Brian Newberry fills the shoes of an ousted Navy legend
Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
In the closing weeks of the 2022 regular season, Ken Niumatalolo made a push to save his job. Navy was bound for its fourth season with at least twice as many losses as wins in the last five years, and the veteran HC had been on the hot seat for a while. The 3-6 Midshipmen needed something special down the stretch to keep the winningest coach in program history at the helm. They almost found it against #20 Notre Dame, overcoming a 35-13 second-half deficit with a pair of fourth-quarter eight-point touchdowns, but the Fighting Irish recovered an onside kick and survived, 35-32. A week later, the Midshipmen finished the job, using a 45-yard field goal in the fourth quarter to go ahead of #17 UCF and pull out a massive 17-14 upset.
Three weeks later, Army beat Navy 20-17 despite a 284-153 yardage deficit. While Niumatalolo was still reeling from the loss, athletic director Chet Gladchuk Jr. walked into the locker room and informed him that his fifteen-year tenure was over.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed,” Niumatalolo said afterwards in a candid interview with ESPN. “I thought we stood for something different.”
It’s easy to poke fun at that statement—Navy doesn’t stand for finishing 11-23 and losing five of seven to both Army and Air Force—but he’s got a point. To contextualize that statement, Niumatalolo noted that the Midshipmen went through a global pandemic during his final years (a bigger factor here than elsewhere due to Navy not allowing redshirts), and that he was a year away from finishing his contract. Beyond that, though, the nature of his firing was uncharacteristically ugly for a military academy, where professionalism is expected in everything. The disagreement between coach and AD over this move was not an isolated event, but the culmination of a feud between two of Navy’s most enduring athletic leaders. The cracks began to show in 2021, when Gladchuk made the extremely unusual decision to fire longtime offensive coordinator Ivin Jasper—then reinstated him as quarterbacks coach following public outcry. The way Niumatalolo and Gladchuk sniped at each other after Navy moved on in 2022 demonstrated just how severe the schism had become.
The whole situation would be embarrassing for everyone involved at an ordinary FBS team, even one from which we expect this kind of behavior. (Looking at you, Auburn.) At the United States Naval Academy, whose football team’s resolve and competence are supposed to be emblematic of an entire military branch, it’s a fiasco. Whatever you make of Gladchuk’s emotional micromanagement and Niumatalolo’s dubious insistence that Navy was always playing to its ability, it’s obvious that their disagreements shouldn’t have been settled in such a public way.
Such are the messy circumstances under which Brian Newberry, Navy’s defensive coordinator for the last four seasons, takes the reins. Given Gladchuk’s evident distaste for Niumatalolo and his staff after the last few seasons, it’s far from an obvious move. One might view it as an echo of the decision to bring Jasper back in a reduced role, as a minor concession to the dissent present among Navy fans and former players. Whatever the case, Newberry represents much-needed stability and continuity amid a major shakeup in the program. The way he plans to rebuild—sorry, “reboot,” as he makes sure to clarify—is an extension of Niumatalolo’s philosophy, not a rejection of it.
As with UNLV last week, it does no good to relitigate the ugliness of how Navy moved on from its last coach. Newberry must be allowed to stand on his own terms, a point everyone involved in this drama has emphasized. The football team may not need to be fully rebuilt, but the program’s image definitely does. In this period of uncertainty, he’s just the person they need to right the ship.
The Last Five Years
That 2019 team bought Niumatalolo some goodwill, but admittedly, it would’ve been hard to fully overlook how bad the rest of his late tenure was. The 2020 team scored seven or fewer points in half of their games, the 2021 team opened by losing 49-7 to a 7-6 Marshall squad, and the 2022 team one-upped that humiliation by fumbling thrice in a Week 1 loss to Delaware. There were sparks of hope throughout those seasons, ending with that upset over UCF, but Navy was going to give up on expecting a resurgence sooner or later.
2022 and 2023
Last season was a lot, though more bad than good. Two weeks after that stunning loss to Delaware, the Midshipmen outlasted ECU in double overtime (with an assist from an injury to Keaton Mitchell). Then they rushed for just 114 yards in a loss to Air Force—only to blow the doors off of Tulsa, scoring seven times in the first half en route to a 53-21 win. The triple option kept Navy punchy against their best opponents, as usual, but things also just got really weird and inconsistent for their offense.
The defense was the more reliable unit, and Newberry has the ability to build on its success in 2023. The Midshipmen must replace all-around linebacker John Marshall, who led the team in tackles, sacks, and pass breakups, but returning production is otherwise strong on both units. And there was production on defense last year—Navy held eight opponents to 21 or fewer points and stifled UCF for less than half their season average. If they can improve on that performance, returning to bowl season is a fairly reasonable goal.
The Next Five Years
Newberry doesn’t need to be anything exceptional for the Midshipmen. It won’t be the end of the world if he settles into 6-to-8 win territory and eventually moves on, for one reason or another. After the unreliability and infighting of the last few years, reestablishing Navy as the competent program it should be is much more important than aspiring to the heights Niumatalolo reached (though, of course, both are desirable outcomes).
The more intriguing question is how Gladchuk fits into the long-term vision in Annapolis. He’s been running the athletic department for over two decades, and there will be increased scrutiny of his position if this hire doesn’t pan out, given how damaging his recent behavior has been to the academy’s image. On the other hand, promoting Newberry from within shows a certain awareness of the character this program needs from its coach. Perhaps it’s an admittance that not every bridge to the Niumatalolo era, this team’s modern peak, should be burned.
The goal of this series, as with all the previews I’ve written in various forms, is to suggest what an optimistic fan of a particular team might feel about their current standing. But even as an outsider, the Midshipmen’s decline has been nearly as frustrating to watch. The nature of the American military is obviously far beyond the scope of this story, but I think most football fans would agree that the sport is better when the service academies are represented well on the field. Here’s hoping Newberry can put a conclusive end to a brief, unbecoming era of spite and bitterness in Navy football.