As For Football
An insider's guide for cadets, Old Grads, and Army Football fans.

Army Football Preview: 2022 Season (Fourth Quarter)

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As I write this, we are just over two weeks out from the start of Army Football’s 2022 campaign. This promises to be quite an interesting season, featuring an awful lot of returning talent alongside a few key question marks, especially along the defensive interior.

This week we’re previewing the fourth and final quarter of the regular season. If you’ve missed previous installments in this series, you can find them archived below.

Army Football Preview: 2022 Offense
Army Football Preview: 2022 Season (First Quarter)
Army Football Preview: 2022 Season (Second Quarter)
Army Football Preview: 2022 Season (Third Quarter)

This article previews games against UConn and at UMass plus Army-Navy. All three of these opponents have shown signs of rebounds following disappointing performances in 2021, and any one of them could prove to be a dangerous foe if the Army Team isn’t on its game and ready to play when it counts.

Week 12: UConn

2021 Record: 1-11
SP+: -23.0, #129
FPI: -19.0, #130

Despite a few moments of legitimate excitement last season, former UConn Head Coach Randy Edsall failed in the end to recapture the old magic in Storres in his second tour with the team. Unsurprisingly, he was fired following a one-win 2021 campaign that saw his team — just barely — squeak past Yale to earn its one and only victory of the year. The Huskies then hired formerly retired coach Jim Mora to be their new Head Football Coach, and that at least gave them a big name to hopefully jumpstart recruiting at Connecticut’s flagship university. 

The Huskies now find themselves with a collection of recruits and transfer students alongside a summer camp quarterback battle and a struggling offense. UConn will probably start either redshirt freshman QB Tyler Phommachanh, who played very well in spots last season, or redshirt sophomore transfer Ta`Quan Roberson from Penn State. Alas, neither guy has much experience overall, and both are better runners than passers, though they may improve over the course of the season. Or, more likely, we’ll see occasional flashes in a run-heavy offense along with plenty of mistakes and turnovers as the Huskies’ offense struggles to find itself.

Projected Line (SP+): Army -24
Projected Line (FPI): Army -23

UConn looked good in spots last season, and ESPN thinks they have a good defense. However they lost the few winnable games they put on the schedule last year, often in the most heartbreaking fashion, and now we have a new coaching staff lead by a head coach in Mora who’s been out of football for years.

Maybe this will all work itself out by November. Phommachanh certainly flashed at times. However, it’s hard to give these guys the benefit of the doubt after what we’ve seen the last few seasons.

Week 13: at UMass

2021 Record: 1-11
2022 SP+: -23.1, #130
2022 FPI: -18.8, #129

UMass is in a similar situation to UConn, but they somehow beat the Huskies last year, and they have at least one legit playmaker in RB Ellis Merriweather. Like UConn, the Minutemen also just fired a coach and hired a much older former coaching star in Don Brown, and as we noted above, that sort of thing doesn’t always pay off. Brown, though, at least has history with the program — and more than enough self-confidence. His team added eight transfers on defense over the offseason, and they’ve also gotten all their offensive players who were freshmen last year –quarterbacks and O-Linemen, both —  a year of experience playing college football.

But. This is a team that lost to two FCS schools last season — Rhode Island and UMaine — meaning that the culture of failure has had plenty of time to become entrenched. That sort of thing takes time to correct, even if the team itself maybe has some of the tools on hand already.

Projected Line (SP+): Army -19
Projected Line (FPI): Army -17

Personally, I think UMass will probably rebound before UConn. However, I also thought UMass was the better team last year, and yeah, they did beat the Huskies, but that was literally the only time they looked good all season.

Week 14: Bye

No Army Football on Championship Weekend, but there will be plenty to watch.

Week 15: Army-Navy

2021 Record: 4–8 (3–5 American)
2022 SP+: -12.0, #104
2022 FPI: -8.3, #104

I don’t think Navy had a particularly good football team in 2021, but they beat Army in what I personally consider to be one of the most egregious losses I’ve ever seen. In many ways, last year’s game salvaged the Mids’ season. 

Throughout last year’s Army-Navy Game, the same Squid team that had struggled to move D-Lines all season pushed Army’s vaunted defense all over the place and thereby averaged fully six yards on first down through the game’s second half. Meanwhile, Army’s offense abandoned the fullback in favor of inside runs to SB Tyrell Robinson, and for whatever reason, Army’s offense kept literally tripping over its own feet. A once promising game soon spiraled out of control, and here we are.

I have no idea what Navy will look like this year save that they had a young team with a lot of promise in 2021, and now most of those young players are a year older, bigger, and more experienced. Add in the fact that the Mids’ coaching staff seems to have finally come around to the fact that they have been under-performing on a year-over-year basis, and… well, who knows?

I will say this: Navy’s staff is much better than Army’s at identifying problems and fixing them with realistic solutions. Coach Ken and company seem a little more open to experimentation and to building around the players that they actually have rather than the players that they wish that they had. By comparison, it feels like Army will jam a square peg into a round hole no matter what, even if it takes a sledgehammer to get it in there.

Projected Line (SP+): Army -10
Projected Line (FPI): Army -9.5

Upsets happen in college football all the time. Barring something strange, I expect Army to be favored again this year. But this is a mixed blessing at best, and as we’ve just discussed, it doesn’t give me much confidence. 

We had Matt Wilhelm on the podcast recently, and he said — repeatedly — “Throw the records out in rivalry games!” That hasn’t historically been the case with Army-Navy, but it might be apropos to the current era.

Bowl Season: Independence Bowl vs. American Athletic Conference

Army’s main bowl tie-in this year is with the Independence Bowl. That is probably where the Black Knights will end up, assuming that they become bowl eligible. However, ESPN owns the Independence Bowl and its associated contracts, and those contracts are structured to allow the network to do pretty much whatever it wants with any of these games. Thus, Army’s postseason destination still relies to some extent on its performance during the season, though all concerned would probably prefer an appearance in the Independence Bowl as planned.

If I had to make a prediction right now, I’d say Army vs. Tulane, but that’s based on absolutely nothing save my worst fears. Tulane Head Coach Willie Fritz has owned Jeff Monken over the last half-decade or so, making a match-up with the Green Wave a legit nightmare scenario. But Army’s been very good in bowl season, and hey, maybe we’ll finally get one against Tulane, too.

Final Thoughts

If all goes to plan this season, Army *should* steamroll all three of the teams in its Fourth Quarter. As we’ve noted, though, I don’t actually believe that this will occur, not least because Army never steamrolls Navy. When the Black Knights win, they always seem to win by a half-point, even when they have multiple NFL-caliber players going up against the worst Navy team in recent memory.

We saw this exact thing in 2019.

If the Black Knights get off to a slow start against their tough early season schedule, then these last three games will be crucial to their postseason hopes. And things may get interesting if UMass and/or UConn improve. But all of that is a long way down the road.

Go Army! Beat Coastal Carolina!!!

H/T to Mike Tawdry for today’s cover image.

About the Author

Danno E. Cabeza

Danno E. Cabeza is a member of the West Point Class of 1995 and former Army Swimmer. He now serves as Editor and Managing Partner at As For Football. His new book,
The Return of Dr. Necropolis, comes out December 29th, 2026. Read more of his work at Casa Cabeza.

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