Don't Let It End

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely scrambled college athletics for 2020, to the point where some sports and schools have had to cancel their whole seasons. For now, though, Division I football is pressing on, although not without changes. Several conferences have adjusted their schedules to focus on league games by limiting non-conference matchups, placing restrictions on them, or eliminating them altogether.

Those scheduling restrictions are meant to give schools more flexibility in rescheduling any games that might have to be postponed. They are also an obvious problem for independents like Notre Dame. The Irish, having already lost games against Wisconsin, Stanford, and USC, agreed to play as members of the ACC to ensure a full schedule for themselves. The agreement meant that they would have to abide by the ACC’s scheduling guidelines, which limited teams to one non-conference game that had to be played in the conference member’s home state. That put Notre Dame’s annual game against Navy, which had already been moved from Dublin to Annapolis, in jeopardy. On Thursday, it became official: Navy-Notre Dame will not be played for the first time in 93 years.

I admit that I was shocked when the news started to trickle out that the Irish wouldn’t face the Mids this season. I was confident that the game was a priority for both schools. Maybe it was. The official release from the Naval Academy stated that Notre Dame playing an ACC schedule this year made the Navy game impossible. On the surface, it would appear that something could have been done to make the game happen if both sides truly wanted it, but perhaps that was not the case. One thing that you learn from covering college athletics is that nothing is ever as simple as it seems, especially when it comes to scheduling. A little understanding can go a long way; for the most part, everyone is trying hard to make football work this season, and we should look at anything we get as a blessing.

Along those lines, what a coup it was for Navy to get BYU to come to Annapolis as a last-minute replacement. One legitimate concern that Navy fans had with the program joining the American Athletic Conference is that there wouldn’t be the chance to schedule occasional games against atypical opponents. In the Cougars, Navy gets a name-brand, primetime opponent on the rise, with the bonus of a little bit of history in the matchup of two Polynesian head coaches. While BYU is in a scheduling pickle as an independent, it’s a credit to both schools that they were able to make such an interesting game happen on short notice.

Still, while there is something to be said for making the most of a bad situation, the fact remains that it is indeed a bad situation. Losing the Notre Dame game is a considerable blow to the Navy program; one could argue that playing Notre Dame this year is even more important than playing Army. That is a controversial opinion for obvious reasons, but it isn’t without merit. The value of Army-Navy is derived from the natural rivalry between the schools. The value of Navy-Notre Dame is different; while some of it stems from its participants, a large part of it comes from the game being the longest uninterrupted intersectional rivalry in the country. Once that status is lost, there is no getting it back. Army-Navy is clearly the bigger game, and the 2020 season would be all the worse if it wasn’t played. However, the rivalry would bounce back as strong as ever in 2021. Navy-Notre Dame might make a welcome return next year, but in its hiatus, it will have lost a little bit of its luster.

As part of the release announcing the news about this year’s game, the Naval Academy also announced that Notre Dame had agreed to an extension of the series until 2032. That is welcome news, but if you’re a Navy fan, you can’t be faulted for having an uneasy feeling. Twelve years isn’t that far away. What comes after that? Nobody wants to be the one to end a streak, but now that the deed has been done, would it be easier for Notre Dame to drop the Mids as an annual opponent?

The story of the series between the two schools is well documented. The Navy started several service schools during World War II to meet the demand for officer training. Notre Dame, which was on the brink of shutting down due to the lack of students during the war, was chosen as one of those schools. Even today, the South Bend campus boasts one of the largest NROTC units in the country. Out of gratitude to the Navy for keeping the university alive, Notre Dame has committed to playing the Naval Academy in football every year.

There is a vocal minority among Notre Dame fans, however, who feel that 75 years of gratitude enough. They see Navy as a lose-lose situation that holds Notre Dame football back; the Mids are good enough to steal a game from the Irish here and there, but Notre Dame doesn’t get much credit for a win. In their estimation, the Irish, with their national championship ambitions, would be better off scheduling either an easier win or a marquee game against another powerhouse. To be fair, this is a minority among the Notre Dame faithful. But will that be the case a decade from now?

While the Irish are free to schedule as they please, dropping Navy would be a mistake in the big picture. Notre Dame’s very brand— what elevates them to college football royalty— is their history and tradition. They are treasured as the game’s link to its past. The Navy game is part of that. It’s not that playing Navy makes Notre Dame special; it’s being the kind of school that would maintain that kind of rivalry that makes Notre Dame special. Obviously, there is more to the history and tradition of Notre Dame than the Navy game, but it is dangerous and unwise to chip away at the foundation of your program’s success. Notre Dame is a mid-sized, midwestern private school with high academic standards. Tradition isn’t what keeps Notre Dame football from being Alabama. It’s what keeps them from being Northwestern.

For Navy, the financial value of the Notre Dame series is obvious, but the real football benefit is in recruiting. Army’s coaches like to highlight their games against a variety of Power 5 opponents, and if you like that approach, there’s nothing wrong with it. But there’s nothing special about it, either. Everyone from Buffalo to Bowling Green can say the same thing. What they can’t say is that they have a long-standing, annual rivalry game against the premier brand in the sport. Playing Notre Dame sets Navy apart, not just among the service academies, but among most of the so-called Group of Five.

The extension shows that both sides understand the value of the Navy-Notre Dame series, which is reassuring. Nevertheless, the loss of the game’s uninterrupted status could mean a loss of the institutional inertia that made the series a fixture on Notre Dame’s schedule. With so many of college football’s traditions falling by the wayside in recent years, one hopes that both sides will care enough in the future to keep this one alive.