her boyfriend says, “Good shout,” which apparently means a teenager likes what you just said.
A few minutes later, my daughter starts playing videos from a kid on Instagram who has 420,000 followers who watch him go to stores and restaurants that are about to close for the night. He then says, “Let’s watch the lights turn off.”
Then the lights turn off.
That’s it. That’s the bit.
If there were a breathalyzer for having too much teenager nonsense in your bloodstream, I just flew past the legal limit.
I think, I’m out. I can’t listen to this.
So I put in my AirPods to listen to my very smart, important podcasts about, uh, MMA and the TV show “Survivor.”
But my mind gradually drifts from listening to a preview of UFC 322 back to the Larry Pickett Jr. story. I keep trying to get my head around what I want this story to mean. I want to talk about the incident itself with care, because, let’s be honest, not everybody should just read about him and decide to run into burning buildings. But we could all probably do a little more in our daily lives to make this world a better place for the kids we dump on all the time.
Or maybe I’m overcomplicating things? Maybe this is just a story about an impressive young person who did a beautiful thing, and that’s it. Perhaps this is a simple story that puts some optimism into the world about selfless young people.
As I drive, I keep coming back to something Shawnonne Pickett said at the Steelers bar about how when adults rail against kids these days, they’re often pointing fingers with no real good-faith purpose. “If everybody who said those things did something that day to enrich a young person’s life, can you imagine that world?” she says.
I actually can’t, I think. It feels like pessimism about kids, and the future is being implanted into my middle-aged brain every week, which allows me to blamelessly ascend to the same perch that Socrates once occupied, putting down the next generation because it might make me feel better about the life I have lived.
That abruptly brings me back to this moment in the car. My daughter and her boyfriend have drifted back to their devices, silently scrolling while I am disengaged listening to my podcasts. In the Picketts’ minds, that is not giving the kids something productive to fill the space. How could I whine later that my kids’ faces are glued to screens if I tune them out?
Right about then, I pull onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, a twisty four-lane road that cuts down toward the Bronx and Manhattan. It’s one of those roads that has straight stretches where everybody’s going 70, then a mile with three turns and a red light where traffic slows to 25.
Sort of like 9W, near West Point.
My daughter’s boyfriend makes a comment about how short the on-ramps are for the road, and my daughter chimes in that she doesn’t love this road and never wants to drive on it. I take out my AirPods and jump into the conversation, trying to be present with them. We talk together for a few minutes, laughing and enjoying ourselves.
Then it happens.
Cars swerving. Horns. Smoke. A big truck with its four-ways on. Frantic brake lights. Shattered glass. A car on its roof, still rocking. A woman running.
The accident must have begun 10 seconds before I get there.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but my first thought is, Damn, we are making really good time.
But my brain has been Pickett-pilled just enough that my second thought is a little less selfish. I veer off the road and park 20 feet from the crash. A black pickup truck stops in front of me as I turn toward my daughter and boyfriend to say, “No matter what, stay in the car.” I don’t tell her to do this, but my daughter dials 911.
The guy in the truck gets to the car first. The woman who ran from the driver’s side is sitting in the grass. She’s bleeding from her lip and wrist.
“Is there anybody else in the car?” he yells over the whir of cars still buzzing by. She doesn’t answer. She seems so shaken sitting on the ground beside the wreck.
We go over to the passenger side to try to open the door. It’s wedged into the pavement, the car’s weight pressing down on the door. There’s smoky air all over, so it’s impossible to see inside. I grab a hold of the door handle and yank as hard as I can. It makes a hideous cloying noise as the metal grinds against the road. But it starts to open, crushing pieces of broken glass as it slowly opens.
Oh no…
There’s an older woman, about 70, hanging upside down, her seat belt suspending her face down. The other guy runs to get a knife from his truck so we can cut her out of there. The air is tangy and gross — it’s from the airbags, not a fire.
I have to reach under her body to try to unlock the seat belt, and my face goes past hers. She’s looking out into nowhere, unblinking, and her forehead has blood all over it. That visual haunts me then and now, this poor person prone in the air, bleeding. Her arms are dangling, and I don’t see her blink.
She might already be gone.
I reach through and fumble at the seat belt. But her weight is so heavy that the belt is stretched taut. I lay down on the ground, the glass pieces poking into the knees of my jeans, and I get a shoulder under her body, just enough to take some pressure off the seat belt. After a second or two, I feel the click of the belt and I’m under her body enough that when she falls, I’m able to help her body flutter to the ground. I roll her onto her side, then to her butt.
