Darkness and a steady rain fell almost simultaneously on the Army Black Knights’ football practice Tuesday. The surrounding red-and-yellow foliage canopy disappeared from view, as the color and warmth drained out of a late-October day in the Hudson Valley. A dry, 100-yard indoor facility beckoned right next to the field, but nobody even thought about moving the remainder of the workout in there.

The rain kept falling, and the Black Knights kept drilling in preparation for their home game against the Air Force Falcons, until the on-field practice exceeded two hours. That followed a mid-afternoon team meeting and position meetings, which followed a full day of classes, which followed the customary predawn wake-up call for every Army student.

And when coach Jeff Monken finally called his team together on the practice field at 6:46 p.m., he wasn’t done with them yet. 

The players took off their helmets, took a knee and formed a semicircle around the 57-year-old coach for a 17-minute blasting of the Black Knights’ effort and execution on a key preparation day. With rain saturating them all, Monken delivered an f-bombing philippic that questioned how badly the Black Knights really wanted to beat a hated rival service academy Saturday. 

“You can talk about it!” He concludes. “Or you can f—ing be about it!”

His team is undefeated and ranked No. 21 in the nation, a rare moment at a place where the best days predate the advent of television. The Black Knights have not trailed for a second all season. Yet, Monken just shredded his players—not individually, but as a unit, because the unit is all that matters at West Point. In everything. And if the leader allows the unit to lose its edge, he’s failed.

When Monken finished tearing them down, the players filed off the field. They exited through a gate bearing a sign that read, “Last of the Hard.”

If it feels like modern college football has gotten too easy—too soft, even—there is an unyielding (and currently undefeated) gray rebuttal to be found in West Point, N.Y. This is the toughest program in America. The hardest. The last of the hard.

The U.S. Military Academy opened its doors in 1802 with a deadly serious calling: to cultivate leaders to defend the country in times of violent conflict. To make war, and to win. It remains a serious place, demanding the utmost of all 4,000-plus cadets—the football players absolutely included. They are expected to be soldiers, students and winning athletes, all at the same time.

Monken’s description of his players’ everyday lives: “It is a hundred pounds of gear in a 50-pound rucksack busting at the seams.”

The academic curriculum offers no lightweight options. The football facility lacks a miniature golf course, a waterfall, a barber shop and sleeping pods. Players walk the hilly campus in fatigues, no Bentleys or Bulgari bling in sight.

Lavish training table? The entire student body eats breakfast and lunch together, a 25-minute sprint in a massive mess hall, the same sketchy food for everyone. (Dinner is provided for players at the football facility, a nod to the late hours kept there.)

There are no five-star prospects who arrive on the Gothic campus trailed by agents and entourages. The transfer portal doesn’t have a welcome station here. There are no staffers designated to mine the rosters of competitors for players who might be wooed with NIL deals. The school will not opt in to make payments to athletes via the House v. NCAA lawsuit settlement. 

Army players get paid, but it’s a salary from the U.S. government that runs in the low five figures. They earn it through a variety of military obligations.

The triple-option offense does not attract aspiring pro quarterbacks or wide receivers. It does not attract behemoth linemen. There aren’t a lot of NFL-prototype bodies walking around the facility.

You can get to the league via West Point, but the primary postgraduate life plan begins with a mandatory five-year military service commitment. And if a war breaks out, West Point grads will be in the thick of it.

“This place is designed to challenge our students,” Monken says. “There are places you can go where college is easy. This is not one of those places. There are jobs that are easy. There are lives that can be easy. But when you make a commitment to a life of service, whether that’s five years or that’s 45 years, you put others first. That’s challenging. It’s challenging on us as individuals because human beings are selfish. 

“And we get told as often as possible out there in the world that we should look out for ourselves and take care of No. 1. And if it’s a choice between you or the other guy, make sure it’s you. Here, it’s completely the opposite. We teach these young men and women to serve and to put others first. And so they got to make decisions every day. Hard decisions.”

Maybe it is a coincidence that Army is 7–0 and Navy is 6–1 at a time when, elsewhere, the player population becomes more transient and recruiting becomes more transactional. But maybe it’s not. Maybe the reliance on a collective will—as opposed to a collective that purchases star players—is a freshly effective way to win.

That’s not to say it’s the only way to win. Plenty of programs with the financial wherewithal are successfully rebuilding their rosters via the portal. And people at Army believe football players should get a cut of the billions of dollars flowing to schools—they’re not advocating for a return to the days of indentured amateur servitude. 

