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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
WEST POINT, N.Y. — Mike Viti, Army’s assistant head coach for offense, still has his first evaluation of Bryson Daily on his computer after seeing tape of Daily as a high school prospect.
The report reads like it might have come from a back alley, maybe even an underground fight club, instead of a football field.
“It looked like he was in a street fight every time he carried the ball,” Viti said. “He looked like he was fighting, just a different running style. And then you find out he was a hurdler on the track team and a coach’s kid, and you get real excited.
“You knew you were watching a brawler.”
Viti, a former fullback at Army, recruits western Texas for the Black Knights, and when he says “football player” in describing Army’s record-setting quarterback, he means it.
As they say in West Texas, they make ’em a little tougher in those parts. Daily started at quarterback for Abernathy High, a school with 230 students located 20 miles north of Lubbock, from the time he was a ninth grader and led the Antelopes to the 3A state semifinals that season. He played for his father, Darrell Daily, and was more than just a quarterback. He also played linebacker, and in crucial situations would kick field goals and punt.
As a freshman, he helped beat one of Abernathy’s top rivals with a game-winning 27-yard field goal.
“Of course, if you ask him now, he would say it was a 47-yarder,” his father joked.
Daily also played point guard on the basketball team (he moved to the post if the other team had a big bruiser down low), pitched and played shortstop on the baseball team and ran hurdles and threw the discus on the track team.
“He screamed out that he was an Army football player, everything we’re looking for here,” Black Knights coach Jeff Monken said.
Daily’s play this season has screamed out even louder, as he leads the unbeaten and No. 19 Black Knights against No. 6 Notre Dame on Saturday night in Yankee Stadium. Army hasn’t played a game with national implications this high in decades, as the prime-time matchup has College Football Playoff ramifications for both sides. The Black Knights are two-touchdown underdogs.
“I think we do feed off that a little bit,” Daily said. “A lot of guys, like myself, only had FCS offers coming out of high school, a ton of our starters. But we’ve won all nine of our games this year, and those schools we’ve beaten wouldn’t have even thought about recruiting us. It’s the same with this game. Obviously, Notre Dame has top recruits, a top program, a lot of money, all that stuff.
“But the only thing we’re looking at is that it’s a great opportunity for us, and we’re excited to go play.”
DAILY, A SENIOR captain, has been the face of this Army team, which has matched the best start in program history. The 1949 team, under legendary coach Earl “Red” Blaik, finished the season 9-0.
“Tough as s—,” Monken said of the 6-foot, 221-pound Daily, who has been a battering ram at quarterback for Army’s triple-option attack that leads the country in rushing (334.9 yards per game).
That description fits just about every player in a program that breeds brotherhood, and as Monken is fond of saying, is the “last of the hard,” a throwback to the days before big money — for blueblood programs, administrators, coaches and now players — dominated the sport.
On the field, Daily takes Monken’s “last of the hard” mantra to another level.
“Bryson wants to punish you,” Army center Brady Small said. “He runs hard. He does everything hard, and what he does for us as a leader is just as important. When we see him lower that shoulder, whether it’s for an extra yard or 2 yards, that’s why we love him. It’s never about him.”
Daily ranks fifth nationally in rushing (132.7 yards per game) and is tied for second nationally with 21 rushing touchdowns. The only player with more touchdowns is Boise State’s Ashton Jeanty with 26, but Jeanty has played in two more games than Daily.
Daily and Jeanty are the only two players averaging more than 6 yards per carry and more than 20 carries per game. In his past two outings, Daily has bulldozed his way to a combined 67 rushing attempts, including 36 carries in Army’s 14-3 win over North Texas two weeks ago. The 36 carries were the most by an FBS player this season.
Daily is anything but your stereotypical running quarterback. His forte is power, not speed, meaning defenders tend to see a lot more of the front of his No. 13 jersey than they do the back.
“I’m not blessed with the speed that some guys have, so I have to take a few more shots,” Daily said. “But I enjoy contact. It’s always been a part of my personality. A lot of that comes from playing linebacker in the past and the mentality I grew up with playing for my dad. That’s the kind of program he ran, built on toughness. There wasn’t any other way to play the game.”
As tough as he is, Daily is not immune to injuries, and he missed the Air Force game Nov. 2, two weeks removed from a six-touchdown performance (5 rushing, 1 passing) in a 45-28 win over East Carolina. He carried the ball 31 times in that game and practiced the next week, although the Black Knights didn’t have a game that weekend.
But heading into the week of preparations for the Air Force game, Daily was sidelined with what Army officials termed an undisclosed injury/illness. He had contracted a painful infection in his foot that required a procedure to drain the swelling. Daily said he couldn’t even get his foot in a shoe, let alone put any pressure on it. He still doesn’t know how he got the infection.
“That’s football. You get hit as much as he has, and then something freaky like that takes you out,” said Darrell Daily, who spent the Saturday of the Air Force game in the hospital with his son.
Not being out there with his teammates for a service academy game was bad enough for Bryson Daily. But to make matters worse, he couldn’t get the game on television in his hospital room. There was a problem streaming the game on his laptop, and he missed part of the first quarter before finally getting the computer going.
“He about threw that sucker across the room,” Darrell Daily said. “It killed his soul not to be able to play in that game because he won both Commander-In-Chief games last year as a starting quarterback. But he was confident that [backup] Dewayne [Coleman] would step in for him and handle things.”
Army won 20-3 without him, but Bryson Daily was determined to get back for the North Texas game. Once the swelling subsided, he was back at practice, but did very little the week of the game, again placing his status in question.
