Navy Game Preview: 4 (but Really 2.5) Possible Outcomes

Anchors Aweigh! It’s Navy Week

That 12-minute 3rd Quarter Boston College Drive last week sure was fun, huh?

The atmospherics struck at ever-tender scar tissue: a physically overmatched opponent hanging around because of bumbling mistakes, then shortening the game into Dangerous Territory, threatening the type of loss that undoes not only seasons but regimes.

Fortunately, that nightmare scenario did not come to pass. The claustrophobia was real, though! Why? Because of the United States Naval Academy, of course! Readers of this may already be experiencing the vagal nerve reflex brought on by memories of those kinds of games:

1997, 1999, 2002,  2003, 2007, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2022. Notre Dame  can’t pull away, and they can’t get Navy off the damn field. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it’s a root canal throughout no matter what. You descend into an impenetrable cavern of tension and negativity. 25 yard explosive gains bring no joy if they don’t cross the goal line. Defensive havoc plays serve only as preludes to excruciating 3rd and long Midshipmen tricks or battleship grey 4th and short conversions. The game ends, and you feel drained, embarrassed, and like you haven’t brushed your teeth in days.

Then, there’s 2010, where Navy was so much better at the triple option (about which, more later) than ND was at anything that we got our doors blown off.

At any rate, it’s not always like that. Nominally speaking, there are four broad varieties of outcome to a football game (blowout win, close win, close loss, blowout loss) but with Navy games — and possibly with this Navy game in particular — only two or two-and-a-half of them are really on the table.

1. NOTRE DAME BLOWOUT WIN – 75% LIKELY SCENARIO

Key Supporting Factor #1 – This Ain’t Your Uncle Ken’s Navy Offense 

Much has been made of the “new” Navy offense, a hybrid shotgun/wing-T old-timey-meets-2025 installed last year by offensive coordinator Drew Cronic. As someone who used to coach a little but, I have to applaud the amount of inventory the Middies run with seeming effectiveness: RPOs, buck sweeps, bellies, traps, misdirection, vertical passes, and vestigial triple option. It’s a lot to handle, and for bad defenses you almost have to just hope the beating isn’t too bad. Navy’s enjoyed a lot of that type of outcome. Enjoyed, that is, against likely the single easiest schedule in the country.  It’s a great fit for consistently slamming through the vast majority of their AAC schedule each year.

Honestly, though, I think this newer look offense from Navy fundamentally hurts their chances at upsetting a blue blood like ND:

– They have to move linemen more than they did as a pure triple option team, when undersized and exquisitely-drilled OL would be into your defensive front before your DL had taken their hands off the ground. Now, teams with great athletes get a chance to flow to the play and will beat Navy’s guys to the spot often.

– Because of the realities of having to try to live like everyone else (e.g., get more beef to the point of attack before the defense can do the same), they can of course engage some tendency breakers (see last year’s long Horvath TD) but they also have to give more “honest” keys in order to make their offense work (as opposed to the pure triple where the amount of false key layering you can do while still hammering your core actions is almost infinite). Not as helpful for, say, a dregs AAC opponent, but our guys should be able to play with “velocity and violence” against Navy now, especially with an increasingly circumspect back end (see below).

– Ultimately all this other inventory must inevitably come at the cost of proficiency in the triple. Navy going from being 99.9% good at the triple to, say, 95% isn’t a small drop off – against a physically superior team it represents a categorical difference.

My sense is that Navy is ok with these tradeoffs. I think they moved to this style not to make life harder for ND, but because 1) the new cut blocking rules made the standard of execution under the triple too high and 2) the other academies got so good at defending the triple that CinC trophies became a lot harder/more of a crapshoot to come by.

