Culture
Army and Navy are in the College Football Playoff race. Which means they could play twice
The Army–Navy game occupies a special, yet peculiar position on the college football calendar.
Its significance is undeniable, given the history, ferocity and pageantry of the rivalry. It stands alone — literally — as the only game on the Saturday after conference championship weekend in December. Yet the stakes of the game typically haven’t mattered in terms of rankings or the national championship race.
This year, it’s complicated.
The service academies are both undefeated and ranked. And the 12-team College Football Playoff means that the No. 23 Black Knights (7-0) and No. 24 Midshipmen (6-0) are bona fide Playoff contenders — if one of them can win the American Athletic Conference.
But the Playoff field will be set on Dec. 8 — six days before the annual Army-Navy game kicks off in Landover, Md. And because Army and Navy are now conference-mates in the AAC, the Dec. 14 matchup could be the second meeting between the teams in one season.
Here’s a look at how things could shake out.
How did we get here?
Army QB Bryson Daily leads all FBS players with 19 rushing touchdowns. (Lucas Boland / Imagn Images)
It’s the first time since 1926 that Army and Navy both have started a season 6-0.
The Black Knights are 7-0 and have yet to trail in a game. Naturally, they lead the nation in rushing offense, led by quarterback Bryson Daily, who has accounted for 26 total touchdowns. Army is already 6-0 in AAC play, meaning it has just two conference games left (at North Texas, UTSA).
The Midshipmen are 6-0 heading into a massive game against No. 12 Notre Dame at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., and 4-0 in the AAC. It’s already their best season since 2019 when they won 11 games.
Army and Navy currently occupy the top two spots in the AAC standings.
So … does that mean they could play twice?
Yes — and in back-to-back weeks. They could face off in the conference championship game on Dec. 6 and meet again for their annual rivalry on Dec. 14.
But Tulane is right behind them with a 3-0 conference record and plays Navy on Nov. 16. A loss could derail Navy’s shot at punching its ticket to the conference championship and thus crush the Mids’ Playoff hopes.
Will the Army-Navy game count toward the CFP?
A potential meeting in the AAC championship would. But the annual, neutral-site game will not.
Selection Day for the Playoff is Sunday, Dec. 8, and the annual Army-Navy game is the following Saturday. In the four-team Playoff era, the selection committee had a protocol that allowed it to wait for Army-Navy if it had implications on the field. But because the 12-team Playoff begins the weekend of Dec. 20-21, it could not wait on the outcome this time around.
This means there is a scenario in which one service academy wins the AAC and a berth into the CFP, then loses its final regular-season game to the same opponent it beat out to advance to the Playoff.
There will still be bragging rights on the line, of course.
Would Army or Navy have less time to prepare for a Playoff game?
Given that no other teams play a game the week of Dec. 14, if either service academy earns a spot in the Playoff it would have less time to prepare for its postseason opponent.
What are the chances Army or Navy makes the Playoff?
There is a 29.6 percent chance that Army or Navy makes the Playoff, but the individual percentages for both teams depending on the results of their next games look a little different.
If Navy beats Notre Dame on Saturday, the Midshipmen’s odds to make the Playoff rise to 10 percent, according to the projection model by The Athletic’s Austin Mock. With a loss, that drops to 5 percent.
Army faces an easier opponent in Air Force, so the Cadets’ percentages are higher: 30 percent with a win and 14 percent with a loss. Army also has to play Notre Dame on Nov. 23, at Yankee Stadium.
Mock’s model gives Army a 63 percent chance to win the AAC, while Navy is at 15 percent.
GO DEEPER
What do Army and Navy’s historic starts mean for AAC championship? CFP?
What else needs to happen for either team to make the Playoff?
Two things need to happen. First, the obvious one, is for Army or Navy to keep winning and win the AAC. It’s unlikely either can make the Playoff as an at-large team.
Second, they likely need the Mountain West to beat up on each other. Boise State (5-1) is currently ranked ahead of Army and Navy, and the Broncos’ only blemish is a road loss at Oregon.
The other team to worry about from the Mountain West is UNLV (6-1). Boise State plays at UNLV on Friday, which will have a significant impact on the Group of 5 Playoff bid.
If you want a rooting guide to get Army or Navy into the CFP, I’d probably root for UNLV to pull the upset this weekend and then continue to root for those two teams to lose down the stretch. — Austin Mock
Has Army or Navy ever won a national championship?
Led by 1946 Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis, Army claimed national titles in 1944, 1945 and 1946. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
Yes, but the specifics are a bit complicated, because college football hasn’t always held a national championship game.
Army claims five national championships (1914, 1916, 1944, 1945, 1946), though multiple programs claim titles for four of those years. Similarly, Navy claims a share of the 1926 national title.
The last time either team cracked the AP top 10 was in 1964, when Navy peaked at No. 6.
What’s next?
Army finishes the regular season with Air Force (1-6), North Texas (5-2), Notre Dame (6-1), UTSA (3-4) and Navy.
Navy finishes with Notre Dame, Rice (2-5), South Florida (3-4), Tulane (5-2), East Carolina (3-4) and Army.
(Top photo: Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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