“He walked through on Thursday and went through their pregame stuff on Friday and then went out there and carried the ball 36 times,” Darrell Daily said. “I’m not sure anybody or anything was going to keep him out of that game.”
NOW, WITH ANOTHER bye week to get healthier, Bryson Daily and Army get to play on their biggest stage yet in what has been a remarkable season for the Black Knights. One of just three unbeaten FBS teams with Oregon and Indiana, Army is the only one that has won every game by double digits. But it hasn’t faced any team the caliber of Notre Dame, which has given up just seven rushing touchdowns in 10 games.
Daily, one of 29 Texans on Army’s roster, gets his competitive spirit naturally. He grew up in a family of coaches and athletes. His mother, Christi, coached basketball and track. She and Darrell are retired and living in Wimberley, Texas, which is about 40 miles southwest of Austin.
Both of Daily’s grandfathers were coaches, not to mention one of his grandmothers. Both of his sisters, Brooke and Ali, played sports, and Brooke is a junior high school coach in Wimberley.
“It’s all we’ve known. It’s all Bryson has known, from the time he was in youth leagues and my father-in-law [Buddy Comer] was coaching him,” Darrell Daily said.
Comer was the one who helped Bryson Daily channel his intensity and drive, which occasionally reached the threshold of being more of a negative than a positive when he was younger. Daily hated to lose — and still does. But he learned to turn that anger into a steely determination.
Comer still sends his grandson reminders before games that a “cool head and hot heart” will lead to success. Daily even has “CHHH” tattooed on his arm.
“He’s an alpha leader, and the guys believe in him,” Monken said. “He pushes the other guys and is very demanding, but it’s always with the betterment of the team in mind.”
Daily doesn’t have anybody in his family with a military background, but it was an easy decision for him when Army offered him a scholarship.
“I wanted to play college football at the highest possible level. It didn’t matter where,” Daily said.
The FCS schools in Texas — Stephen F. Austin, Incarnate Word and Abilene Christian — all wanted him and so did several Ivy League schools, but not necessarily as a quarterback. SMU kept him dangling and had one scholarship spot open, but ended up giving it to a player in the transfer portal.
Army recruited Daily as both a quarterback and linebacker and assured him he would get his shot at QB. After visiting West Point, he was sold and felt a close connection with Viti, who was deployed in the Arghandab River Valley in Afghanistan from 2010-11 before returning to his alma mater to coach. Viti was a platoon leader, and he lived on a combat outpost that was attacked virtually every day by the Taliban.
“Seeing what kind of dude he was and seeing what West Point meant to him and hearing about his service, I knew this was where I belonged,” Daily said. “It wasn’t just about football. It was about being a part of something bigger than just yourself.”
Daily spent his first year at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School in 2020 after having to delay hernia surgery during the COVID pandemic. That first year helped him prepare for life at the academy. As a freshman the following season, Daily scuffled with the transition from the spread/speed option he ran in high school to Army’s version of the triple option. He appeared in only six games his first two seasons, although he did make the travel roster as a sophomore.
Daily patiently waited his turn and never flinched, even with four or five quarterbacks ahead of him on the roster when he arrived on campus. He knew his time was coming.
“The transfer portal isn’t a factor here,” Monken said. “You’re still able to develop players, have them be around older players and learn and stay together for four years. Bryson bought into that.”
He won the starting job as a junior in 2023 and became only the second Army quarterback to both rush and pass for 900 yards in a season. But the Black Knights had shifted to more of a shotgun/passing attack, in large part because of the rule change the year before that eliminated blocks below the waist outside the tackle box. Army’s offensive numbers tumbled, and the Black Knights finished 6-6 for the second straight season.
This season, Monken decided to go back to a true under-center, triple-option attack based on the power game. The Black Knights went from averaging 20.5 points in 2023 to 35.2 points this season and regained their spot as the country’s top rushing team. They’re averaging 72.1 more yards per game than the No. 2 FBS team (UCF).
“It was a way for us to maybe run some option out of the shotgun and still be different,” Monken said of the unsuccessful experiment a year ago. “But I realized we weren’t different enough. So this year, I came back to getting more under center, going back to our roots a little bit and finding a way to do that without having to rely on the cut block.”
All the while, Daily has flourished. He has attempted just 51 passes, but seven have gone for touchdowns, and he has thrown only one interception. But it’s the running game where he has excelled. He’s not the kind of quarterback who uses his speed to run away from defenders, but he’s quick and uses the next-level cut to find openings a lot of players don’t see.
And when all else fails, he goes into all-out linebacker mode, lowers his pads and essentially says, “May the best man win,” to his would-be tacklers.
“We’ve kind of grown with him, and that’s what you’ve got to do as a good offense,” Viti said. “You’ve got to see who your best players are and play to their strengths.”
Daily’s family will be well represented in New York. His parents, two sisters and one set of grandparents are all making the trip from Texas.
Daily, an engineering management major, has an eye on infantry to begin his military service. But just like his father, he will spend next football season coaching at the prep school at West Point. That time will count as the first six months of Daily’s military service.
But nobody in the Daily family is getting too far ahead of themselves, especially Bryson. There’s a lot more football left to be played, including the American Athletic Conference championship game Dec. 6 and the 125th Army-Navy game on Dec. 14 in Landover, Maryland.
And after that, maybe even a playoff game.
“We’re just trying to enjoy every moment and chase that winning feeling, and that happens by chasing that 1-0 mentality of going 1-0 every week,” Bryson said. “It’s no different this game than it was last game.”
And that’s whether it’s a street fight or fighting to find the goal line against the Fighting Irish.