For the first time in six decades, Army is officially the best college football team in the East.
The honor was bestowed upon the Black Knights Tuesday by the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference, which selected Army as the Lambert Trophy winners. First awarded in 1936, the Lambert Trophy honors the best college football team from the Eastern seaboard, defined as everything from Virginia on up. Though the Black Knights had not won the honor since College Football Hall of Famer Earl Blaik led that year’s club to an 8-0-1 season and a No. 3 final ranking back in 1958, Army is still in second place all-time with eight Lambert trophies.
Penn State holds the all-time lead with 31, including Lambert trophies in 2016 and ’17.
This year’s Army team completed the best season in the academy’s modern history, going 11-2 with their second straight Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy, their third straight win over Navy and a No. 19 final ranking in the Associated Press poll, their highest year-end ranking since 1958. Head coach Jeff Monken was also named the national coach of the year by the Maxwell Football Club and the Lombardi Foundation.
Adding another 🏆 to the case.
— Army Football (@ArmyWP_Football) January 15, 2019
Army earns prestigious Lambert Trophy for the first time in 60 years. #GoArmy pic.twitter.com/xhJMXoLU0j
Great as the Black Knights were in 2018, an argument can be made Syracuse should have actually taken home the award. The Orange played an inarguably tougher schedule -- two of their three losses were to Clemson and Notre Dame -- and at 10-3 finished the season ranked four spots higher than Army in the AP poll.
For their efforts, Dino Babers’ bunch took home the ECAC’s FBS Team of the Year award, which, to an unwashed non-Easterner like yours truly, sounds like when certain conferences hand their MVP award to a quarterback but then name a different quarterback as their offensive player of the year.
Furthermore, Colgate won the Lambert FCS Cup while Maine was the FCS Team of the Year; LIU-Post won the Lambert Division II Cup and West Chester University the Division II Team of the Year; Johns Hopkins won the Lambert Division III Team of the Year and RPI won the ECAC Division III Team of the Year.
All winners will be honored on Feb. 21 in Danbury, Conn.