The VMI Preview

We’re back.

And not a moment too soon. It feels like nothing good happens in the college football offseason, whether it’s some player suing the NCAA for a ninth year of eligibility or the SEC and Big Ten constantly one-upping one another, coming up with terrible Playoff ideas. Every year brings a new and ominous threat to the future of our beloved sport. Our only refuge is the arrival of actual games, where the sound of marching bands, the hot rubber smell of FieldTurf pellets, and the sight of freshly-painted end zones snap us out of our dread and return us gleefully to the here and now.

Every fan is excited about the promise of a new year, but Navy fans may be more excited than most. The Midshipmen are set to embark on their most anticipated season in a generation. The program is in rare territory for a service academy, with five of its top six rushers and 94 of 99 total receptions from 2024 returning. Service academies are best when they’re full of seniors, so when they have a lot of returning production, it usually means they’re coming off a down year. What you never see is this kind of production coming back from a team that won ten games. But that’s exactly the position the Mids are in as they kick off the 2025 campaign, and fan imaginations are running wild, dreaming of the possibilities.

But optimism can only last for so long. Eventually, every team gets put to the test. For Navy, the first of those tests comes on Saturday when they host VMI at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.

In this case, it’s fair to question how much of a test this will really be, with the Keydets coming off of a dismal 1-11 season. Their offense averaged only 209.8 yards per game, which was dead last in FCS. In 12 games, they scored only 15 offensive touchdowns. Defensively, they were 90th in the division, allowing 407.3 yards per game. They were 94th in rushing defense, 109th in turnover margin, 101st in scoring defense, and scored only 12.4 points per game. Sometimes, numbers can reveal a team that has had bad luck and might actually be better than its record indicates. In VMI’s case, though, they were exactly what their record said they were.

How did it get this bad? It’s not like the Keydets haven’t had their moments. Head coach Danny Rocco led his team to five wins and a 4-4 SoCon record in 2023, his first season in Lexington. In the pandemic-altered 2020 FCS spring season, VMI was the SoCon champion and earned its first-ever playoff berth. What happened? Unfortunately, the current environment in college athletics hurts some teams more than others, and VMI might be hurt most of all.

If VMI is going to win, it has to do so as a developmental program. They face some of the same issues that Navy does when it comes to the size of their recruiting pool. But building a roster takes time, and while Rocco had relative success in year one with the team he inherited, it’s still the early days of the subsequent rebuild. And that rebuild will take longer at VMI than it will almost anywhere else.

Offensive coordinator A.J. Hampton had a great quote about the challenge of building a roster at the school, saying, “It’s hard to get old here.” VMI doesn’t have a graduate school, so it loses graduate transfers to colleges that do. They also can’t bring in graduate transfers. They don’t bring in any transfers for that matter. VMI isn’t a service academy where everyone at the school is on scholarship; they’re subject to the FCS limit of 63. That means when someone leaves, the coaches often have to start from scratch with his replacement. And at a place as challenging as VMI, some attrition is inevitable.

The result is quite possibly the youngest roster in Division I. On the offensive two-deep, VMI lists 26 players, with 17 as freshmen or sophomores. Eight of them are starters (VMI lists 13 positions). Defensively, 19 out of 26 players on the two-deep are freshmen or sophomores, with four starting. Of the 52 players listed, only five are seniors. “Hard to get old” is almost an understatement.

Still, if you’re going to set up a developmental program, it helps to have a coach like Rocco. He has a strong reputation as a teacher, having worked in coaching for 40 years, including head coaching stops at Liberty, Richmond, and Delaware. In his 19 years leading those programs, he has won at least a share of seven conference championships and advanced to the FCS playoffs five times, including two appearances in the semifinals. He’s a coach who knows what he’s doing, but in the get-rich-quick portal era of college football, the question is how patient fans and administrators are willing to be.

In the meantime, Rocco has a team to coach this year, and to his credit, he’s saying the right things. When asked about the young age of the roster, he’ll say it makes them hungry to prove themselves. But is there anything else this team can hang its hat on as it begins the 2025 campaign?

There are a few things. For one, VMI’s defense wasn’t quite as bad last year as the total numbers would indicate. The Keydets allowed 5.85 yards per play, which isn’t good, but also isn’t bottom-of-the-barrel, either. Part of their problem is that they were always on the field; VMI’s offense only converted 23.4% of its third-down chances. An offense that sustains drives would go a long way toward helping them out.

Along those lines, VMI should also benefit from some stability at quarterback. Redshirt junior Collin Shannon began last year as the starter, but suffered a fractured shoulder in the second game that knocked him out for the rest of the season. The Keydets were forced to cycle through a trio of freshmen under center in his absence. Shannon also started three games as a redshirt freshman, including a 209-yard passing performance at ETSU and throwing for 176 yards and a touchdown against NC State. His return brings desperately needed veteran leadership to the offense.

