Navy basketball is one of the great sleeping giants of the college game — a program with three Elite Eights, eleven NCAA Tournament appearances, and the singular distinction of having produced one of the fifty greatest players who ever lived, all while its athletes wake up for formation before practice. The 2025-26 season was the giant stirring: 26 wins, a 17-1 Patriot League record, the program's first outright regular-season championship since 1997, and a first-year head coach who had the Mids playing some of the nastiest defense in America.
Start with the history, because at Annapolis the history is the program. The Midshipmen reached the Elite Eight in 1947, 1954, and — most famously — 1986, when David Robinson, the 7-foot-1 Naval Academy junior who would become a Hall of Famer and two-time NBA champion, carried the seventh-seeded Mids past Tulsa, second-seeded Syracuse, and 14th-seeded Cleveland State before falling to Duke. Robinson won the Wooden and Naismith Awards in 1987 and remains the towering figure of Navy athletics. The program's Patriot League-era peak came with three NCAA trips in five years (1994, 1997, 1998) under Don DeVoe — and then, for nearly three decades, the league title eluded Annapolis.
Enter Jon Perry. When Ed DeChellis retired in 2025 after 14 seasons, Navy promoted from within, and Perry's first team delivered a season for the record books. The 2025-26 Midshipmen matched the program's second-most wins ever (26) and ripped through the Patriot League at 17-1 — tying Colgate's 2022-23 mark for the best league record since the conference expanded to ten teams. The formula was defense: Navy finished fifth in the nation in scoring defense (63.6 points per game), 21st in defensive field-goal percentage, and eighth in three-point defense. Opponents didn't just lose to Navy; they got ground down.
The stars were seniors who embodied the program. Guard Austin Benigni was named Patriot League Player of the Year after finishing second in the league in scoring (18.1 points), fourth in assists (4.4), and first in three-point percentage (45.7). He also earned Scholar-Athlete of the Year, and his career totals — more than 1,900 points and 400 assists — put him alongside American's Sa'eed Nelson as the only players in league history to reach both marks. Center Aidan Kehoe was the Defensive Player of the Year, leading the league and ranking sixth nationally in rebounding (11.0 per game), setting the Patriot League single-season record for field-goal percentage (73.6), and finishing second in the country with 18 double-doubles. Donovan Draper joined Kehoe on the All-Defensive Team, and Perry's staff was voted the league's Coaching Staff of the Year.
The ending stung, as endings at Navy so often do in this league. The top-seeded Mids fell to fourth-seeded Boston University, 73-72, in the Patriot League semifinal — one possession from the tournament final and an NCAA berth. The consolation was a trip to the NIT, the program's first postseason appearance since 1998, where Navy drew Wake Forest and lost 72-82 in Winston-Salem. A 26-win season that ended in heartbreak is still a 26-win season, and the standard has been reset: this is now a program that expects to contend for the league every single year.
That expectation extends across Alumni Hall. The Navy women's program, under Tim Taylor, authored its own breakthrough in 2025-26: a 21-7 record, 16-2 in the league, the program's first regular-season title since 2013-14, and a sweep of the major awards — Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year for junior guard Zanai Barnett-Gay, Rookie of the Year for freshman Zoe Mesuch, and Coaching Staff of the Year for Taylor and his assistants. Taylor rebuilt from a 1-29 rock bottom in 2022-23 to three straight winning seasons and a 16-win conference campaign, the most league wins ever by a Navy women's team. The two programs sharing Alumni Hall are now both defending league standards at once — a golden era for the yard.
For 2026-27, Perry's second season begins with the hardest task in coaching: replacing a Player of the Year, a Defensive Player of the Year, and a senior class that won 26 games. Benigni and Kehoe are gone, and the new Mids will have to forge a new identity around whoever steps into their footprints. What won't change is the structure — the defense-first culture, the depth, the home floor at Alumni Hall where the brigade makes life miserable for visitors. Navy's path back to the NCAA Tournament runs through the Patriot League tournament in March, and after last year's semifinal heartbreak, the Midshipmen will arrive with a score to settle.
The David Robinson banner hangs in the rafters, and the standard it represents never left Annapolis. A program that once stood one game from the Final Four with the future Admiral now believes it can get back to the bracket — and in 2025-26, for the first time in a generation, the rest of the league believed it too.