During the week, Darrell Daily can be found trimming and carving slabs of brisket at Kelly’s Hill Country BBQ. Two 1,000-pound smokers flank a black trailer parked along Ranch Road 12 in Wimberley, Texas, slow-cooking a variety of meats that sell out daily without the benefit of a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
The fencing around the smokers features black silhouettes of a pig and a cow, and big red letters that read, “BBQ.” Nothing more needs to be said—just smelled and tasted. The Lone Star State is the motherland of barbecue, and Kelly’s has been lauded by Texas Monthly as one of its best proprietors.
On fall weekends, Daily puts away his carving tools and hits the road with his wife, Christi, and her parents. Wherever the Army Black Knights are playing football, they’ll be there. Their youngest of three children, Bryson, is the senior quarterback of an undefeated team, and this is the last roundup. For the moment, at least, this is the final stage of the family football dynasty.
“We aren’t going to miss one,” Darrell says.
Darrell is living the quintessential Texas life. After decades coaching high school football in the state that loves it the most, he now hangs around a barbecue truck with a couple other retired coaches and proprietor Kelly Evers, himself a former social studies teacher. Then Darrell and Christi travel the country watching their son play quarterback like a wrecking ball.
It’s a perfect combination of avocations, and the Dailys have been rewarded with a perfect season to this point.
Army is 9–0 and in contention for both the American Athletic Conference championship and a College Football Playoff berth. Bryson is a fringe Heisman Trophy candidate, the prime weapon in a blunt-force option offense that leads the nation in rushing. It’s all highly improbable—the Black Knights have their highest AP ranking since 1962 (No. 16), and Daily has risen from two-star prospect to being heralded as “Captain America” by some in the media.
He’s got the looks for that role, but in reality, this a story steeped in West Texas grit more than anything glamorous. “He’s the overalls, hard-hat, lunch-pail, digging-the-fence-line-with-you type dude,” says Army offensive line coach Mike Viti, who recruited Daily out of Abernathy, a no-stoplight town 20 miles north of Lubbock that was built to serve the Santa Fe Railroad more than a century ago.
The Dailys have lived the football life for generations—both of Bryson’s grandfathers were coaches as well (and his mom coached basketball and track). There was plenty of sports knowledge passed down, but more than that there was a conviction about how the game—all games—should be played. That went for Bryson’s older sisters, Brooke and Ali, as well.
“We were very old school,” Christi says. “The team was going to be it, not the individual. If we were wearing white socks, we were all wearing white socks.”
Says Darrell, “We always played harder than everyone. I coached pretty hard. I was pretty aggressive. But I loved the kids, and they believed in what we were doing.”
Darrell was a fullback and linebacker when he played for his dad, Carroll. In turn, he became the winningest coach in Abernathy history—in large part thanks to his son. Bryson was a four-sport kid who started at quarterback for four years, leading the Abernathy Antelopes to the Class 2-A state semifinals as a freshman—kicking the winning field goal in the round of 16, naturally.
His quarterback credentials got him nowhere with recruiters. Bryson was targeted by the Ivy League schools and smaller Texas programs as a linebacker. While he had the mentality to play that position, he wanted a chance to play QB. Army offered it to him in its throwback offense, plus all the other mutually attractive elements of a program that bills itself as the “Last of the Hard.”
Bryson ran the ball a lot out of a spread-option offense in high school, which is not the same thing as the Army option. The transition to coach Jeff Monken’s system was difficult at first.
“Spring my freshman year was some of the worst football I ever played,” Bryson says.
By his sophomore year, he grasped it well enough to make the travel squad as the fourth-string QB. Last year, he started, enduring Monken’s brief and largely unsuccessful decision to alter the offense to more of a true passing game. When the Black Knights switched back to ground-and-pound, dive-and-pitch football, Daily thrived.
This season he has been the best running QB in the country. Daily is the nation’s fourth-leading rusher at 132.75 yards per game and the first quarterback to rank in the top five in that category in five years. He’s one of just two players averaging more than six yards per carry and 20 carries per game—the other is Boise State Broncos running back Ashton Jeanty, perhaps the leading Heisman candidate. (Among the others who have hit those numbers in recent years: Bijan Robinson, Kenneth Walker III, Chuba Hubbard and J.K. Dobbins, all high-level NFL backs.)
The 6' 0", 221-pounder is not piling up that yardage with the spectacular athleticism of some elite running quarterbacks. You will not watch him play and think of Lamar Jackson, Vince Young or Cam Newton. But he does have a couple of vital attributes: a knowledge of when and where to run behind a hard-nosed line, and a resolute refusal to be easily tackled.
