THE STEEP CLIMB up Stony Lonesome Road is harrowing, even for the fittest of Army's football players. When the shuttle buses aren't running in the winter, team members hoof it from their barracks to the Kimsey Athletic Center for offseason mat drills at 5 o'clock in the morning, typically in freezing temperatures with a layer of snow on the ground.

The last thing they see before making the final left turn is the historic "Beat Navy" house, built in 1875 and used to accommodate distinguished guests. The building, with its illuminated sign out front, is a reminder that the football mission at Army is clear. It's why you see "BEAT NAVY" signs everywhere in and around West Point, New York, from the Food Mart Go Army convenience store in nearby Fort Montgomery to the urinals in the football complex. Yes, the urinals.

In downtown Annapolis, Maryland, the waterfront home of the U.S. Naval Academy, souvenirs with GO NAVY BEAT ARMY are in storefronts everywhere -- year-round -- but on campus, everything ramps up during "Army Week." That's when the coaching staff double-checks every door is locked. It's when mascot security is turned up a notch. (In 2012, Navy's goat mascot went missing and was found next to a grass median on Army Navy Drive in Crystal City near the Pentagon.) It's when the scout team wears black stripes on their helmets to mimic Army's players.

Because of who the players are -- and the soldiers they will soon become -- the Army-Navy rivalry game, which will be contested for the 125th time Saturday in Landover, Maryland, is unlike any other in the country, drawing a global audience of our nation's armed forces past and present.

But as the college football landscape continues to rapidly shift, the lives of students at Army and Navy have become a larger outlier than ever before.

"Their entire day is filled," Navy coach Brian Newberry said. "And it's not just classes, it's legitimate classes. And they've got things in the evening within their company and military responsibilities. They don't get sleep like you do at another place."

There's also no money for name, image and likeness -- the Department of Defense prohibits players from endorsing any products or having any sponsorships. The academies do not allow redshirting. There are no sweeping roster changes from the transfer portal. Anyone who transfers into the U.S. Military Academy or the Naval Academy has to start all over as a freshman academically and go through the military training and dreaded "plebe" orientation, making it highly unlikely any junior football player wants to tackle that challenge.

And yet there's still so much to play for.

"A lot of what we talk about is serving something bigger than yourself," Navy senior fullback Daba Fofana said. "Now, there is that aspect of you want to put food on the table for your family and all of that, but the reason you play football and the reason that you serve in the military isn't for yourself. It's for the love of the game, love of your country, the love for your brothers."

"I'm glad guys at other schools are getting paid big money in NIL," Army junior linebacker Kalib Fortner said. "They should be. But that's not our purpose. It's the brotherhood that's at the center of everything we do and fight for, playing for your brother that's right beside you in the locker room, the one who lives down the hall from you in your barracks, every cadet who's ever come through here, and most importantly, our country."

ESPN shadowed Fortner, Army's leader in tackles for loss this season (8.5), and Fofana, a team captain, attending classes with the players, as well as practice and position meetings -- even Bible study -- to illustrate what a typical day is like for an athlete at one of the academies.

As Army and Navy prepare to play the 125th edition of "America's Game," they do so entrenched in their military history, adhering to strict traditions in an era of college football that has drastically changed around them.

DABA, FROM THE Mandingo tribal word meaning hard worker, is named after his paternal grandfather. His father is from the Ivory Coast, but Fofana grew up in Cumming, Georgia, where he wrestled, ran track and played football.

It's a long way from the Yard, the nickname given to the Naval Academy that dates back to the word "dockyard" during the Revolutionary War.

Like any college, the Yard is buzzing with activity -- students with backpacks crisscrossing campus to get to their next class. Unlike most other places, though, you need a valid picture ID to get past the MA (master-at-arms) at Gate 1, and don't even think about driving on campus without a credential from the Department of Defense or a Naval Academy ID card.

Not only is it hard to get in, the midshipmen need permission to get out.

There are more than 4,400 students in the Brigade of Midshipmen, and they all live in Bancroft Hall, a sprawling dormitory complex that includes 3.8 miles of corridors and eight wings divided into 36 companies.

