From the department of caring a bit too much about borderline unwatchable football games (GC, can we get a tag for that?) comes John Feinstein (above) in this morning’s Washington Post, who apparently watched all of Saturday’s Notre Dame/Navy game with a tear in his eye, a bump in his sweats and his Navy press guide open. Frankly, I’m impressed he watched the whole thing, period, but…
It may be difficult for an outsider to understand, but the Navy football team’s 46-44 triple-overtime victory over Notre Dame on Saturday may rank, at the very least, a close second to (the 1980 Olympic hockey team’s) storied miracle on ice. This was a miracle on turf. Notre Dame had beaten Navy 43 straight times, dating back to 1963 when Roger Staubach
was Navy’s quarterback and officers in the military made salaries comparable to those of players in the National Football League.
It was before Vietnam, before Iraq, before any high school athlete who had any notion that he could play in the NFL someday ran screaming from the room at the thought of attending a college with a five-year post-graduate military commitment. It was, in short, a very different world.
Skeptics will point out that this is a bad (now 1-8) Notre Dame team. It doesn’t matter. Every Notre Dame team should dominate Navy on the football field. At one point during the game, NBC — also known as the Notre Dame Broadcasting Co. because it pays the school millions of dollars a year to televise all its home games — did a promo for a high school All-Star game it televises in January. Only the country’s top-rated high school seniors are invited to play.
“Twenty-one of the current Irish players have played in that game in past years,” NBC play-by-play announcer Tom Hammond said.
That would be exactly 21 more than are currently playing at Navy. Or, as Hammond’s partner Pat Haden pointed out: “With all due respect, Navy doesn’t get to recruit blue-chip football players.”
Just blue-chip people.
Later in the piece, Feinstein finds time to mention that one of the hindrances to Navy football recruiting is “the chance to get shot at when you graduate.” Which is good, because otherwise it’d be easy to look at Feinstein’s wild sentimentality and and see a guy spinning his wheels and plumping up his adjectives in order to get around the complicated contextual issues involved in talking about armed services football in a time of war.
That doesn’t mean that a sports-related editorial (or sports-related blog post, if you want) necessarily needs to address the foreign policy issues of the day or make explicit the less-metaphorical combat into which these tough and admittedly admirable Navy athletes will soon find themselves tossed. But that context does make the over-ripeness of the whole thing a bit worse-smelling, at least to my nose. Also, is it really a miracle when any D1 team beats the program that entered the game 119th out of 119 D1 teams in offense?
Yeah, he gave the same spiel on NPR this morning and I found myself pretty moved…..
…to turn off the radio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15995012
Having seen bits and pieces of this contest, including the last two overtimes, it’s pretty fair to say that the talent discrepancy here was much wider than Appalachian State-Michigan, which inspired its own share of treacle and guffawing. Nobody keeps running the triple option on an every down basis against D-I defenses unless they have to or Tim Tebow threatens a Crusade. At this point Navy looks more like a Division II squad – they’re tiny (gotta be), slow (thanks, Athletic Director Rumsfeld), and generally jittery/spastic on the field, which is exactly how you should be when you run the triple option. In short, Navy had as much business winning this game as they do maintaining a top-tier athletic program. Which is not to say they did anything to deserve Feinstein’s toxic mawkishness, but nor did the Patriot League, a golf tournament, or several other passing sports topics.
Really? Navy routinely goes to bowl games, albeit pre-Christmas ones. I’m pretty sure they almost beat BC in a bowl game last year.
Far be it from me to question Pete — he’s the dude that actually watched a fucking Navy game with a colicky baby sitting nearby — but not having seen the game my inclination is to agree with Mark. Navy is 5-4 now, and has beaten some erstwhile major programs this year (Pitt comes immediately to mind, but…well, Temple doesn’t count, does it?). Also, the Middies’ largest margin of defeat was 23 points at Rutgers, which is nearly Notre Dame’s average margin of defeat this season. Navy’s obviously a minor D1 program, and Appalachian State is a major D2/1-AA/whatever its name is now, so I’m not sure that Pete’s wrong about the talent being comparable at those two. But I think Feinstein’s idea of Navy as a Team of Rudies is about as oversold as, well, everything else in his piece. And I sure think that the distance between Michigan and Notre Dame, presuming Appalachian State has a slight edge on Navy, is pretty sizable.
Yeah, I suppose that why he’s written/published 25 books, been the “Washington Post’s” sports writer and NPR’s regular sports go-to guy … but then I’m sure you and your commenters have much more impressive resumes … NOT !
Granted I am biased, but I am proud of my Alma Mater and WooPoo and our teams and students and truly appreciate those who love the sport … not just the name or the money or the hype.
Before I begin let me just say that in seven weeks this child has vomited at the sight of both Chris Duhon and Richard Edson (shilling silently for, what, Nationwide Insurance? I’ll still give you dap, Richard), so Navy-ND was definitely for my benefit and not the lad’s. In any event, Navy’s given up 43 points to Duke, lost to Delaware (a top-notch I-AA team), and Ball State (a mid-notch MAC team). As far as the bowl deal, the spot’s reserved for them. Beat Army, Duke, and four other rosters and the bid is theirs. I suppose I should be lauding that, given that three comments above I practically called them Valdosta State, but it’s hardly evidence of a quality program.
They did beat Air Force, Pete. You know Dee Dowiss, wherever he is, can’t be pleased about that.
And to the Ancient Mariner: I’m in no way disrespecting your alma mater, or its football team’s achievement here. I am carping at Feinstein, most definitely, but that’s because he wrote an off-the-rack, oversentimentalized piece when his resume — impressive indeed, and surely more so than my bunch of posts about the Royals and scattered clips — would suggest that he’s capable of more. There are several stories of varying interest to be told about Saturday’s game — none of them even need to be about politics, as I noted — and he came pretty close to telling one at the end (notably how different the culture of the Naval Academy is from just about any other D1 program’s). It’s the mawkishness and churning overstatement at the beginning that got to me.
It seems to me a disrespect to Navy’s pretty-good season (Ball State aside) to make it sound like this was somehow a for-the-ages upset, the 43 years of losses aside. The Vegas line had Navy as three point underdogs at Notre Dame, after all, and by just about every objective standard they’d played better than ND coming in. A miracle on turf is just histrionics, no matter how historic the win might’ve been to Navy’s program.
I’ll wait for Robert D. Kaplan’s encomium.
Feinstein is a Hall of Fame fraud. And a world-class dork on top of that. Up his pudgy ass. What a jackoff!
Let’s not forget that John Feinstein is the radio broadcaster for the Navy football games. So, yes, it was a huge win for *his* program. But to go out and talk about it like it was on the level of Super Bowl III is stupid.
Leading up to the game last week everyone kind of thought that ND would lose. Let’s face it, ND sucks this season, and they suck bad. Once ND coses out the season with losses to Duke, Stanford and Air Force maybe Johnny will take a step back and realize that this win, while historic, is nothing special this season.