2021 Season Predictions

Cole Jacobson: Fresh off my perfect 2019 predictions where I nailed both the CSFL MVP (Eddie Jenkins) and team champion (Army), I’ll admit things will be a bit more difficult this time around. Not only for individual reasons — I’m now three years removed from playing in the CSFL instead of one — but also because of the general mystery that comes from the majority of the league having not played a game in two years. With that being said, I’ll dive right into my attempt to keep my perfect record intact.

On the individual side, I’m taking Army senior LB David Dickerson to win CSFL MVP. While this might come across as a scalding hot take, a reader must keep in mind that, unlike the Heisman Trophy at the FBS level, the CSFL has historically shown a tendency to be very willing to give defensive players the league’s top honor. Three of the past seven CSFL seasons have seen a defensive player win MVP, and all three happen to be from Army (Dylan Doty in 2013, Philip Choi in 2015, and Curtis Jerzerick in 2017). For what it’s worth, I believe NaVonte Dean was slated to become the 4th had there been a full 2020 CSFL season. 

And if there was any season where picking a defensive player to win MVP before the year made sense, it’d be 2021. While we entered the last full season in 2019 with some very proven talent at QB headlined by Jenkins and Chestnut Hill’s Mike Marino, the 2021 season is defined by newcomers at the position, as Kyle Johnson-Hackett and I discussed on his podcast in August. That’s not to say a QB couldn’t win MVP — in my opinion, Army’s JC Watson and Penn’s Andrew Paolini have very good shots to do so — but there’s not an obvious preseason candidate at the position the way that guys like Jenkins, Keegan West, and Mike McCurdy had been in prior years. Likewise, with Mansfield’s David Butler and Navy’s Caleb Champion graduated, and Caldwell’s Armani Bermudez having transferred to Illinois State of the FCS, the RB talent in the league has taken a hit as well (though 2019 first-team All-CSFL RB Laquan McKever of Penn is still around). The only official CSFL game of the 2020-21 school year had a combined 10 points (Army defeated Navy, 7-3), and I believe that has set the tone for a season that will be dominated by defense.

If it is indeed a defensive player that wins the trophy, I like Dickerson to continue Army’s streak. The main reason for this is simply how his ascension up the depth chart has gone. Dickerson was a reserve who made 12 tackles as a freshman in the fall of 2018, and then he cracked the starting lineup in 2019 as a sophomore, making 35 tackles on the season. In the lone game of his junior year, he went from starter to star, leading Army with 15 tackles, 4.0 TFL, and an INT that ended up leading to their lone scoring drive. I was a statistics minor in college, but I don’t need any of that background to be able to say that if you extrapolate the trend he’s been on, a huge 2021 season is coming for Dickerson. Combine that with the fact that I think Army’s team in general will be very strong (more on that below), I think he beats out other top defenders like Navy’s Jake Karczewski or Penn’s Lewis Evans to earn the trophy.

At the team level, as I somewhat alluded to in the last paragraph, I’m going with Army to take home the CSFL championship. Given that Army and Navy have played in the last two CSFL title games in 2018 and 2019, not to mention their extremely competitive one-off game in 2020, those two schools have to be the favorites, and I like Army to become the first repeat champion the league has seen since Army did it in 2012 and 2013.

It is true that Army doesn’t quite have a cakewalk to the title game anymore. As I wrote in my last piece for this site in August 2021, Caldwell’s move to the North has changed the landscape of this league, as the North suddenly isn’t a walk in the park. But make no mistake: Navy still has the tougher road to winning its division than Army does. Even though the South Division is smaller (four teams, to the North’s five), any division that includes Navy, Penn, and Chestnut Hill is going to be a dogfight. As I said during my predictions two years ago, any team that has an easier path to the championship automatically gets a boost to its title odds.