Fofana wakes up each morning around 7 in a tiny dorm room that's about 100 square feet, a utilitarian space devoid of any decorations, pictures or posters. He typically leaves around 7:20 a.m. and doesn't come back until around 9 p.m. There's no rug on the tile floor, and each room has a shower and a sink, but the bathrooms are communal. There are two raised wooden beds that each accommodate a desk and chair underneath, with no clutter on the desktops, save for a few neatly stacked papers. On the floor sits a black mini-refrigerator, which Fofana received special permission for.

"I just have the stuff that I need in here," he said.

Fofana learned to quickly and expertly make his bed with hospital corners every morning before leaving his room, and any extra blankets have to be folded on top. It's one detail that will be checked during two routine inspections each semester, "alpha and bravo." Normally, he said, study hours are "sacred," but once every semester, all midshipmen go through a white-glove test -- a 40-point inspection called bravo that includes making sure the floors are waxed and that all uniforms are hanging dark to light, left to right. Students are allowed three "hits" on the inspection, and if they fail on a fourth, they have to take it again.

There's a laundry service that does the dry cleaning for the dress uniforms, and a cart comes around the halls once a week to collect other clothes. Everyone has to be in their company spaces by 11 each night, and sign a paper confirming it with the company deck officer.

"It was very much a culture shock," Fofana said of his arrival at Navy. "At the beginning of plebe summer, as soon as I walk through my door, you walk in and you start getting yelled at all of a sudden, I'm like, 'Oh, shoot.' And the first two weeks were a pretty hard adjustment, just because of the lifestyle and all that stuff. But after that, I ended up easing into things and figuring out a rhythm."

After all, he's got a PlayStation in his room. Both Army and Navy are in the EA Sports NCAA football game, but their players don't receive any NIL money, unlike the $600 that players who have opted in at other schools receive.

"I'm just happy to be a part of the game," Fofana said. "It's a childhood dream of mine."

FORTNER AND HIS twin brother Liam, a receiver at Army, grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. They won back-to-back state championships together at Central High School, and Kalib was a three-time all-state selection. They signed their scholarship papers with Army together on Dec. 17, 2020.

Up by 6:15 every morning, Kalib Fortner's day begins at 6:50 when cadets assemble in the quad for predawn formation. Breakfast in the mess hall is mandatory and begins at 6:55 a.m. Fortner doesn't return to his barracks during the season until 8:30 or 9 p.m.

Fortner lives on the second floor of the Eisenhower Barracks, named after former general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a 1915 West Point graduate. There's very little space between the two beds in his room, which he shares with Charlie Barnett, a junior kicker. There's a desk at the foot of his bed and two portable fans.

"The smell is nothing like it was my freshman year at Sherman Barracks, when we had to leave our windows open, but you still have to air it out sometimes," Fortner joked.

The only real decor is a collage of pictures of Fortner's longtime girlfriend, Morgan McSwain, just above his desk. The floor is tile, and there's nothing on the walls, which are painted a bland off-white.

There's no television. "Wouldn't have time to watch it if I did have one," he said. There's no mini-fridge, either. Fortner uses his school-issued laptop to watch game tape and also has an iPad and may watch other games on it. There's a sink in the room, but that's it. The toilets and communal showers are at the end of the hallway. There aren't any elevators in his barracks, which have six floors.

Every Monday, the cadets have mandatory main inspection. Fortner is up at 6:15, shaves, gets his uniform ready and climbs the seemingly endless flight of stairs to "The Shelf," which overlooks the rest of the barracks in the main courtyard. Fortner is a squad leader in the First Regiment and has to inspect seven cadets in his company when they get to the top.

"Got to make sure their shoes are shined, their belts are in line, that they have their dog tags and proper haircuts," Fortner said. "It's a laundry list."

AT 7:20 A.M., on a "tactical Thursday" when nearly everyone is required to dress in identical fatigues, Fofana walked through the side door of Bancroft Hall, which is essentially a food factory equipped to feed all 4,400 midshipmen in 20 minutes. By rule, he takes his hat off inside the building. A patch on the left arm of his uniform reads "DON'T TREAD ON ME," and the pin with three gold stripes on the front of his chest indicates he's a team captain, an honor recognized throughout the school.

"You're at a leadership school," longtime Navy assistant coach Ivin Jasper said. "That's the role you're going to be in once you leave school. It's getting that early start on it."

