Memphis is the only team that Navy has played every year since the Mids joined the American Athletic Conference. The Tigers are always one of the conference's most talented teams, so the two teams have made a habit of playing in pivotal games. In 2015, Navy's win over the #15 Tigers catapulted them into the national spotlight. In 2017, Memphis returned the favor, getting a win over the #25 Mids that put the Tigers in the top 25 on the way to a West Division title. The 2018 game featured Malcolm Perry's heroics. The 2019 game was a prime-time matchup of two teams that would go on to win 23 games between them. Whether or not you call it a rivalry, it's a game the Mids circle on the schedule.

This year's contest was no exception. Rayuan Lane's interception with 23 seconds remaining stopped a Memphis comeback attempt and capped a wild 56-44 Navy win. Navy is now 3-0 for the first time since 2017 and has an early leg up in the conference race.

I thought Navy had a shot in this game, especially after coming so close last year. What I didn't see coming was how it happened. Last year's Memphis defense gave up 200 rushing yards five times, including 299 yards against the Mids. But ever since they held Iowa State to zero rushing yards in the Liberty Bowl at the end of the year, they've been dominant against the run. Coming into Saturday, Memphis' opponents were averaging only 2.3 yards per carry. Florida State ran for 37 yards on 24 carries against them. To me, that tells a story of a physical and disciplined defense that would make generating big plays difficult.

Boy howdy was I wrong. Navy's offense had made a living off of big plays in their 2-0 start, and they kept right on doing it on Saturday. The Mids had six runs of 15 yards or more, including runs of 46, 60, and 90 yards. They added five passes of 20+ yards with touchdown passes of 39 and 46 yards. Of Navy's seven scoring drives, five were seven plays or less, and only one lasted even five minutes. The offense was so efficient that they had more touchdowns (seven) than third downs (six). But that's what happens when you average almost 11 yards per play.

In a way, it all felt strangely familiar. Memphis' game plan was similar to others the Mids have faced over the years. Offensive coordinator Drew Cronic's approach to playcalling against it was the same one Navy had taken dozens of times, even if many of the plays were new.

Memphis lined up in either a 3-4 or a 3-3-5, depending on Navy's alignment. In the latter, they would take an outside linebacker and move him back as sort of a hybrid LB/safety. In both alignments, they would key on Navy's presnap motion. When one of the snipes went in motion, the safety lined up over him would follow him. In the 3-3-5, it was the hybrid safety that followed. Meanwhile, the safety on the other side would read the motion and step up in run support.

You can see that plan pretty clearly here:

In the past, Navy would attack this with a two-fold approach. They would run just enough plays into the motion to convince the defense that their plan was sound, then run counters and misdirection away from the motion, along with play action, to get their chunk plays. And that is exactly what they did again on Saturday.

One way the offense ran with the motion was to run the triple option but with the added wrinkle of pitching off of the run support safety.

They also ran the toss sweep and the jet sweep, trying to beat the backside safety outside to turn the corner.

When the playside safety was too aggressive and got caught up in traffic, it gave the runner room to make a cut against the backside pursuit and turn it into a big play:

Running the power read sweep also had the same effect as the toss and jet sweeps.

In this play, Navy used the motion man as a receiver on a swing pass. A receiver on the play side of the formation blocked the safety following the motion. The defensive back covering the blocking receiver was left unblocked, but it took him a second to read what was happening and react. That was all the time the receiver needed to pick up a few yards.

Navy’s success running with the motion just made Memphis increasingly aggressive coming from the backside. On the Mids’ first touchdown, the backside defensive end actually wins at the line of scrimmage, beating the cut block and forcing Blake Horvath to change direction. When he did, there were no defenders there to stop him because they had run with the motion.

Other plays went against the grain by design, like Alex Tecza’s pass to Horvath.

With one safety always being committed to run support, he was an easy target for play action. Here, Horvath carries out an excellent play fake to simulate a power read. The playside safety reads that and steps up in run support. Normally, that would be the playside snipe’s blocking assignment, and Eli Heidenreich runs at the safety accordingly. At the last second, though, he turns upfield and runs a corner route. The backside safety’s responsibility once he reads the pass is to drop to cover the deep middle third, but by the time he reads the play, Heidenreich has blown past him.

The Mids also used motion to open up the middle of the field. Here, the motion man does a reverse pivot. When he started his motion, he became one safety’s responsibility, and that safety followed him when he reversed the other way. But when he started his motion, the safety on the opposite side took that to mean his assignment would be run support, since that was the case for every other play when there was motion on the opposite side. The safeties ran to either side of the formation, which opened up the middle.

