Yesterday, Army played Navy in college football for the 127th time. For a long time this annual contest pitted two of the top teams in the country against each other, but you almost certainly don’t remember that unless you are in your 80s. The people watching from the student sections at the U.S. Military Academy and the United States Naval Academy certainly were not alive at a time when Army and Navy were competing for national titles.
The teams are midlevel Division I programs nowadays; the military academies’ height and weight rules put them at a disadvantage against teams that can, in comparison, field a defensive line of monsters. But both teams have been somewhere between decent and actively good for a while now, and Navy was ranked No. 22 coming into Saturday’s game. Both teams run a gimmicky offense, a modernized triple-option in which most plays are runs. On Saturday, Army rushed 34 times and threw just 10; Navy ran it 52 times compared to 14 passes. A Blake Horvath TD pass to Eli Heidenreich in the fourth gave Navy the 17-16 win, in a game that was indeed kind of exciting despite all those runs.