Each sports team has its own table in-season, and Fofana sat down for breakfast at table No. 42, which had a yellow FOOTBALL sign on it. He piled sausage and eggs on his plate and had a glass of orange juice. Several trays packed with pancakes were scattered around the table, with teammates grabbing food and passing it around like a supersized holiday dinner.

Fofana has a 3.69 GPA and is majoring in applied physics while pursuing a career in medicine; he hopes to be a doctor in the orthopedics field. This fall, he's taking 16 credits and said the most difficult course is called Introduction to Aeronautics, a study of concepts such as fluid motion, airfoil and wing theory, and wind tunnels. (The students call the class "planes.")

His class schedule on this particular Thursday began at 8:30 a.m. in Luce Hall Room 114 with Stoic Philosophy and Leadership. Fofana was one of the first students in the room.

"What do we want to know about each other today?" professor Marcus Hedahl said to start the class, asking each person in the room to share an album, song or artist they enjoy listening to.

The purpose of the class, Hedahl said, is to teach the midshipmen how to think, not what to think. It's a leadership class that looks at diverse cultures.

As Fofana left his stoic philosophy class and made his way to Autonomy and Control Naval Weapons Systems in Rickover 1061, he joined a flood of classmates walking through a hallway adorned with posters of famous leaders, including Bill Belichick, Gregg Popovich and George Washington.

The focus of this next class is the mechanics of how weapons systems work. On the floor at the front of the room, in front of a dry-erase board, was a blue, inert (key word) 5-inch gun shell. If it's blue, it's a dummy weapon used for instruction.

The theme of the day was sensors, as in night cameras, smart watches and heart sensors. The students call professor Lieutenant Commander Christopher Jeffries, who is also dressed in fatigues, "sir," and he stayed at the front of the room by a lectern as he taught, explaining to the small group that they need to know how a GPS works and not to depend on it -- because sometimes it doesn't work. He showed a video of an F-35 plane that continues flying even after the pilot has been ejected.

Before turning his attention to football in the afternoon, Fofana worked on his physics research project, where he used a confocal microscope to look at a sample DNA salt solution.

"There's a lot of pressure, anxiety," Newberry said of the academic demands on the players. "I want football to be an outlet for them. When they get over here, I really want it to be the best part of their day. That doesn't mean we're not going to do hard things. But we're going to have fun in the process of doing those things."

A CIVIL ENGINEERING major, Fortner is taking 16 credit hours this semester. His five classes include Structural Analysis and Platoon Operations. He took a heavier load during last spring semester (21 credits) and made the dean's list.

In the spring, he took a class called Survival Swim.

"You had your uniform on, your rifle, everything," he said, "and then there was also a class called Military Movement, essentially gymnastics, but I passed them both fine."

During his Structural Analysis class, a required course for civil engineering majors, Fortner and his brother Liam worked together drawing frames on a chalkboard (yes, an old-school black chalkboard). They erased part of the structure they were drawing and started again. "It's deflection of beams and frames, even harder than it sounds," Fortner said.

After his final Wednesday morning class, Fortner hustled to pre-lunch formation, where cadets gather with their companies to take accountability and make any pertinent announcements before marching into the mess hall. This week, the week of the Air Force game, cadets wore camouflage fatigues, camouflage hats and brown boots. They walked briskly and alertly, always with their heads up and prepared to salute an officer, and seeing a cadet with his or her face buried in a cellphone would be akin to seeing Bigfoot.

The campus is referred to as "post," and is very contained. West Point covers 16,000 acres on the west bank of the Hudson River, about the size of Manhattan. "But post is pretty condensed, making it easy getting to and from classes and meeting with professors," Fortner said. Washington Hall is the mess hall, and just out front is a statue of the first U.S. president. A helicopter landed on the lawn adjacent to the statue just after the cadets sat down at their tables for lunch. "It's probably a general," Fortner said.

The mess hall houses 4,000 cadets, and Fortner sat at one of the first three tables with the rest of the football team. Breakfast and lunch are mandatory for cadets. On their table was a sign that read: "Heavy, Heavy," meaning they get a little more food in a meal served family style. The players spoon out meat, green beans and macaroni onto their plates. There are bags of rolls on two corners of the tables, and a couple of pitchers of water (no ice). Some of the players drink Hoist, an electrolyte hydration beverage approved for use by the military.

