ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A few dozen incoming football players, along with their parents, milled around the second floor of the U.S. Naval Academy’s Ron Terwilliger Center for Student-Athletes, chatting with Navy head coach Brian Newberry and his staff.Plebe Summer was about to start for new students at the academy, not just football players: six weeks of intense physical and mental training as they transition from civilians to midshipmen.Seeing the newbies in their dark blue uniforms, nervousness and excitement on their faces, senior defensive tackle Griffen Willis feels a tinge of a flashback.“It’s a little bit of a blur,” Willis said. “But also, at the same time, I only remember the good parts. And Plebe Summer’s hard, don’t get me wrong. I had a hard plebe year in general, but looking back, it’s just so worth it.”All over the country, college football teams tout brotherhood, but at Navy it’s embedded in just about every aspect of the academy experience. It’s real here, and it starts with the shared experience of Plebe Summer.As major college football becomes more transactional and transient, Navy has used its brotherhood as a shield.“This is a transformational place,” Newberry said.The professionalization of college football, with schools spending millions on athletes and unlimited transfers leading to yearly roster overhauls — especially outside the power conferences — was expected to put Navy and its rival service academies Army and Air Force at a huge disadvantage.Instead, all the conditions that seemed set up to undermine the Midshipmen are working in their favor.As most programs from the Group of 6 conferences become launching pads for coaches and now players, Navy can close whatever gap it might face from a size and speed standpoint with stability.“Obviously, continuity is important. You can’t overstate that,” said Newberry, heading into his fourth season as head coach. “Relationships don’t happen in six months; they happen over a long period of time. You grow together, you develop together. This place has always been unique. This is a crucible. The relationships and the bonds that are formed here are pretty special, because these guys do hard things together.”Favorite college football offseason additionsAntonio MoralesNavy has won 21 games in the past two seasons, tied for 10th-most in the Football Bowl Subdivision and tied with Boise State and UNLV for the most among G6 schools. The Midshipmen are the favorite to win the American Conference this year, raising the prospects of another scenario that most shrugged off when the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams in 2024: a service academy making the field.Yes, nothing is more important at Navy than beating Army and retaining the Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy for a third straight season. Same goes in reverse at West Point for the Black Knights.Yet after two straight years of Army, Navy or both contending for a conference crown, including Army playing in the American title game and winning in 2024, the Midshipmen see no reason to limit themselves.“Why not shoot for the stars,” quarterback Braxton Woodson said. “We want to try to make history, and why not? Why not us?”When the CFP expanded to 12 teams, the academies were practically an afterthought. Nobody seemed to have a problem with keeping the Army-Navy game on the second Saturday of December, the weekend after the Playoff field was set. Don’t worry about those guys. They’ll never be serious contenders anyway.The backfire began almost immediately.In 2024, the combination of Notre Dame routing Army and Navy by a combined score of 100-28 and Ashton Jeanty and Boise State being excellent took the CFP selection committee off the hook. They never really had to consider slotting one of the academies into the CFP bracket with a game still to play, even after Army won the American title game.Navy stayed in the American race until the final weekend of the regular season last year and, despite a 49-10 loss to the Fighting Irish, almost certainly would have been ranked high enough to be a Playoff team had it won the league instead of Tulane. The Green Wave finished 20th.In the newest iteration of the CFP selection process, the highest-ranked G6 team is guaranteed a spot regardless of whether it wins its conference. Whether that will help or hurt a service academy’s chances of making the CFP is to be determined.Bottom line: The prospect of Army or Navy being locked into the CFP and then losing their rivalry game six days later is a headache Playoff officials would like to avoid and a scenario that seems far more likely since expansion.Among the eight teams that finished .500 or better within the American last year, Tulane, North Texas, USF, East Carolina, Memphis and UTSA averaged about 32 scholarship players departing via the transfer portal. Four of those six programs