In the yard at the Naval Academy, there was no visible sign that The Big Game had been lost once again, and no sign at all that another head football coach was packing up and leaving Annapolis.
As classes changed in the early afternoon yesterday, midshipmen in their Navy blues flooded the area and called out to classmates about other things.
"Seven days from tomorrow I'll be getting on a plane," one shouted ecstatically.
"You coming to the basketball game tonight?" another Middie called to a friend.
"Nah, I can't," he answered. "I've got to work on my project."
Finally one midshipman -- S.E. Sterling was on his name tag -- was asked about the 22-20 loss to Army Saturday.
"Were you crushed?" he was asked.
"Not really, sir," Sterling said politely. "It was almost expected."
The loss surprised no one who has been following Navy football. Navy hasn't had a winning season since 1982, hasn't beaten Army since 1991, all of which helps explain why coach George Chaump was fired Sunday.
"I think we'll beat 'em next year," added Midshipman Sterling. "I'm pretty optimistic we'll hire a good coach. Some of the football players in my company say it's pretty much a coaching problem. We have good athletes."
That's always the way, isn't it? Fire the coach? Everybody does it, including the Naval Academy.
To be sure, Chaump's five-year won-lost record of 14-41 is the sort of thing that gets coaches either fired or lynched. His three wins this year against eight losses are pretty feeble -- a 7-0 win over a poor Division I-AA team, Lafayette; another by 17-15 over pathetic Tulane; the third by 29-17 over a Rice team
quarterbacked by an 18-year-old freshman making his first college start.
Chaump is merely the latest good coach to walk the plank at Navy. After George Welsh left to go to Virginia in 1982, Gary Tranquill came to Annapolis.
Few coaches anywhere know the game as thoroughly as Tranquill, who, on the practice field, would go from the receivers to the linebackers and back across the scrimmage line to show the running backs the proper way to take a handoff. Tranquill was expert in every facet of the game.
But in five years at Navy he was 20-34-1 and was fired. Since then he has been an assistant at Virginia, with the Cleveland Browns and now at Virginia Tech.
Elliot Uzelac followed Tranquill in 1987. Ah, this would be the guy, right? Uzelac had once been an assistant coach at Navy. He knew the system. He knew how to get appointments for football players.
After hiring Uzelac, Navy had to wait a couple weeks to get him aboard, until after Michigan finished playing in the Rose Bowl. Uzelac was then Michigan's defensive coordinator. Even that -- coming fresh off the Rose Bowl -- gave Uzelac the aura of a winner.
But Uzelac failed at Navy. In three years he was 8-25. The final two years of his contract were bought out. Today he's defensive coordinator at Colorado, which was 10-1 this year and will play Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.
Technically, the athletic board of control hires football coaches, but it was Jack Lengyel, Navy's athletic director, who hand-picked Chaump from Marshall College.
"You're going to love this guy," Lengyel, a former football coach himself, promised. "He's liable to be throwing the ball out of the end zone."
Now George has failed, too. Probably he'll also wind up as an assistant at a big college or in the NFL, where he once worked for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
When one highly qualified coach after another fails, maybe the problem is not with the coaching but with the job itself. Maybe nobody can win at Navy the way things are now.
People point out that Welsh won there, but that was 13 seasons ago. Things change.
Academics are tougher than ever for future officers in a high-tech Navy. A general science major that was in place when Welsh coached has been done away with. The service commitment is increased to six years. There are more colleges playing and recruiting from the talent pool and more NFL jobs -- 30 teams next year -- in the star-gazing eyes of top high school players.
And Welsh, as we now know, is an extraordinary coach, winning at Virginia, where many had said no one could win.
Army is not much better off than Navy. It wound up with a 4-7 record after a two-point win on a 52-yard field goal, the longest ever kicked in an Army-Navy game.
Air Force beat Hawaii last weekend and finished 8-4, but Air Force has some programs that are more to the liking of football players than those offered at Navy.
If Navy is to win in football it needs to make some changes, no matter who the next coach is.
It's time for service academies to make it possible for an occasional rare player to play pro football -- while fulfilling, of course, his six-year commitment in the off-seasons.
An NFL team that wanted a Middie badly enough could reimburse the government the $203,000 it costs to educate a midshipman or cadet. In professional sports today, that's not a great deal of money.
A Roger Staubach or a David Robinson -- both Navy graduates -- is of inestimable value, public relations-wise, to the service. Having an opportunity to make the pros would bring a few extra athletes to Annapolis.
This is the sort of thing Navy needs to be looking into. If people want Navy to have a successful football team, the place will have to change more than coaches.