100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters

In November 2021, a group of West Point cadets drove four hours from New York to a Maryland farm, infiltrated the pasture and grabbed a goat. They drove four hours back before realizing they had the wrong one.

The target was Bill No. 37, the Naval Academy’s active mascot. They grabbed Bill No. 34 instead — 14 years old, missing a horn and long since retired. Army returned him unharmed on Monday.

This was not the first time. It was not even close.

Since 1953

Army cadets have been stealing Navy’s goat since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. The first documented heist came on November 22, 1953, when cadets Ben Schemmer and Alex Rupp chloroformed Bill the Goat at Thompson Stadium in Annapolis, loaded him into the back of a convertible and drove north to West Point. The chloroform wore off at a gas station in New Jersey and the goat’s horns tore through the convertible’s soft top. President Eisenhower — a West Point graduate — demanded the goat be returned before the game.

The Superintendent of the Naval Academy, Vice Adm. C. Turner Joy, told The New York Times that the goat had not been “kid-naped” but had “merely visited West Point as a guide for the ‘pathetic’ group of Army cadets who, like Yale’s ‘poor little sheep,’ had lost their way.”

The cadets kept coming. In 1965, a cadet named Tom Carhart and five classmates dressed in black with faces darkened by burned cork, cut through two fences topped with barbed wire and crept past Marines to reach the goat pen on a high-security naval base. They had help.

“We had planned it all with our girlfriends,” Carhart told The New York Times. “They told the Marines a story about how they were lost, and they’d been stood up on a blind date. I think one of them cried. We sneaked in to the goat pen, only 25 feet behind them all, but the guards never turned around. They were looking at the girls.”

His commandant at West Point delivered the verdict.

“He told me I had violated nearly all of the cadet regulations, I had risked the lives of others, I had taken on the government and won,” Carhart said, “and then he said, ‘Well done.’”

In 1972, Army cadets announced another successful heist with an ad in The New York Times: “Hey Navy, do you know where your ‘kid’ is today? The Corps does.”

The Goat Extraction Team

By 1990, Navy had moved the goat to an undisclosed location between appearances. It did not matter.

A West Point cadet named Ted Russ spent a year planning what he and his friends called themselves — the goat extraction team. “There were four main phases,” Russ said in an ESPN feature. “Find, secure, hide and reveal.”

On November 17, just before midnight, Russ and approximately nine other cadets executed the mission. The goat was not where they expected. They had to bust it out of a building. But during Army-Navy week, they brought Bill XXVI into Washington Hall in front of more than 4,000 members of the Corps of Cadets.

“We yanked him off the truck and ran into the mess hall,” Russ said. “The reverberation of the cheering was insane. I’m sure he felt like the gates of hell had opened.”

Within a week, Russ was standing before a disciplinary board. Brig. Gen. David Bramlett, the West Point commandant, signed the conduct report personally. Russ was boomeranged — bused to and from the Army-Navy game, banned from everything else.

Then the commandant quietly let them off.

“I think the fact that we won the game that year probably helped us a lot,” Russ said.

Navy Strikes Back

Since 1953, Army has nabbed Navy’s goat at least a dozen times. The Army mules had been stolen exactly once.

Navy decided to change that.

On December 5, 1991, the Naval Academy launched Operation Missing Mascot. Navy’s football team was 0-10, but seventeen midshipmen — assisted by two active-duty SEAL “advisers” — were planning the most ambitious mascot theft in the history of the rivalry.

They drove onto West Point’s campus in daylight wearing MP uniforms. They brought bolt cutters and bags of mule feed laced with molasses. The operation was role-specific — one man cut phone lines, another breached doors, others handled the animals. Some were selected, according to a Navy account, for their “aggressive desire to place an enemy in submission.”

Shawn Callahan of Baldwin, New York, led the reconnaissance. “We went up there and said, ‘Hey, are these the Army mules?’” Callahan told the Associated Press. “They told us more than we needed to know.”

Bill Wiseman — a senior who went on to become a Navy SEAL — helped lead the assault. Inside the stable, the team zip-tied six Army personnel to chairs.

“Some were putting up quite a struggle, so we used some duct tape to shut them up,” Wiseman told The New York Times.

Ten minutes after they entered the building, four mules — each weighing half a ton — were on a truck and the team was driving south. Army sent helicopters after them and alerted law enforcement, but the midshipmen took back roads and police did not catch up until they reached the Naval Academy gates.

Navy brass stepped in before anyone was charged. The team and their four stolen mules were escorted straight to a pep rally on the yard, where thousands of midshipmen were waiting.

“We went from criminals to heroes in a matter of minutes,” Wiseman said.

Two days later, the 0-10 Navy football team beat Army 24-3. Instead of felony charges, the midshipmen received the Order of the Mule — a gold-sealed commendation signed by Capt. Michael D. Haskins, the Commandant of Midshipmen, praising their “extraordinary bravery above and beyond the call of duty” in capturing “not one, but all four of the Army mules at West Point.” The citation called the mission one of “great national importance” and observed that the Army team had already “lost their asses.”

Wiseman reflected on it decades later. “Looking back, we went so far overboard, tying guys up. You would never get away with that today. I’m frankly amazed we didn’t get in a lot of trouble.”

He believed the brass knew all along. “They wanted a little street cred of their own,” he said.

The Treaty

In 1992, the Commandant of Cadets at West Point and the Commandant of the Brigade of Midshipmen at Annapolis signed a Memorandum of Agreement. The subject line: “Rules of Engagement Prior to Army-Navy Competitions.” Paragraph 4a was direct: “Kidnapping of cadets, midshipmen or mascots will not be tolerated.”

It did not work. The goat was stolen again in 1995, 2002, 2007, 2012, 2015 and 2021 — when the cadets grabbed the wrong one. In 2012, Bill was found near the Pentagon.

West Point said in a written statement that mascot thefts do not “reflect the Army or USMA core values of dignity and respect.” The academy also produced an elaborate mascot-stealing spoof video with Brig. Gen. Steven Gilland, the West Point commandant, playing the role of airborne commando. In the video, Gilland tells his boss, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen: “We need to massacre midshipman morale.”

“You know, if anything goes wrong,” Caslen replies, “I’m denying any knowledge of this mission.”

Why It Matters

The Army-Navy rivalry is 136 years old. Navy leads the all-time series 64-55-7. The first game was played on November 29, 1890 — Navy won 24-0 — and after every game since, both teams have observed the Sing Second tradition: the losing team’s alma mater is played first while the winning team stands behind them in a show of respect, and then the winners rush to their side of the field to sing their own. Winning the game is a prize. Singing second is an honor.

The rivalry is now a conference game. In 2024, Army joined longtime member Navy in — appropriately enough — the American Athletic Conference and won the league in its first season. Navy, a member since 2015, is still looking for its first conference championship.

But the mascot heists belong to the students. They are not sanctioned. They are not safe. They violate direct orders, formal agreements and occasionally federal law. Future Navy SEALs planned one. A sitting president had to intervene in another. The commandants signed Rules of Engagement. The cadets ignored them before the ink was dry.

“I’ve read the obituaries of the men who took Bill XII in 1953,” wrote Shane Cashman, whose family kept the Army mules. “Each one mentions the day they delivered the goat to West Point.”

Ted Russ served as a special operations helicopter pilot after West Point. He said the thing he is most proud of from his time at West Point is stealing a goat with his friends.

“I look at the corps of cadets,” Russ said, “and I wonder who out there is thinking about taking it next. Because I guarantee you there’s somebody.”

They told you it didn’t matter. Here are 100 reasons it does.