But they see unique advantages to their way of program building. They see player development, player retention, roster continuity and less potential locker-room drama as vehicles to elevate their station in the college football hierarchy. In an era of on-the-fly team building, Army’s organic cultivation of program culture stands in stark relief.

Athletic director Mike Buddie has attended plenty of conventions of college athletic administrators and listened to the communal lamenting of the system as it currently exists. He doesn’t have much complaining to add to the conversation.

“My colleagues oftentimes express their envy of where we are,” he says. “We have our challenges—when Russia invades Ukraine, it impacts our recruiting—but we’re not hiring a GM to do our payroll.”

At 6–0 in the American Athletic Conference, Army is in the pole position to play for the league championship—perhaps against Navy, which is 4–0. Either the winner of the AAC or the Mountain West Conference champion figures to advance to the 12-team College Football Playoff. If it’s Army, that would be the program’s greatest achievement since it finished the 1958 season 8–0–1 and ranked No. 3 in the nation.

But coaches are averse to blue-skying about what might happen down the road, and Monken is a coach’s coach in that regard. He’s the son of a high school coach and comes from an extended family of coaches in central Illinois. 

He played small-college football at nearby Millikin University, then veered away from the family tree to become a college coach. In 1997, he joined triple-option guru Paul Johnson’s staff at Georgia Southern, and while there, he heard about a saying the team started using seven years earlier—last of the hard. Monken became the head coach at Georgia Southern in 2010, then came to Army four years later. He brought the slogan with him.

“I think about this place and this team, the young men and women that are in our Corps of Cadets, the graduates of West Point, every man and woman that has served in our armed forces, how different they are from the rest of us,” he says. “They’ve pledged a commitment to this nation that most people don’t want to make. And in every generation, there are Americans who will make that pledge and do the hard things that the rest of us aren’t volunteering to do. They’re the last of the hard in their generation. I think it is just very fitting for our team and who we represent every time we take the field—we represent the United States Army, that last of the hard.”

Congratulate Monken on 7–0 and he will grimace, as if just saying it out loud might bring the whole thing crashing down. Air Force is 1–7, but this is a rivalry game. Last year, the roles were perfectly reversed—the Falcons were undefeated, the Black Knights were 2–6. Army won in a stunning upset, 23–3, with a plus-six turnover margin, the start of a winning streak that carries on to this day—a nation-leading 11 straight. He knows what can happen.

“This is the hardest game of the year so far,” Monken says grimly.

The unit cannot be allowed to stand down. Not now.

The team meeting in the auditorium was a high-energy gathering, music thumping as the players filed in and engaged in animated chatter. A video on the big screen showed The Keepers—offenses scoring and protecting the ball—and The Takers—defenses forcing turnovers. Then Mike Viti walked to the center of the room.

The offensive line coach is the ultimate West Pointer in the football office. Viti was a fullback in the early 2000s, a team captain and a regimental commander. After graduation, Viti deployed as a platoon leader in Afghanistan, earning a bronze star and a combat action badge. After retiring from the military, he returned to his alma mater to coach.

What poured out of Viti in the auditorium was a percussive passion. It arrived as almost a slap to the face of the listeners, alerting them to the urgency of the week’s mission—not just to defeat Air Force, but to defend the Army way in the process. (The service academies do not all see each other as friendly peers, let’s just put it that way.)

“It’s a family member to me,” Viti says the next day, articulating what West Point means to him. “A very close family member, maybe second only to my wife. It’s an actual entity in my life, a hundred percent. My life’s work. It’s a religion to me. It matters that much to me. It’s been my pedigree set, my foundational basis, how I see the world, how I try to participate in it. And I am forever indebted and honored to just associate my name with this place.”

If the Military Academy wants to send in one guy to sell young people on joining the last of the hard, Viti is it. He’s lived it and loved it. But he also will not shy away from the specter of what can come with a West Point commission.

“You’ve got to bring up the most dangerous courses of action,” Viti says. “And that starts with a word that starts with a ‘w’ and ends with an ‘r.’ That’s the elephant in every room, every conversation. It’s on the frontal lobe of all these kids. So that’s arguably the biggest decision that a 17 or 18-year-old can make in their entire life at that moment.

“I know what it’s like. I think it needs to be a very transparent and honest dialogue for kids and their families. And I love it because our head guy doesn’t apologize for it. We look those questions in the eye, we answer them truthfully and honestly. We’re transparent with our kids. It’s not barbaric bulls—. It is a profession that you are educating yourself and training yourself on a daily basis to do.”

