Potomac’s John Feinstein Leaves Navy Radio

You won’t be hearing the witty, sometimes acerbic color commentary from controversial author John Feinstein on Navy football broadcasts any longer.

Feinstein, a nationally-known sportswriter, author and radio-TV sports talk show personality, abruptly resigned last week as color commentator on Navy football radio broadcasts after the Naval Academy signed a deal with CBS-TV to produce a documentary about the historic Army-Navy football game rivalry, an idea Feinstein says he’s been pitching for nearly ten years.

Feinstein, who lives in Potomac and appears regularly on ESPN-980 and other sports stations nationwide, asserts that he’d spent nearly ten years trying to develop either a movie or a documentary based on his superb book titled “The Civil War: Army vs. Navy a Year Inside College Football’s Purest Rivalry,” which chronicled the traditional rivalry between the two military academies at Annapolis and West Point.

 “This is a sad day for me,” Feinstein wrote last week on his blog ‘Feinstein on the Brink.’  “I resigned after 14 years as color commentator on the Navy football radio network. I did it with a lot of regret and with no malice toward anyone at Navy. But I had no choice.”

The Maryland author, who shot to prominence with his controversial “A Season on the Brink” on Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight in the mid-1980’s, was baffled by the obstacles presented by both Hollywood and the major TV networks to his proposal for an Army-Navy game film or documentary.

“If people bought into Rudy (the movie about a Notre Dame football walk-on), why wouldn’t they buy into a story like this one about real football players who went on, in many cases, to fight in real wars?” he said in his blog.

Feinsein pursued the documentary approach on the traditional Army-Navy rivalry, making presentations to CBS, HBO and other outlets. 

“The problem, of course, was finding people who would put up the money to do it,” Feinstein blogged.

Recently, Feinstein learned that CBS Sports moved ahead separately reaching agreement with both the Naval Academy and U.S. Military Academy at West Point to produce its own documentary, leaving Feinstein in effect standing outside in the cold on the project.

That documentary will be shown on Showtime shortly after this year’s Army-Navy game, with another show planned during the week-long run-up before the big game.

“I have no doubt CBS will do just fine with this,” Feinstein wrote in his blog. “They’ll have the access and they’ll spend the money. They won’t have my anecdotal memory or know some of the stories about past players that I know and I’m SURE they won’t try to claim any of the stories I have written or told in the past as their own.”