But more important than that is the personnel on the field. It’s true that the Black Knights were decimated by graduation on the defensive side of the ball, with all three of their 1st-team All-CSFL defenders in 2019 (NaVonte Dean, Tate Blessinger, and Ryan Leach) having since graduated. But Navy is in a similar position, with all three of its 2019 defensive first-teamers (David Potsma, Luke Kustra, Grant Hooper) out of the picture. With players like Dickerson, senior DL Alex Sobeski, and sophomore LB Luke Gigliotti in the fold, Army will still be elite on that side of the ball. 

Between two teams that are perennially strong on defense and on the offensive line, the edge often comes down to the QB position, and I like Army’s situation better there. QB JC Watson, a former RB on Army’s FBS team, is a threat to score any time he has the ball, and he makes that offense vastly more dangerous with the way he can expand its play-calling options. In contrast, both of Navy’s two primary QBs of the past two years (Brayden Chmiel and Jake Foss) have graduated, propelling me to give Army a very slight edge as of now.

Having played for Penn’s program a few years ago, I strongly hope the Quakers prove me wrong and take these two teams down, but I ultimately don’t think they have quite enough in the trenches to bring home their first title in five years. Penn’s going to be a good team, as it’s simply what the program does; there have only been losing seasons in the entire 21st century, and that standard shouldn’t change following the coaching transition from Bill Wagner to Jerry McConnell. But fresh off playing in the team’s Alumni Game (a 27-20 win for the current varsity team), I believe the team’s losses in the trenches will be too much to overcome in terms of title contention.

What Penn does have going for it is talent at the skill positions. To have a trio of skill players as good as RB Laquan McKever, WR Brendan McCaffrey, and TE Ben Klaus all in their senior years is a rarity in this league, and something that QB Andrew Paolini won’t take for granted. Paolini, in his own right, could very easily be the best QB in the league this season. Penn has had the league’s best QB play for more or less the entire past decade between Todd Busler, Mike McCurdy, and Eddie Jenkins, and there’s no reason for that to stop now. In particular, Paolini’s improvisation skills stick out to me. No matter how good your preparation is, there will come times in any football game where a snap is inaccurate or pass protection breaks down, and what separates good QBs from great ones is the ability to figure out a way to make something out of nothing in those spots. Having gone against Paolini and his offense up close a few days ago, I can vouch that he has that ability — on one 3rd and 22, he sent my ass back to the 3rd grade with a spin move to escape a sack and convert on what ultimately was a scoring drive. 

But with that being said, it takes a special group in the trenches to bring home a championship, and Penn had some serious attrition there since its last season, with four out of five starting OL from 2019 (Matt McDermott, Matt Hermann, Jack Schaible, and Dan Smith) having graduated. While I think Penn’s OL is extremely assignment-sound under position coach Frank McConnell (son of Penn head coach Jerry), I don’t know if there’s enough man-meat left in there to take down both academies. However, I believe it will be Penn’s defense that pushes the team to a winning season. Despite only featuring two starting seniors (S Luca Curran, CB Sam Mintz), I’d say the defense looks to be the better of the two units, as the young group held our alumni offense to only two offensive touchdowns in a full 60-minute game. Junior LB Lewis Evans particularly impressed me, as he was all over the field, including a game-changing tackle on a 4th down with the game tied at 20 apiece in the 4th quarter.
As a miscellaneous prediction outside of MVP/team champion, I think this will be a year of significantly increased parity in the league. The primary reason for this is the potential impact of 5th-year seniors. The Ivy League is notoriously stringent for not allowing grad school students to play varsity sports, and even though it did allow a one-time waiver for the Class of 2021, that decision came in February 2021, after many senior student-athletes had either transferred to other institutions or accepted job offers. Similarly, it’s extremely difficult for student-athletes to redshirt at service academies, because of legislative requirements that they complete their course of study in four years, barring mitigating circumstances. In contrast, the CSFL’s that aren’t Penn, Cornell, Army, or Navy won’t have such restrictions, allowing them to more feasibly bring back some members of the Class of 2021 who were initially robbed of their senior seasons. Having extra veteran depth means volumes to any football team, and because of that, I don’t expect the CSFL to see a repeat of 2019, when none of the Army-Navy-Penn trio lost to anyone besides each other.