Key Supporting Factor #2 – ND’s Got Good Personnel Matchups Aplenty

Check out this play by Tae Johnson:

BC gets everything they could ask for on this play: Drake Bowen, I think, plays this technique incorrectly. Josh Burnham has no one to the B gap inside of him, so he correctly crashes on dive action. Bowen I think is supposed to read outside-in as he comes down but instead comes straight ahead. The result is that the BC jet sweep easily gets the edge. Moreover, #0 (Smith) is getting blocked and Zackery doesn’t look like he really knows what to do.  Lots of chances for this BC ball carrier to cut it up for a decent explosive. Instead, Johnson not only beats him to the edge, but he dues it while staying under control and preventing the plant and cut up field.

This is the type of thing that happens with a great player on the back end: your opponent can hit three straight cards on an inside straight and only have 5 lousy yards to show for it.

Johnson isn’t the only representative on this front, but he’s a great illustration. You also look at guys like Shuler, Talich, Ausberry, Sneed, and maybe even Jalen Stroman, and you have guys who can be really effective coming downhill but also provide more than enough range to erase a good many of the angles Navy might correctly scheme up.

Key Factor #3 – ND’s Offensive Explosiveness

In the 2016 loss to Navy, ND had 6 possessions. They scored 5 times, but look at the play by play: they burned 9 minutes on a couple of field goal drives; another 12:30 on their latter two touchdown drives. Not a single one of their scoring drives was shorter than 10 plays. You add that to Navy’s penchant for gamesmanship and comfort with the prospect of winning ugly/blown out and you see the horrible odds you give yourself if you agree to shorten the game against these dudes.   By virtue of personnel and willingness to push the ball down field, 2025 ND does a good job of not letting themselves get boxed into a coin flip game. Take last week’s game against BC – it was mistake filled and rife with missed opportunities, but we moved our asses. Drives of 59 yards in 2:42, 73 yards in 1:30, 75 yards in 3:04, 94 yards in 0:14 (ha) total up to 301 yards in 7:22 of clock time. When you have a gear like that, a 12 minute opponent drive isn’t quite as scary.

2) ONE OF THOSE GAMES – 24% LIKELY SCENARIO

Key Factor #1 – Depleted Defensive Interior

ND will be without its two most experienced defensive tackles this week. Against Navy offenses of yesteryear, this would be a potentially huge problem. If you started getting predictable in your structure against a Ken Niumatalolo Navy squad you were almost sure to be in for a long day (e.g., playing left handed to protect your thin interior DL? Get ready for counter-wrinkle after counter-wrinkle until you cry uncle, at which point you’re getting a fake rocket toss PA TD pass out of an unbalanced formation).

Now, though? This is where that 95% effective vs. 99.9% effective bit comes in. For one thing, Navy just isn’t going to be as deeply proficient at anywhere near as many wrinkles, and they’e not going to be infuriatingly perfect at them. For a team that in those games of years past made a living on extending drives on 4th and short by skin of their teeth that’s a paradigm shift. Sure, there’s now more explosiveness in the equation but increasing the velocity of possession exchanges probably works against an upset strategy overall.  I also like ND’s odds of chasing down explosives and living to fight another series.

Key Factor #2 – Bad ND Short Game

No two ways about it, ND has sucked of late on money distances in both the scrimmage game as well as the kicking. Miss your bunnies and all sorts of weird and unfortunate things can happen. Either be explosive as hell, or get more efficient.

A/B Scenarios

In one of those games, a loss would be catastrophic. A narrow win, though, would also be pretty bad. ND is getting a nice benefit of the doubt in the playoffs race right now, and limping through another one would conceivably leave the Irish in the position of needing a lot of help to get back into the field (and maybe take the chances of another 1st Round home game off the board altogether). It would be a huge, huge bummer to not see Jeremiyah Love (and JD Price, and Malachai Fields, and Will Pauling, and Jordan Bothelo, et al) not play another nationally meaningful game at ND.

We’ve got to win, and we’ve got to win very powerfully.

PREDICTION

I like ND to get it done in this one. The teams’ respective styles tend toward a game in which ND’s talent ought to have ample chances to win out frequently. My bet is that we will get three things:

1. A 3+ score ND win
2. A lot of cool highlight plays
3. A weird final point total for ND (43 or something like that)