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)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. 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 works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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