Fortner sort of picked at his lunch and didn't eat much.

"I don't usually eat a whole lot here. I'll get some snacks at the football complex before practice," he said.

The mess hall is massive, majestic and full of history. There's a huge raised platform in the middle known as the "poop deck," and special guests will visit periodically to address the cadets, who greet the guest by standing at attention. The same goes for any formal dinner.

Among the guests during his time at Army: former President Barack Obama, Hall of Fame basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (a West Point graduate), multiple high-ranking generals and ESPN's Stephen A. Smith. Even the Stanley Cup, won last season by the Florida Panthers, was raised on the poop deck in October, with team captains Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk and Aaron Ekblad whipping the corps into a frenzy. Panthers owner Vincent Viola is a West Point graduate. Barkov brought the house down when he screamed, "Beat Navy!"

"I'm not sure a day goes by when you don't hear that, and it doesn't matter where you are or who you run into," Fortner said.

AT 3 P.M., Fofana grabs a seat at the end of the table in a small room for his meeting with the fullbacks and quarterbacks. He's wearing his football pads and eating an Uncrustable while they watch film of the previous day's practice. At the head of the table, working the video clips and running through film is first-year offensive coordinator Drew Cronic.

As the meeting broke, Cronic said, "Daba's got it."

"1, 2, 3, FAMILY!" the players yelled together.

There are 180 players on the Navy roster -- there's no limit to team size. Newberry said because other programs are so focused on the portal, more talented high school players are available for Navy to recruit.

"We're being a lot more selective, and a lot more picky with who we're taking," Newberry said.

When practice began, it was unusually hot for a September afternoon.

At 4:10, as the Midshipmen were finishing up stretching, one player yelled, "Where else would you rather be?"

"Nowhere!" the team responded.

Fofana is listed at 5-foot-8, and that's probably a little generous. Most of the players at the academies are noticeably smaller than the elite recruits who typically populate blue-blood football programs, but there's a self-awareness about it that drives them.

"These guys are going to be bigger and stronger than you," barked Jason MacDonald, who spent his first four seasons at Navy coaching the fullbacks.

"No offense, young man, but the linebacker you face will be bigger," MacDonald told another player. "You gotta sink lower."

Fofana is the No. 2 fullback on the depth chart, but he has received one of the highest honors a Navy athlete can get -- being voted a team captain by his teammates. As a team captain along with senior linebacker Colin Ramos, Fofana also leads Navy's leadership council, which is composed of one player for each position group.

"Be your own blocker," MacDonald directed as Fofana ran through the spring-loaded machine with his eyes down. "Hit it, hit it, hit it! Eyes up!"

"That could be the difference between a 5-yard gain and a touchdown," he said. "Hear me?"

"Yes sir!"

Newberry said Navy never has more than two hard days of practice in a row because "everybody can't really handle it."

"You have to be really conscious of all that they have on their plate, mentally and physically."

At 7 p.m., following a long day, practice and more treatment -- and ordering Chick-fil-A for dinner -- Fofana headed back up the stairs in Ricketts Hall, where the pastor, Bill McKinney, was leading a discussion on faith, and his wife, Barbara, was handing out brownies and milk to about a dozen players in the room.

It's September, and some players were wearing T-shirts that had BEAT ARMY written on their backs near the collar. As the pastor spoke, to his right on the wall behind him was a picture of Navy's band, holding up poster letters that spelled "BEAT ARMY."

FORTNER HAS A short window to go back to his barracks and change into his football practice shirt and shorts and maybe get in a little studying before the buses start running at 1:30 p.m. to take the players up to the Kimsey Athletic Center and practice fields adjacent to Michie Stadium.

None of the players want to miss the bus because they know how grueling that climb to the top can be. The buses don't run when the weather is nasty in the winter, and Fortner said the summer bus schedule can be tricky too.

"I know what it's like climbing that hill when it's 20 degrees and a foot of snow on the ground," he said. "I think one of the hardest days I ever had was going from there to boxing class. Demanding doesn't begin to describe it."

Treatment for the players begins at 1 p.m. followed by weightlifting for different groups. Fortner also had a leadership council meeting. The team meeting was at 3:20 p.m., followed by Fortner's inside linebackers position meeting.

