Troy Calhoun stands in the same dangerous position where Ben Martin and Fisher DeBerry once stood.

Calhoun has performed wonders in his dozen seasons as Air Force football coach. He’s earned 87 victories along with eight winning seasons and nine bowl trips. He immediately revived a fallen program when he arrived in 2007.

Remember, Martin and DeBerry performed wonders with the Falcons, too. Both flirted with unbeaten seasons and national championships. Both were blessed with magical offensive minds. Both are legends, a vastly overused word, but both men deserve the description.

Both departed Air Force after fumbling their magic. Martin departed in 1977 after four straight losing seasons. DeBerry resigned in 2006 after three straight losing seasons.

Calhoun oversees a broken program that has lost 14 of 22 Football Bowl Subdivision games. From 2007 to 2010, Calhoun won 34 of 52 games and looked ready to build a regional, if not quite national, power. Since then, he’s dropped 48 of 93 FBS games with four losing seasons. (DeBerry stumbled to two losing records in his first 20 seasons.)

The Falcons crawled to four FBS victories this season, and none were dazzling. Teams that lost to the Falcons — CSU, New Mexico, UNLV and Navy – lost 35 of 48 games in 2018.

Calhoun declined a request to explain his plans to repair the Falcons.

This is no surprise.

For years, dating to 2012 or so, he’s declined to speak clearly, or even kind of clearly, about his team. He instead speaks in mystifying sentences, but mystifying everyone is central to a strategy only he comprehends.

He refuses to explain his team to fans. He declines to reveal how deeply he cares for his players and winning at his alma mater. Calhoun is not, in his media moments, exposing who he really is. In his first few seasons with the Falcons, Calhoun was open and funny and honest. That’s the real Calhoun, the man his friends know, the man hidden beneath a strange façade of his own construction.

His waste-everybody’s-time media strategy is a mistake and one reason so many seats are empty on Saturdays at Falcon Stadium. His say-nothing media approach is universally unpopular, and administrators, faculty, cadets, athletes and coaches at the Air Force Academy are included in this realm of universal unpopularity.

But Calhoun’s misguided, failed media strategy will not end his days as Air Force coach. He can keep talking weird for another decade, as long as he rediscovers how to win.

Losing ends coaching careers. This truth crashed into the lives of Martin and DeBerry, both noble men. This truth currently stares at Calhoun.

Calhoun’s prime problem is defensive weakness, a problem that has dogged the program for much of the 21st century. The 2018 Falcons averaged 30.2 points, enough for a winning record, especially with their weak schedule.

Looked at from one angle, the 2018 defense took a big jump from 2017. The nation’s worst run defense became stout against the rush, and the Falcons surrendered 80 fewer points.

But when it mattered most, the defense seldom delivered. The 2017 team allowed 33 or more points five times. So did the 2018 defense, and the Falcons lost four of those five. Fierce and wise defending could have turned gloomy 5-7 to (somewhat) uplifting 7-5.

Defense wasn’t the lone problem. Lack of nerve in play calling doomed the Falcons to defeats against Army and Wyoming, the bitterest afternoons of 2018. When imagination was required to seize victory, imagination seldom was seen.

Reason remains for optimism. The Falcons are young and junior-to-be quarterback Donald Hammond III has the look of a program-lifting star. (I thought the same thing about junior-to-be QB Arion Worthman two years ago.) Calhoun supporters can talk, with some weight, about a winner just around the bend.

That was the talk a year ago, too, and Calhoun and his Falcons failed to deliver. A lost team wandered, once again, to a losing record. Calhoun deserves patience. I get that.

The patience tank runs perilously low with empty within sight.

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