Even as Army head coach Jeff Monken disputes the COVID-19 reasoning for canceling Saturday’s rivalry football game with Air Force, his own team is having issues with the virus.
West Point officials confirmed earlier this week that there is an ongoing outbreak of COVID on post, quarantining at least 110 cadets, per a source. Monken revealed on Friday that an unspecified number of his football players are isolated with the virus and others are quarantined due to contact tracing. He also stated he believes the outbreak is being handled well.
“We feel good about where we’re at,” he said. “We continue to test and trace and make sure that if we feel like there’s any issues that we’re quarantining people. Somebody gets it, they go into isolation. Somebody has had contact, then they go into quarantine. We’ve got cases of both and we’re dealing with it appropriately.”
Despite the cases of the highly contagious and sometimes deadly virus, Monken wanted to play the Falcons in the all-important Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy series, believing both schools had a sufficient number of healthy athletes available to play.
“I’m still very disappointed and, frankly, a little bit ticked off that we didn’t get a chance to play the game this weekend. I’m still not sure why,” Monken said.
Air Force athletic director Nathan Pine informed Army counterpart Mike Buddie late Thursday morning that a COVID outbreak at the Colorado academy and surrounding community made it imprudent to play the game 48 hours later at West Point’s Michie Stadium. Following discussions of about two hours, per Buddie, the game that was supposed to be nationally televised by CBS was postponed.
Army athletic officials tried to find a replacement opponent on short notice but to no avail. Officials from both academies want to find a replacement date but, without Air Force moving any of its games to accommodate, there are no more dates available in 2020.
Monken said West Point offered to travel to Colorado, if that meant playing the game.
Said Monken: “We said, ‘We’ll come to you. You don’t have to come to us if that’s the problem.’ All I said was I want to play. I don’t care where we play it. I don’t care what we’ve got to do. I don’t care if we had to travel, take a bus, play them on the middle of the interstate … I was wanting to play. It made no difference to me where it happened or what we had to do to make it happen.
“Our kids desperately wanted to play and I would imagine that their players really wanted to play the game and it’s just unfortunate that we weren’t able to do that,” he added.
Where Monken takes issue is he believes the Falcons were missing a number of critical starters and that played into the reasoning not to play.
“When you have got well over 230 guys on your team, you got enough guys to play with,” Monken said, referring to the Falcons. The last edition of Air Force game notes listed 72 active players; Army’s roster on this week’s game notes lists 163. “If we had some COVID cases, which we do, we still intended to play. We had some guys that were going to be out because of it. We had some other guys that are going to be out because of contact tracing. We got other guys that were hurt … but I still intended to play the game.”
Monken has said on numerous occasions that Army and the rest of college football is fortunate to be playing this fall, and he’s wrapped himself in a military ethos about overcoming obstacles and moving forward.
“I think we should take advantage of every opportunity to play that we can,” Monken said. “Certainly, we don’t want to put anybody at risk, but we mitigate risks all the time in the military. That’s what we do and part of the military is … we don’t stop. The American people are counting on the military to keep going no matter what’s going on.”
“I know (Air Force) had some injury issues and likely that had something to do with their decision as well,” Monken added. “And I know they don’t like me saying that probably either, but you know the truth is the truth probably when you get down to it, but I know we won’t ever get the truth … because they don’t talk about injuries and I don’t blame them — I don’t talk about them either.”
Monken insists he is not taking the COVID issue lightly, but he said the whole world is dealing with it.
“It’s a concern for everybody,” Monken. “This virus has affected everybody in the world and we’re not immune to it. You can do everything possible and take all the precautions and it can find its way in. Now, hopefully we can just somehow drive it out of our bubble and not have to deal with it.
“Everybody in their life gets thrown curveballs and adversity so … I’m not the only one that’s got to deal with this. It’s not just in sports; it’s in every profession, every organization. I’ve got kids going to school every day and they got principals and teachers and the district personnel … they’re trying to do this every day.
“I’m not stressed out about it. I’m not walking around wringing my hands like, ‘Oh, COVID-19. What are we going to do about COVID?’ It’s just part of life right now. So you can either worry about it and lose sleep over something you have no control over or you just deal with it and you make the most of that opportunity and the situation. And so I’m just going to try to make the most of the opportunity.”
Barring any changes, Army (6-1) will travel to New Orleans this week to face Tulane (4-4) at noon Saturday. The Black Knights host Georgia Southern on Nov. 21 and Navy on Dec. 12. Army is slated to play a Pac 12 Conference or at-large team in the Independence Bowl on Dec. 26.
Source: Military News