Army's inside linebackers coach is Justin Weaver, who was also Fortner's coach the year he was in the academy's prep school in 2021. As the linebackers watched tape together, Weaver barked, "Every first-down marker is a trench, but we had sawed-off shotguns in all those trenches."

There's never any doubt, even in football position meetings, that you're at a military academy.

"When y'all go out and lead soldiers and set up training, expect them to execute. Trust your training," Weaver said as he looked around the room.

"Consistency over time is toughness. Anybody can do something once."

Army coach Jeff Monken likes to refer to his program and his players as the "last of the hard."

"I brought it with me from Georgia Southern," said Monken, who coached there from 2010 to 2013 before coming to Army. "This is the last generation willing to accept the hard, and these kids at Army embody that. You hear people in all walks of life saying they're soldiers. We are. That's why we're here."

Just like the players' academy duties, Army's practices are regimented, intense and unrelenting. At one point Monken climbed on top of a cart and screamed, "It's time to f---ing start practicing the way we're supposed to. Are we going to talk about it or f---ing be about it?" The level of discipline on the Black Knights was clear in their 35-14 win over Tulane last Friday in the AAC championship game, when Army became the first FBS team in at least 20 years to have no turnovers, no penalties and no punts in a game, according to ESPN Research.

Army has an indoor practice facility but uses it only when severe weather forces its hand. The backdrop for the field, especially once the leaves begin to turn, is gorgeous. And you know you're not at just any practice when midway through, a group of parachuters comes sailing in over the fields. And then a few minutes later, Army helicopters come roaring overhead.

As the players spread out to stretch toward the end, coaches bellowed, "Finish the day!"

The team dinner, catered by a local restaurant during the season, is served at 7:55 p.m. on the fourth floor of the football complex. The players chowed down on wings, then slowly made their way to older-looking school buses painted white, and back down the hill to their barracks.

The "Taps" bugle call is played at 11:30 p.m., when all cadets must return to their rooms. Even after a 12- to 13-hour day, Fortner finds himself up past "Taps" on some nights.

"There's no such thing as wasting time here at West Point," he said. "You find time to study, nights when you get back from practice, pockets during the day and sometimes in the early morning hours.

"It's not easy here and not for everybody. People ask, 'How do you juggle it all?' My answer is that being on the football team here forces you not to be a procrastinator. Time is money. Time is valuable, and time is important."

Fortner's "lazy" day during the season is on Sunday when he might sleep in until 9. But then it's time to get up, and he says, go "kick some ass" the rest of the week.

FORTNER DOESN'T HAVE a car. Cadets aren't allowed to have one until the second semester of their junior year. But he has heard the stories of high-profile players around the country driving Lamborghinis.

"Is that true ... Lamborghinis?" Fortner asked with an incredulous smile.

No Army players receive NIL money, although Fortner said he gets a $358 monthly stipend from the military. Much of that is used for incidental expenses such as his laundry and haircuts. There's only one transfer player on the team, backup center Kyle Kloska, who came from Central Michigan.

"Part of what's so cool about this place is that it hasn't changed. It's not going to change," Fortner said. "We're not here to cash checks. We're here to serve each other on this football team and later on our country."

The midshipmen also receive a monthly stipend, but they pay for everything they have -- things like their computer equipment, laundry, haircuts and uniforms -- making it basically an interest-free loan that they're paying back over their four years. As a plebe, more is taken out. There is also an opportunity to take out a $32,000 loan when they are juniors at an interest rate somewhere around 4%, a benefit also available to cadets at Army.

"We're a unicorn right now," said Navy's Newberry, whose roster does not include any fifth-year players. "We still truly are a developmental program. Everywhere else in the country, rosters are flipping over semester to semester -- not year-to-year. How do you really build a culture? In relationships, trust takes time. We have that here."

Monken said "society has a head start" on Army when it goes out to sign high school players on the recruiting trail. Like Newberry, he doesn't operate in a world with NIL or the transfer portal.

"Kids have been told they should look out for themselves and build their own brand, and so the music and the social media and TV is about individual success, wealth and power," Monken said. "That's completely opposite than it is here. We are fully committed to training these young men to be servant leaders. So you bring guys like that in here, and they're already wired that way to serve the team and to do what's best for the team.

