The number-crunchers keep low-balling Army, Navy and Air Force — about 1.65 points a game, every year

The most common way to build a team-strength rating quietly shortchanges the same three programs every single year, and it can't help itself. Hand it a recipe of recruiting talent, how reliably a team moves the chains, and how often it rips off big chunks of yardage — the standard formula — and it will mark Army, Navy and Air Force down for not hitting many home runs. Then it watches them outperform that grade in 24 of the last 29 seasons. That's better than four times out of five against a yardstick that ought to be a coin flip if the bias were random. The triple-option wins games in a corner of the field this home-run-hunting formula simply never looks at, so it never learns.

Start with the size of the miss, because it's small in points but huge in how steady it is. The academies beat the rating by about a point and a half a game; everyone else, across more than 1,200 team-seasons in the data, lands right at zero — no tilt at all. Army carries the heaviest tax, a little over two points a game. Air Force sits in the middle, around a point and a half. Navy is the lightest, just over a point. But all three lean the same direction, year after year, while the rest of the country averages out to nothing.

The real culprit: they get punished for not hitting home runs

Here's the honest version of why. The formula loves big plays, and the academies rip off far fewer of them than the average team. That one fact alone costs them close to a point a game in the rating — and that penalty shows up cleanly every year. The triple-option also almost never gets stuffed for a loss behind the line, and it cashes in when it reaches scoring range, all while moving the chains a tick better than average. But don't oversell those last points. The clean drives and the lack of negative plays only explain maybe a quarter of the gap. The bigger, more reliable cause is the home-run penalty itself — plus a slice the numbers just can't account for. So the simple story that 'their value is all in finishing drives' is too tidy; the real answer is they get docked for a style that wins anyway.

This isn't a hot streak — it's who they are, and it's getting stronger

The tell is in how the gap behaves over time. A team that just had one lucky year usually drifts back to the pack the next season — across the league, one year barely predicts the next. But the academies are under-rated by the same amount this year and again next year, which means it isn't leftover glow from one good run. It's baked into the scheme. It even survives their bad years: Army went 6-6 in 2022 and still beat the rating by about 4.4 points a game. Account for talent and the whole profile of how they play — the clean drives, the lack of stuffs, all of it — and simply being an academy is still worth a real, measurable bump that's far too consistent to be noise.

And it's specifically a triple-option thing. Lump in every other slow, ball-control offense that doesn't hit home runs, and once you set the academies aside, that bump basically vanishes. This is about the option, not grind-it-out football in general.

Two more honest notes. The gap isn't flat — it has roughly doubled, from a smaller edge in 2014-19 to a bigger one in 2020-24, so it's a growing blind spot, not a fixed one. And it's a diagnosis, not a betting ticket: an academy-adjusted rating doesn't predict next season any better than just looking at last year's win percentage, and it adds nothing on top of a proper strength rating that already accounts for who a team played. The blind spot lives only in the bare-bones, popular formulas. A rating that does the work right — and the academies' actual results on the field — already give the option its due.