Can you root against Navy?
Well, I guess the appropriate question would be: Can you root against one of the service academies? For someone who follows Notre Dame football, the Midshipmen pose that question each year, as the two schools have met every season since 1927.
And after the Irish squeaked out a 27-24 win in South Bend Saturday on a forty yard D.J. Fitzpatrick field goal as time ran out, Navy still hasn’t beaten Notre Dame since Kennedy was in the White House. For the last forty meetings, the clock has hit zero with Notre Dame on top, and again this year, the Irish continued to build on their own NCAA record for consecutive wins against an opponent.
As a Notre Dame fan, it’s always been hard for me to take great satisfaction from a victory against the Middies. Not because their football team is usually struggling and an Irish triumph is expected, generating a collective “big deal” from the college football world. Even this year, with Navy coming in at 6-3 and Notre Dame at 2-6, a Midshipmen win would hail more Irish disgrace than praise for their opponents from pundits around the country.
But there is a world beyond that of college football, and the men and women who attend the Naval Academy—as well as the Air Force Academy and West Point—are all too aware of that world. Their biggest challenges, closest calls, and most inspiring victories come while trying to dislodge despotic dictators, not nine defenders in the box.
Whether you rooted for Notre Dame or Navy or neither on Saturday, the fact remains that the men on that football field represent you. You and everyone else in our country whom they voluntarily risk life and limb for, not for fame or money, but because they feel called to do it.
On a fall Saturday, however, they and their classmates who traveled with them wanted something much simpler: a win in a football game that none of them would ever forget.
“39 years in a row, and I helped end it.” “39 years in a row, and I was in South Bend to see it.”
For a team that has come so close in recent years—four point losses in ’97 and ’99, a touchdown defeat in 2002—all signs pointed to this being the year. The Middies not only sport that winning record but would be encountering an Irish program that hadn’t started a season this badly since 1963, the year of the last Navy victory.
But like last year, Notre Dame erased a fourth quarter Navy lead and pulled out a win. Like the thirty-nine teams before them, this Midshipmen squad would not end the frustration but play a part in another chapter of it.
The faces of the players and their band said it all, the pain and shock of once again coming so close but falling just short evident to anyone who could see them. It would be hard for anyone to take the knowledge of what a place like the Naval Academy and its students stand for, see the anguish on their faces, and root against that team.
So can you root against Navy? Probably not. But you still root for your team.
College football is a passionate game, both for the men on the field flying around at a hundred miles an hour and for the fans who hang on their every move. That doesn’t change if you go to Oklahoma, Ohio State, Notre Dame, or Navy. The Midshipmen want to win big-time college football games like anyone else, with the opposing team’s fans getting loud and their team’s play shutting them up.
It’s not about winning because everyone is pulling for you. College football never is.
It’s about lining up against the other team, playing for sixty minutes, and coming away with a win if you were able to absorb the other school’s best shot.
In fact, for a school like Navy, anything less, even from the fans or reporters, would probably be an insult.
After the game, a couple students from Navy came down near me in the south end zone at Notre Dame Stadium. One asked how many games in a row the Irish had lost before that win. When I told him three, he responded to the effect of: “If they had won one of those games, I think we would have won, but they [ND] were just as angry as we were.”
Thankfully, some fights are as simple as X’s and O’s and the momentum of two football teams heading into a game on a cold Saturday afternoon.
I respect the hell out of that kid and the others he goes to school with for what they do for the rest of us. But neither he nor the rest of the Midshipmen wanted to beat Notre Dame and its band of well-wishers. They wanted to beat Notre Dame, its mystique, and its nationwide fan base in all their blue and gold glory.
This year, like the thirty-nine before it, it didn’t happen. And while I won’t root “against” Navy, I will always root for Notre Dame to win.
Something tells me the Midshipmen wouldn’t want it any other way.
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Ted Fox delivered play-by-play of Irish football and men's basketball for three years as a student. He wrote a weekly sports column for the Notre Dame student newspaper for over three years and has been a contributing writer to "The Wolverine", the official publication of University of Michigan athletics. Ted recently finished working in production at ESPN and is currently pursuing an on-air and writing career. 