VMI might also have a particular card to play against Navy. Defensive coordinator Rich Yahner was the linebackers coach at Delaware when the Blue Hens played Navy in 2022. The Mids were terrible that day, losing three fumbles in the first 18 minutes and being limited to 184 yards on the ground. With that kind of success, it would make sense for Yahner to repeat the same plan on Saturday.

But how much of that success was because of the defense, and how much was Navy shooting themselves in the foot? Delaware spent most of the game lined up in either a 3-3-5 or 3-5-3, with both the middle and playside safeties following the pitch. They sometimes moved a safety up to linebacker depth to look more like a 3-4. It’s become one of the more common looks that Navy sees, especially since joining the American, and Navy had answers as far as Xs and Os go. What they couldn’t do was get out of their own way.

There were missed reads, like this one.

The next play was an outside zone, a logical call when the defensive end takes the fullback. Except this time, he didn’t; he played outside. On an outside zone, the guard and tackle double-team the defensive end. If the DE plays outside, the guard breaks off the double team and heads to the second level. The quarterback is supposed to follow behind him. He didn’t. Instead of reading the play, Tai Lavatai guessed that his read would take him outside. He guessed wrong, and the play was strung out for a loss.

On this play, it looked like the fullback missed the quarterback changing the direction of the play.

This was an inside zone play out of the heavy formation, with both tackles lined up on one side of the formation and a wide receiver in the tackle spot on the other side. The wide receiver/tackle here is supposed to duck inside the defensive end and get to the linebacker. Instead, he does some kind of hop-step stop-and-go thing, and the linebacker runs straight to the ballcarrier.

There were several assignment mixups, too. Here, both the receiver and the slotback block the same player while another is unblocked and makes the stop.

Here, they got their assignments right, but they didn’t block either of them.

You get the idea.

Even if you agree that Navy was their own worst enemy that day, if you’re in Yahner’s position, I think you have to make the Mids prove they can beat a defense they lost to once before. I expect to see VMI lining up similarly on Saturday. But if they do, that raises other issues for them. Perhaps most obviously, Navy doesn’t run the same offense that they did in 2022, and they had great success last year against defenses that rolled out their old option game plans against them.

The other issue is about personnel. The Delaware team running that defense was full of fifth- and sixth-year players. VMI is on the opposite end of the experience spectrum. At SoCon media day, Rocco did say that there was one player at every level of the defense who had all-conference potential, with defensive end Jacob Moore, inside linebacker Stephen Dean III, and safety Kouri Crump expected to lead the way. But it’s still a young defense, and against an offense that demands eye discipline and sound assignment football, that usually makes for a long afternoon.

On the other side of the ball, there is a little bit of a mystery. Hampton took over playcalling duties for the last three games of 2024, but this is his first shot at building the offense up from the start. Schematically, though, I don’t expect it to look that different. VMI’s young offensive line dictates a lot of what they can do. Last year, the Keydets averaged only 8.23 yards per completion, the lowest in FCS. They want the ball getting out of the quarterback’s hands before defenders reach him in the backfield. With a pair of 6-4 receivers and tight ends that range from 6-4 to 6-8 (!), they have the kind of big targets you want to make catches in traffic. But a west-coast-style offense needs consistency to be effective, and last year’s 52% completion percentage didn’t get the job done.

One way Rocco hopes to address this is by placing an increased emphasis on the run game.

“I really believe that we got a nice group of running backs,” he said. “Very few of them have statistics worth talking about, but we have some guys that can run the football.”

He’s not kidding about the lack of statistics. Sophomore Aslin Shipe is expected to get the start at running back, and he carried the ball all of ten times for 39 yards last year. He did make an impact as a kick returner, however, with 161 yards on nine returns, including a 43-yarder against Chattanooga. At 5-9, 180, Shipe is built like a traditional Navy slotback, and he has legitimate speed. With fellow sophomore Leo Boehling coming in at 6-0, 240, the Keydets have a thunder-and-lightning combination that they hope will add some variety to their offense to keep the defense guessing and the sticks moving.

Ironically, I think this setup plays into Navy’s hands. The Mids won’t want to tip their hand in the opener by showing how and when they blitz, so they probably have a fairly basic game plan for Saturday. But with an offense designed to get the ball out of the quarterback’s hands as quickly as possible, you wouldn’t want to blitz in the first place. There’s no point in sending extra rushers to the quarterback if they won’t reach him in time. Instead, the Mids can afford to sit back in coverage, step into passing lanes, and rely on the defensive line to occupy blockers enough to allow the linebackers to run to the ballcarrier.

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to expect Navy to win this game comfortably. That’s just a reflection of the state of both programs. Still, while the outcome isn’t really in doubt, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to watch for. Past games against struggling FCS opponents have been revealing. In 2023, the offense’s problems against Wagner foreshadowed issues later in the season. In 2018, the Mids allowed 6.5 yards per carry and committed eight penalties against Lehigh in a harbinger of things to come. Style points matter this week if the Mids want to set the right tone.

The 2025 season has arrived. Here’s to making a good first impression.