Does that look familiar to you? It should.

The turning point in the game, at least in my opinion, was Navy’s last drive of the first half. After holding Memphis to a field goal on the previous possession, the Mids got the ball at their own 25 with 2:14 on the clock and a 21-17 lead. They went 75 yards in 2:03 to take a 28-17 lead into the locker room. In the two-minute situation, Memphis was more concerned with stopping the deep ball than they were about stopping the run. The safeties stopped playing run support, which opened up running room for Horvath on the power read. Three plays later, the Mids were in the red zone. Memphis had fired the corner earlier in the game, but they backed off after getting burned on a wheel route by Brandon Chatman. With the deep ball not a concern inside the red zone, though, the Tigers blitzed the cornerback again. That set up second and 12. On third and 12, knowing the cornerback was likely to blitz again, Horvath was able to find Heidenreich between the CB and the safety coming over the top. That gave the Mids a first down and stopped the clock.

Horvath ran it in on the next play, and Navy took a two-score lead into halftime.

It was in the second half that Navy really got big plays from misdirection, starting with this touchdown pass to Chatman running a drag route against the grain.

Incredibly, Memphis didn’t adjust by backing off on their backside pursuit. Instead, they doubled down by shifting the linebackers toward the motion in addition to the safeties.

This was when Navy started making really big plays. First, they sent Amin Hassan in motion to get the linebackers to move, then handed him the ball to run off tackle where the LBs had just shifted away from.

Then the Mids ran the midline option. A snipe would go in motion to move the linebackers and the safety and become a lead blocker for the quarterback running midline away from the shift.

Horvath’s last touchdown came on a variation of the power read. On this play, though, instead of the quarterback running on the motion side of the play, he ran away from it. Horvath’s read here is the down lineman over the B gap. If he got a give read, he’d hand it off, and the play would be a jet sweep. Instead, he got a keep read, and with the linebackers and safeties following the jet sweep motion, there was a whole lot of open field in front of him.

Navy had run that play once in the first quarter, but it seems Coach Cronic kept it in his back pocket until he really needed it.

(It's a different play, but the concept of an option play run to opposite sides of the formation should also look familiar. )

One of our questions coming into the game is whether Navy held back offensively against Bucknell and Temple to spring some surprises on Memphis. In his press conference on Monday, Ryan Silverfield seemed to think that was the case.

"I want to give them credit where credit's due," he said. "Coming off a bye, I think there's twenty-two plays we hadn't seen on previous film."

I'm sure the Mids wanted to save some things, but I think most of what we saw was just a result of Memphis using a different defense than what Navy's other two opponents used. And while some of the plays were new, the general theme of setting up big plays through misdirection is something we've seen dozens of times over the last 30 years.

New formula, same great taste.

Defensively, though, this game wasn't Navy's finest hour. Memphis rolled up 659 yards of total offense, including 274 on the ground. The Mids sat in soft zone coverage for almost the entire game, hoping to avoid the big play. And while Seth Henigan did indeed have to check down on most of his throws, the Tigers had two running backs top the 100-yard mark on the ground.

The Navy defense never looked comfortable. This was a much different game plan than what they usually employ, and I wonder if the mindset change affected how the Mids played individually. In his postgame press conference, Brian Newberry seemed to allude to this when he lamented "playing not to lose" instead of just "playing defense." Regardless, it got the job done. Navy's defense made just enough plays to break Memphis' serve, holding the Tigers to three touchdowns in five red zone opportunities while Navy went 4-4.

There's something significant about Newberry choosing to go with this defensive approach. This was an old-school Navy game plan. The old formula used to be for Navy to play bend-but-don't-break because they had enough confidence in their offense that they weren't worried about the other team's field goals. It says something about Newberry's confidence in the current offense that he was willing to go this route against Memphis and that he believed the Mids would be able to keep pace with a talented and experienced Memphis attack. The offense rewarded his faith.

As usual, there's an element of "it's never as good or as bad as it seems" here. Memphis' defensive game plan wasn't great. A lot of the plays we saw won't work against other plans, so please don't fall into the trap of asking, "Why don't they run the Memphis plays?" the next time things get rough. But while Memphis' defense had a lot to do with Navy's performance, so did Navy. The Tigers are a physical, power-conference-caliber team. If the Mids couldn't block those guys, it wouldn't have mattered what the play call was. And they still had to execute to near perfection, which is hard to do against any defense. The Mids came through.

No matter how you look at it, this game was a tremendous step forward for the Navy program.

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