Giving Up The 'Bone

Army football is giving up the option offense, a scheme the service academies have used since the 80s:

Over Christmas break, Monken instructed his position coaches to phone their players and tell them something they would have considered unfathomable when they were recruited here. The Black Knights would relinquish the flexbone triple option, a scheme detractors consider archaic and one that rarely features downfield passing to control the clock and limit opposing offensive possessions. Army, Navy and Air Force all held on to a version of the system as a way to cope with the rigors of recruiting against schools that did not require its graduates to complete at least four years of military service after graduation or wake up at ungodly hours in the morning to march in formation.

Army was unsuccessful without the option in the early 2000's but went back to it, but now is giving up the option because of an NCAA rules change:

But two days before its 2022 spring game, an NCAA ruling forced the Black Knights’ hand.

Monken found out via email that the organization’s playing rules oversight panel approved a proposal banning players from blocking below the waist outside the tackle box, allowing only lineman and stationary backs to do so inside the box on their initial blocking movement. The panel cited player safety as a reason, but Monken wonders whether that was the real reason and says tackles below the waist are much more dangerous that blocks, and there’s no way you’d outlaw them.

“People don’t want to have to defend it,” Monken says. “They don’t want to have to teach the cut block. It eliminates having to teach that fundamental skill. It eliminates them having to defend the offense because it’s going to be really difficult to run this offense the way we ran it without being able to block below the waist and those linebackers in the box that are screaming to the perimeter that you can’t cut-block anymore.” 

Would this rule have changed if Texas, Georgia, Clemson and Ohio State ran the flexbone? It’s doubtful college football’s biggest fish would have been O.K. with that, but the rule affects only a small percentage of FBS’s 133 schools.

Monken says he was surprised at how much the new rules limited the offense.

“You can’t use a tackle and loop them and cut [defenders],” Monken says. “You can’t run the fullback out of the back field and cut. You can’t use the slot back and load them and cut them. All those blocks were effective from keeping the linebackers from getting out there, and everything we do is full flow under center.”

Monken had to go back to the drawing board....

Army changed to the wishbone offense in the 1984 season, and in one season went from a 2-9 team to an 8-3-1 team.  I hope this current change is as productive and that this season we get to hear, so many times, the two prettiest words in the English language,  TOUCHDOWN ARMY!