"We don't promise a jersey number. We don't promise starting time. We don't have money to say, 'Oh, we'll give you this much money.' No, it's just to be a part of this. We sell this place and what this is and what it can do for them for their future, our culture."

Army athletic director Mike Buddie, who pitched in the major leagues, said it's not easy to find 17- and 18-year-olds who are willing to serve their country and give up five years of their mid-20s to do so, even if they go in as officers. Plus there's always the specter of war.

"But for the ones that it does resonate with, once they're here, they're here and they're committed," he said. "For the most part, they're coming here for the mission of the academy. They're not coming here to improve their [NFL] draft status. I think we have fewer distractions. It's a hell of a lot easier to build cohesion and chemistry.

"It makes it easier for coaches to coach and develop and hold kids accountable because these kids are held accountable from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed.

"It's just part of their DNA, which I think they respond very well to coaching."

JASPER, THE LONGTIME Navy assistant coach, said it has been a tradition of his to get dressed early and walk around the field at the Army-Navy Game.

"I love coaching in that game," Jasper said. "It's hard to really explain it, to be on the winning side. And the other side? You don't even want to think how the other side is feeling. It is devastating. People don't understand it. If you're not in that inner circle where you understand, you don't understand."

"The truth is, you could lose every other game and beat Army and Air Force and people would be happy," Newberry said. "I wouldn't be happy, but people would be."

Mike Viti, Army's assistant head coach for the offense, played in the rivalry as a fullback for the Black Knights from 2004 to 2007. He says this game is "sacred" for both sides, and when he speaks, everybody connected with the Army program listens. After graduation, Viti served a deployment as a platoon leader in the Arghandab River Valley in Afghanistan and earned a bronze star and combat action badge. He lived on an outpost that was attacked virtually every day by the Taliban.

"I believe in my heart that this place is already a magnet for personalities like a Fortner and many other guys like him. They seek and respect and value the rawness of what this is," Viti said. "They came to this place and games like Army-Navy to actually become who they want to become in life."

A year ago, Fortner was the star of Army's 17-11 win over Navy. He had a strip sack of Navy quarterback Tai Lavatai in the third quarter, picked up the fumble and returned it 44 yards for a touchdown. He also made a touchdown-saving tackle in the final seconds.

How did his life change after being named MVP in a win against Army's biggest rival?

"Probably more officers coming up to me walking to class and saying my first and last name, even some instructors recognizing me on post," Fortner said. "You hear a lot of 'Beat Navy' wherever you go around here, but I heard a lot of that the next week.

"People remember what you do in that game. ... You're at a place where presidents went to school, famous generals, the best of the best in our country. Yeah, it's a football game, but you're representing all of those people."

Monken has seen the rivalry from both sides. He was an assistant under Paul Johnson at Navy from 2002-07, and when he arrived at Army in 2014, the Black Knights had lost the last 12 meetings. Monken wasn't bashful about saying it was time to make it a rivalry again.

A soldier's duty is to complete his mission.

"We hadn't been completing our mission in this series," Monken said.

There are "Beat Navy" signs everywhere -- on stair steps, on the weights in the weight room, on the walls in team meeting rooms, the sides of trailers, in the locker room, even in the bathrooms. As the players walk onto the practice field, there's a clock counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to the game.

Contrast that to when Monken took over at Army.

"There was a little sign about this big underneath the upper cabinets," said Monken, holding up his hands a couple of feet apart. "That was it. Nowhere else."

Entering Saturday's game, Army has won six of the past eight meetings with Navy. The Midshipmen won every game in the series from 2002 to 2015 until Army upset No. 25 Navy 21-17 in 2016.

The pendulum has swung, but Monken knows any momentum in a rivalry like this one comes with a caveat.

"It's only as good as this year," he said.

With its AAC championship victory, the Black Knights reached the 11-win plateau for just the second time in program history. For Monken and everyone else associated with the team, while the first conference championship in the history of Army football has punctuated a season to remember, it will hardly define it.

"We take pride in holding ourselves accountable in everything we do," Fortner said. "And in football, that means beating Navy.

"That's how you're judged here, and that's the way it should be."