had to replace a head coach a Power 4 school hired.Army and Navy’s portal losses were both in the single digits. Retention is important everywhere, but it’s imperative at the academies because it’s almost impossible to get an upperclassman transfer into school.Newberry said Navy has changed its recruiting process, becoming even more selective in its on-field and off-field evaluations — “Because if you don’t want to lose kids in the portal here, you have to take the right kind of kid that’s not just coming here to play football; they see the big picture of things.”As active military members, service academy athletes are not permitted to receive revenue-sharing payments or participate in outside name, image and likeness deals, unlike the players they usually compete against in major college football. Newberry and his staff are not going to keep everyone they want, but a couple of notable wins in the past few years have helped convince others to stay.Jacksonville Jaguars safety Rayuan Lane was drafted out of Navy in the sixth round of the 2025 NFL Draft. He tested out the portal before his senior season in spring 2023 and received interest from Notre Dame, UCLA and Ole Miss, among others.“He said nothing was better than this,” senior offensive lineman Hoke Smith said. “He said, obviously, there’s money and everything involved, but there’s nothing better than what you have here.”Star defensive tackle Landon Robinson probably could have made seven figures by transferring to a Power 4 school in 2025. Instead, he led the Midshipmen to an 11-2 season and was selected by the Bengals in the seventh round of the draft.“We all had teammates in high school who go and play at these big D-I universities, and they’re calling us, showing us their NIL checks and all the things that they’re getting,” Woodson said. “It’s like, dang, man, that looks really, really nice.”Newberry’s message: Think bigger.“Your NIL comes on the back end,” he tells players. “These kids are making six figures two years out after graduation with a guaranteed job.”“There’s no broke Naval Academy graduates,” safety Giuseppe Sessi said.Sometimes, more money means more problems. Sessi said he also hears from players who make choices on where to play based on money and end up regretting it. Locker room dynamics can change when guys are getting paid. Not a service academy concern.Newberry also believes other schools’ reliance on the portal is creating a deeper talent pool for Navy to fish. Sessi, from Texas, recalled his high school coach explaining to him why a college recruiter had passed.“He was basically saying a couple years ago this is a kid who I would have offered, but now it’s like I can go in the transfer portal and grab a kid like him, plus two years of college experience,” Sessi said.The Midshipmen also don’t have to worry about being replaced through the portal.“You know that the guys in the room are the guys in the room,” Woodson said. “Seeing that allows you to develop really and truly as a player.”Braxton Woodson and the Midshipmen could take advantage of an American Conference rocked by roster and coaching turnover this offseason. (Michael Caterina / Imagn Images)And if you put in the work, your turn to play will come, like Woodson this year.The 6-foot-3, 215-pounder from Florida backed up record-setting quarterback Blake Horvath the past two seasons, making a start last year in a loss against Notre Dame when Horvath was banged up. Woodson also ran for 103 yards and two touchdowns in relief of Horvath in a key conference victory against South Florida.This is Year 3 for Woodson in offensive coordinator Drew Cronic’s hybrid wing-T offense, which is like three offenses in one. There is the triple option, a service-academy staple. The Middies also operate out of the shotgun. And they have a traditional drop-back passing game they can implement.Navy needs to be schematically challenging on both sides of the ball. That means asking players to absorb a lot, which they can do at Navy because most of the two-deep has been together for three or four years — maybe five, going back to prep school.“A team that’s together like that, it’s still a superpower, especially at the Group of 6 level,” Cronic said.Even at the Group of 6 level, Navy rarely is the team that looks better coming off the bus.Yet as their main competitors have become farm teams for the Power 4, Navy’s superpowers have become more effective. And what makes the academies different away from the field can become a differentiator on it.“Not long ago you could have gone to State School X and gotten that experience of being with the same coach, and guys you came in with as freshmen are the guys you graduated with, and we’re losing that (in college football),” Newberry said. “You still have that here, and at the other two academies. It certainly helps us.”Maybe it can even help Navy make the College Football Playoff.