On Army-Navy Game weekend, Wisconsin’s history with service-academy football programs is worth researching. Wisconsin has never played Army, but will do so for the first time on October 16, 2021. The Badgers have played Navy twice, but not since 1949. Wisconsin’s most recent service-academy football game came against Air Force. The date was September 15, 1979. One detail emerges from that particular year which many Badger fans might find interesting.
The 1979 season could have been a year in which a then-obscure head coach faced Wisconsin. Even in the late 1970s, it wasn’t common in the college football head coaching industry for coaches to last only one year at a given program. A first season had to really miss the mark — for the coach, the school, or both — for a head coach to leave after one year, but that is exactly what happened after Bill Parcells coached Air Force in 1978.
Air Force had been guided the previous 20 seasons by Ben Martin, who led Air Force to an unbeaten season in 1958 and piloted the Falcons to the Cotton and Sugar Bowls. Air Force’s 1970 season — culminating in a Sugar Bowl appearance — marks the last time any academy football team has played in one of the original five New Year’s Day bowl games (Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, Sun). Martin was a legend, so Parcells was filling big shoes. This also meant, however, that Parcells would get plenty of time to find his own way in Colorado Springs IF he was willing to be patient.
Parcells had been an assistant coach at Army, so he knew the world of academy football. He had been an assistant at multiple other college programs, so he was immersed in the college game entering 1978. Yet, his first season as a college head coach was not what he expected. Air Force might be an academy, just like Army, but the particular nuances of coaching in Colorado Springs were different from West Point. Parcells went 3-8 in 1978… and he resigned after the season. He never did get to coach against Wisconsin in September of 1979. One of the assistants he hired, Ken Hatfield, was promoted to head coach. Hatfield built the Air Force program into a winner and then turned the reins over to Fisher DeBerry, who became a great coach on par with Ben Martin. Air Force did just fine.
Hatfield did just fine, too. After leaving Air Force, he built a winner at Arkansas, making multiple Cotton Bowls as Southwest Conference champion. He won a fair amount of games at Clemson as well.
That Parcells guy? Yeah, his career was decent as well, with multiple Super Bowl rings and a track record for turning bad organizations into winners, never embodied more than when he took the New York Jets (!) to the AFC Championship Game in the late 1990s.
Wisconsin’s only game against Air Force could have been against Bill Parcells. The coach himself, and the workings of history, had other ideas.