If you want to see a full-contact quarterback—busting through tackles with shoulder pads low and thighs churning, or throwing vicious stiff-arms—Daily is your dude. He is the toughest man on America’s toughest team, an all-business group that would rather hammer away in close quarters than dance around in space.
“Physicality has to be a part of my game,” Bryson says. “I’m not blessed with the speed and moves of some guys. So I’m going to run hard. I’m going to make guys tackle me for four quarters.”
Army’s ninth and most recent victory was a testament to that. Bryson ran the ball a staggering 36 times—the most by any FBS player this season—for 153 yards and both of the Black Knights’ touchdowns in a 14–3 win over the North Texas Mean Green. The hallmark of that game was one of the most Army drives ever—a 21-play, 94-yard grind that took nearly a full quarter (13:54) off the clock. Daily ran the ball on 12 of those 21 plays. By the end, North Texas had had enough of tackling him.
“That’s what we do,” Bryson says. “You get into those drives and see the other team subbing out, hands on knees. You start to feel them giving out. After finishing a drive like that by scoring, there’s no better feeling.”
The backstory that makes that performance even more impressive: Daily wasn’t even a lock to play until late in the week, much less run the ball 36 times.
He’d missed the previous game against service-academy rival Air Force with an undisclosed injury/illness. The Dailys and Army remain close-mouthed about what kept the quarterback out of that game, but it was serious enough to require medical attention. He wasn’t even in Army’s Michie Stadium for the game, watching it elsewhere with Darrell.
“Just me and my dad sitting there,” Bryson says. “That was brutal. That’s a game you come here to play.”
The FOMO that day was exacerbated by issues getting the Air Force game to stream on Bryson’s laptop. The Dailys missed the first six plays, which brought out Bryson’s childhood nemesis—his temper.
“I thought he was going to throw the laptop across the room,” Darrell jokes.
Bryson’s molten competitive streak used to manifest itself with outbursts, something he had to learn to outgrow. His grandfather on Christi’s side, Buddy Comer, had a saying for Bryson to deal with channeling his emotions: “Cool head, hot heart.” Through high school and to this day, Comer sends him good-luck texts before games with that abbreviation: “CHHH.” Bryson had it tattooed on his arm.
After the misery of not playing against Air Force—leavened by the joy of watching backup Dewayne Coleman lead a 20–3 victory—the next game was a homecoming at North Texas. A big contingent of Daily family and friends planned to converge in Denton—and hoped Bryson would be able to play.
Army kept his status cloaked in secrecy during the week. Bryson’s practice was limited to a couple of walkthroughs, Darrell says, but he was determined to play. Then he ran it 36 times, tying the most rushing attempts by an FBS quarterback in the last five years. (That ties himself from last year, against Air Force.)
Out in the parking lot before and after the game, the Army parent tailgate feasted on a couple of briskets Darrell brought from Kelly’s for the occasion. This was the easiest trip of the season for the Dailys, who have spent most of it flying from Austin to Newark and then driving to West Point on its picturesque perch overlooking the Hudson River in New York.
Christi is the travel agent, booking flights and rental cars and the same Airbnb in nearby Fort Montgomery, N.Y. “As cheap as we can,” Darrell says.
The Dailys will make an extended stay of it to finish the month. Army plays No. 8 Notre Dame in Yankee Stadium on Nov. 23—the biggest non-Navy game the Black Knights have played in decades. Then they play their final home game against UTSA on Nov. 30, a senior day that will tug at the heartstrings of Darrell, Christi and the rest of the extended family.
There will still be the cataclysm against Navy on Dec. 14, and probably the AAC championship game the week before that (perhaps also against Navy, because college football is nothing if not complicated). And there will be a bowl game for the first time since 2021. But this will be the last game at West Point, a place that Christi says, “took a young man and made him a grown man.”
Military service looms after graduation for Bryson, part of the deal that comes with West Point. He plans to start in the infantry, but perhaps move to engineering after that. Then, who knows? Maybe he will keep the generations-deep coaching line alive.
But for now, he is the most unlikely star quarterback in the country, leading a remarkable unbeaten team deep into November, with a seemingly impossible shot at the playoff still in play. Bryson Daily has given his old man and old coach a lot to brag about around the barbecue pit back home in Texas.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Barbecue and Football: Army QB Bryson Daily’s Texas Roots Run Deep.
