Michael Kelly, Navy’s athletic director, has expressed a willingness to shift the Army-Navy football game one week earlier if it helps the College Football Playoff start sooner and the overall season conclude earlier.
“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.
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Kelly’s stance is less aggressive than Army coach Jeff Monken, who suggested moving the game to Thanksgiving weekend back in March. Kelly noted that the decision depends on future CFP formats, particularly whether conference championship games are eliminated. This indicates that neither Navy nor Army will block efforts to start the CFP earlier, which could also end the season earlier—a recommendation made by the American Football Coaches Association last week. This season’s national championship game is scheduled for Jan. 25, the latest ever, even with a 12-team field that could double in size under a new format.
“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,” Kelly said. “But for us, the whole thing from day one in this was maintaining an exclusive window.”
Maintaining that exclusive broadcast window has been a central concern, reinforced by a White House executive order in March requiring Army-Navy to have its own broadcast slot. While the enforceability of that order is uncertain, it remains a key topic in discussions about the calendar and future CFP structure. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, when asked about the AFCA’s request to finish the season by the second Monday in January, replied: “If you just run over Army-Navy.” When reminded that Monken favors moving the game, Sankey said, “I can only deal with reality, which is now it’s the second Saturday (in December).”
The AFCA, although lacking rule-changing authority, also recommends completing the CFP by the second Monday in January. Currently, the first Saturday in December is occupied by conference championship games. The future of those games beyond the 2026 season is uncertain, depending on the CFP format. If they disappear—either as part of a 24-team playoff or otherwise—that weekend would be available for Army-Navy, and the CFP could begin the second weekend of December.
Army-Navy was played on the first Saturday in December until 2009, when all conferences adopted championship games. For 17 years before that, it shared the same day as other games like the SEC championship (which started in 1992), but Army-Navy had its own broadcast window.
“Amy-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.”
However, Kelly is against moving the game to Thanksgiving weekend. He believes it would be too difficult to find a broadcast window amid other rivalry games and that logistics—such as having both student bodies travel to a neutral site on a holiday weekend—are too complicated. The game was last played on Thanksgiving weekend in 1983 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.”
Kelly, who served as COO of the CFP before becoming Navy’s athletic director last year, understands the broader sport’s challenges. Both Navy and Army aspire to make the Playoff, a consideration Monken highlighted—preferring to prepare for a playoff game rather than a rivalry game. Kelly said he hasn’t been involved in CFP format discussions and doesn’t expect to be, but he appreciates that conference commissioners are keeping Army-Navy’s significance in mind. “It was just great that the stakeholders of college football at least were sensitive to that,” he said. “So as they continue to plan the future of college football, it would at least be brought into consideration.”