Viti was the primary recruiter of Army’s current best player, quarterback Bryson Daily. If ever there were a perfect marriage of recruiter, recruit and college, this is it.

Daily is from Abernathy, Texas, a burgh of about 2,800 people located 20 miles north of Lubbock—deep in small-town, Friday Night Lights territory. His mother and father were both high school coaches, as was his grandfather. No major college recruited the two-star prospect to play quarterback. The competition to sign him was strictly FCS schools.

But he fit the three things Monken prizes most: competitiveness, toughness and a history of winning. He was a two-way football standout who also excelled at throwing the discus in track and field—perhaps the first quarterback to have that on his résumé.

By his junior year in 2023, Daily emerged as Army’s best quarterback. But the program was in an identity crisis, changing its offense away from the ground-bound option game in response to modified blocking rules. As it turned out, those fears about the death of the option were overblown, and Army became just another struggling passing team.

“I think we overcooked it,” offensive coordinator Cody Worley says. “I think why we’ve been able to be competitive at the service academy level, but specifically here, is by being unique and being different. We have some talented players on our roster, but we don’t match up apples to apples with the teams that we play. So I think you have to be different, or you have to be better. Alabama’s better and Georgia’s better. But for us, it was all right, we need to be different.”

So Army reverted to its roots, running a battering-ram offense in a time where defenses are more accustomed to playing in space against bubble screens and slant passes. Opponents must embrace violence when facing the Black Knights’ option game. This is football at its most primal.

The Black Knights once again lead the nation in rushing by a wide margin at 359.1 yards per game, on 54.1 attempts. They are not going over or around opposing defenses. They are going through. 

Along the way, Army has unleashed Daily as a ground-and-pound orchestrator of its option. He led the team with 901 rushing yards and seven rushing touchdowns last year; this season he’s already at 909 rushing yards and 19 rushing TDs. He’s throwing it less frequently but more efficiently, with a 219.02 efficiency rating that would easily lead the nation if he had enough attempts (he’s thrown just 47 passes thus far).

Mostly, though, Daily is the hardest dude on a hard team. He lifts with the linemen and relishes taking on tacklers. On a team full of jacked-up guys who never skip a leg day—kudos to strength coach Conor Hughes—Daily’s quads rival anyone’s. He’s probably the least contact-averse QB in the country, often throwing blocks for running backs downfield.

“Tough as s—,” Monken says.

“He could be the biggest [jerk] ever, but he’s the most humble guy,” standout offensive guard Paolo Gennarelli says. “He’s a glass eater and a pipe swinger.”

“If we’re playing video games or a card game or dice or poker, you name it, he wants to kick your a–,” Worley says. “He’s got an edge and a competitive nature.”

That nature used to get the best of Daily at times, causing him to lose composure. He got a tattoo on his forearm that echoes the words of his grandfather—“Cool head, hot heart”—to serve as a reminder about in-game demeanor.

As Daily’s season took off, a pop-up reputation as Army’s glamorous leading man went with him. Someone stuck the “Captain America” nickname on him, which Viti finds misleading.

“It’s easy to sell Captain America, chosen boy, the golden boy,” Viti says. “Dude, that’s a lazy version of Bryson Daily. He’s the overalls, hard-hat, lunch-pail, digging-the-fence-line type of dude.”

Leading the nation in rushing touchdowns and leading an undefeated team, the two-star recruit has emerged as a fringe Heisman Trophy candidate. As cool as it would be for Daily to finish in the top 10 in the voting—or even get an invitation to New York as a finalist—that’s an individual award. And the unit’s success is not based on such accolades.

“We’ve got guys that understand they’re here for different reasons beyond having a spotlight on him,” defensive coordinator Nate Woody says. “They talk brotherhood in a lot of places. I don’t know that it gets much better than here.”

As the whiteboard reads in the defensive backs meeting room: “The expectation is not for the person. It is for the position.”

After Monken’s tongue-lashing in the rain, the Army players filtered back into the facility to shower, eat and change back into their fatigues. It was nearly 8 p.m., and a day that began before dawn was nowhere near complete.

Viti sat in his darkened office, staring at film. Some players used their position rooms as study halls, flipping open laptops and notebooks. Others headed back to their living quarters with hours of work to do.

“I’ve got a big test tomorrow,” Gennarelli says, knowing that he will be up late before getting up early.

This is the life they’ve chosen at the most improbable college football power of 2024. The life is good—with meaningful rewards that may not be immediate or obvious—and the life is hard. The last of the hard wouldn’t want it any other way.