She just blinked. Thank God. She’s moving. She’s alive.
The other guy gets back and grabs her legs. I take her shoulders, and we lug her over beside her daughter at the side of the road.
About two minutes later, a police officer and an EMT show up. They barely speak. They just go to work. Everybody seems fine. The car isn’t on fire, so this isn’t even remotely close to what the Picketts ran into. We’ve all convened in the grass near the older woman, who is now wrapped into several bright silver foil-ish warming sheets that the EMT provided. The daughter, who is maybe 40 years old, seems so relieved. She is dabbing blood off her lip, but she keeps saying thank you to everyone sitting nearby.
“Everything is OK now,” I say.
“I know,” she says back.
It’s been less than five minutes but feels like a lifetime. I’m able to stand back and watch as others show up to help. The adrenaline is wearing off a bit, so I can feel a bunch of small abrasions in my hands and legs from laying in the broken glass. Nothing serious.
The police officer is walking around surveying the scene as cars whiz by. Occasionally, a passing car hits some debris and causes a really jarring clank or crunch noise.
A woman is crouching behind the passenger, propping her up on the ground as the driver comes over and says that the older woman is her mom. Another woman appears out of nowhere with blue rubber gloves on — she says she’s a nurse and she starts wrapping the daughter’s hand in gauze.
The real hero might have been the guy with the truck, and the blinking lights a football field away. He had been right behind the car when it rolled, and he slowed to a stop and put his four-ways on — he essentially shut down traffic and prevented untold havoc behind the single-car accident.
The police officer eventually comes over and tells us all we can go. He makes a comment about how it’s probably safer if people clear out from the scene.
I look back at my car, and my daughter and her boyfriend are staring out the back window. I have a brief moment of panic.
Was it a bad idea to stop? I mean, I have two teenagers in the car, one of whom isn’t my kid.
As I watch this ragtag collection of strangers all pick themselves up off the ground, I’m struck by the humor of all of us crouched down, touching grass together. To this day, I don’t know their names. I don’t know what they do for a living. I don’t know what they all risked by trying to do the right thing.
And yet, I feel comfortable saying they all would probably agree with the words of Shawnonne Pickett: We would change nothing about it.
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Adam Rittenberg
Tennessee is targeting Penn State‘s Jim Knowles to be its defensive coordinator, and is expected to finalize a deal soon, sources told ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
Knowles, in his first season at Penn State, is not being retained by new Nittany Lions coach Matt Campbell. He came to Penn State from national champion Ohio State, as the linchpin of coach James Franklin’s 2025 staff, and received a three-year contract that made him one of the nation’s highest-paid assistants at $3.1 million annually. But Penn State fired Franklin just six games into the season.
Tennessee fired defensive coordinator Tim Banks on Monday, after five seasons with the school. Banks was a finalist for the Broyles Award, which goes to the nation’s top assistant, just last season and received a contract through the 2027 season. But the Vols regressed on defense this fall, slipping to 113th nationally in pass defense and allowing 33 or more points seven times, including 45 to Vanderbilt during a loss in the regular-season finale.
CBS first reported Knowles as a potential target for the Tennessee job.
Knowles was a finalist for the Broyles Award back in 2021, when he served as Oklahoma State‘s defensive coordinator. He then moved to Ohio State, where his 2024 defense led the nation in both fewest points allowed and fewest yards allowed. This season under Knowles, Penn State ranks 34th nationally in yards allowed and 37th in points allowed.
The 60-year-old Knowles also has held coordinator roles at Duke and Western Michigan, and served as Cornell’s coach from 2004 to 2009.
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Jake Trotter
Indiana is likely to be without Stephen Daley for the playoffs after the defensive end suffered an injury during the Big Ten championship postgame celebration, coach Curt Cignetti told reporters Wednesday.
Cignetti called the injury “serious” and said Daley is “probably” done for the season.
Daley, a senior who transferred in from Kent State this past offseason, ranks third nationally with 19 tackles for loss. He also has 5.5 sacks and 35 tackles, including three tackles and a sack in Indiana’s 13-10 win over Ohio State in the Big Ten title game.
Cignetti didn’t specify the injury, but confirmed it happened after the game, calling it “sort of unbelievable.” It’s unclear when the injury happened, but Daley was seen limping while high-fiving fans in the stands behind the end zone.
The undefeated Hoosiers, coming off their first Big Ten title since 1967, have a first-round bye in the playoff, then will face the winner of Oklahoma–Alabama in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.
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