Navy AD Michael Kelly open to moving Army-Navy football game up a week

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That’s not as far up as Army coach Jeff Monken was willing to go; Monken told The Athletic in March he was in favor of moving the game to Thanksgiving weekend. Kelly said it depends on what happens with the CFP format, especially whether conference championship games are eliminated. It is also a sign that neither school will be the obstacle to the CFP starting earlier, thus ending the season earlier, which the American Football Coaches Association called for last week. This season’s national championship game will be Jan. 25, the latest ever, and that’s with a 12-team field, which could be doubled in the next format. “There’s bound to be a way to thread a needle on this, to find something that’s so great for the enterprise (of college football) and still preserves an important American asset like the Army-Navy game,” Kelly told The Athletic on Tuesday. “We all have to be flexible, and the primary focus is to make sure we continue to work together, to give it to the best audience that it can be. That’s kind of been the focus. But for us, the whole thing from day one in this was maintaining an exclusive window.” That was also the focus of a White House executive order in March: Army-Navy must have its own broadcast window. Though the enforceability of that order is not certain, maintaining that window has remained a focus of power brokers in discussions about the calendar and future CFP format. That was evidenced Monday when SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was asked whether the AFCA’s request to finish the season by the second Monday in January was doable. “If you just run over Army-Navy,” Sankey replied. Monken favors moving it, Sankey was reminded. “I can only deal with reality,” Sankey said. “Which is now it’s the second Saturday (in December).” Now the first Saturday is on the table. Right now, that weekend is taken up by conference championship games. The future of such games beyond the 2026 season is in question, depending on the format. If they went away, either as part of a 24-team CFP or not, it would open that weekend for Army-Navy, and the CFP could start the second weekend of December. Army-Navy was on the first Saturday in December until 2009, when all conferences adopted championship games. For the 17 years before that, it was played on the same day as some other games, such as the SEC championship, which began in 1992, but Army-Navy had its own window. “Army-Navy moved (in 2009) to a weekend that was in the best interest of college football. Now they’re changing college football,” Kelly said. “So now I think everyone’s universally recognizing the importance of Army-Navy, so we’ll hopefully figure out again where, if it means we move up a week and that’s now a good opportunity, then we’ll examine that.” Kelly doesn’t want to move up to Thanksgiving weekend. He believes it would be too difficult amid the other rivalry games to find a window. More importantly, he said the logistics of playing the game on a holiday weekend, with both student bodies traveling to a neutral site, are too difficult. The game has been played on Thanksgiving weekend, most recently in 1983, when it was held at the Rose Bowl. “We were there traditionally. We abandoned it years ago because it wasn’t the right place, right thing for business, and it certainly wasn’t the right thing for the brigade and for the Corps of Cadets,” Kelly said. “It’s a whole movement of an entire student body of two different institutions and their fan bases to go to a city.” Still, Kelly fully understands the bind the rest of the sport is in, especially since he was once the COO of the CFP. He was an associate athletic director at South Florida before getting the Navy job last year. And Navy and Army aspire to play in the Playoff. That was a consideration Monken pointed to — preferring to prepare for a Playoff game, if his team made it, rather than play a rivalry game. Kelly said he has not been a part of CFP format discussions, and it didn’t sound like he expected to be, but he was grateful all signs point toward the conference commissioners keeping the Army-Navy game heavily in mind. “It was just great that the stakeholders of college football at least were sensitive to that,” Kelly said. “So as they continue to plan the future of college football, it would at least be brought into consideration.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms