There may be no better story to explain college football than what Knute Rockne did on November 27, 1926.
Notre Dame was 8–0. It had surrendered one touchdown all season and was positioned for another national championship run. The Irish were scheduled to play Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, a game Rockne apparently considered sufficiently routine that he decided he had somewhere more interesting to be.
So Notre Dame’s head coach skipped his own undefeated team’s game.
Rockne went to Chicago instead to watch Army play Navy at Soldier Field.
While Rockne watched more than 100,000 people see Navy preserve an undefeated season with a 21–21 tie against Army, Carnegie Tech beat Notre Dame 19–0. The Irish finished 9–1. Navy finished undefeated and claimed the only national championship in program history.
College football was apparently insane even before television contracts, transfer portals and conference realignment.
The story is especially appropriate this week because, one hundred years later, Notre Dame and Navy are preparing to meet for the 99th time.
And perhaps no game on Notre Dame’s schedule raises a stranger question:
Why, exactly, are we still doing this every year?
The easy answer is tradition.
The more complicated answer is that this particular tradition actually means something.
Notre Dame and Navy first played in 1927 and met every season through 2019 before COVID interrupted the series in 2020. It became the longest continuously played intersectional rivalry in college football and remains the most frequently played series in Notre Dame history. Notre Dame enters this year’s meeting holding an 84–13–1 advantage.
Those numbers immediately present both sides of the argument.
This is one of the oldest and most distinctive relationships in the sport.
It is also a rivalry Notre Dame has won roughly six times for every Navy victory.
So let us consider the case for keeping it.
The Debt
The phrase most commonly attached to Notre Dame–Navy is the “Debt of Honor.”
That debt has very little to do with football.
During World War II, Notre Dame faced a financial crisis as students left campus for military service. The university opened its campus to Navy training programs, including the V-7 and later V-12 programs. Thousands of naval trainees passed through Notre Dame, providing enrollment and revenue at a moment when the university badly needed both. One Notre Dame historical account estimates that approximately 12,000 officers trained in South Bend between 1942 and 1946.
The shorthand version is that “Navy saved Notre Dame.”
History is usually more complicated than slogans, but the basic point is not mythology: the Navy’s wartime presence materially helped Notre Dame remain financially stable during an existentially difficult period.
That matters.
College football spends a lot of time celebrating traditions whose historical foundations amount to somebody once stealing a jug or painting a rock.
This one involves something considerably more substantial.
And the relationship has retained a level of genuine mutual respect that is increasingly unusual in the sport.
Since 2005, Notre Dame players have joined Navy for the Midshipmen alma mater after the game. The teams compete for the Rip Miller Trophy, named for the former Notre Dame lineman who became a longtime Navy coach and administrator. Even when the series became almost absurdly one-sided, the ritual survived.
There is something refreshing about that.
Not every college football tradition needs to be optimized for television inventory, playoff résumés or recruiting impressions.
Some things can exist simply because they are worth preserving.
And if Notre Dame believes itself to be something different from the rest of college football—and we certainly spend enough time telling everyone that we are—then honoring an institutional relationship that predates modern college athletics is an awfully good way to prove it.
There is also a practical benefit.
The Navy game travels.
Notre Dame and Navy have played in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, New Jersey, San Diego, Orlando, Jacksonville and Dublin. This year the series reaches Gillette Stadium in Foxborough for the first time. Sixty of the 99 meetings have been scheduled at neutral sites.
For an independent program that has always sold itself nationally, that has value.
Notre Dame gets another game in a major market. Navy gets one of the biggest brands in college football. Fans around the country get access to the Irish.
Everyone wins.
Usually Notre Dame by several touchdowns.
Which brings us to the other side.
The Cost
At some point, tradition becomes a scheduling decision.
And scheduling decisions have consequences.
Notre Dame won 43 consecutive games against Navy from 1964 through 2006, still the longest winning streak by one annual opponent over another in major college football history. Navy finally ended it in 2007 with a 46–44 triple-overtime victory in South Bend. The Midshipmen won again in 2009, 2010 and 2016.
Those victories were memorable precisely because they were so unusual.
That is not meant as disrespect toward Navy. It is simply the reality of two programs operating under wildly different rules.
Notre Dame recruits future NFL players.
Navy recruits future naval officers.
The service academies cannot construct rosters through the modern transfer market in anything resembling the way Notre Dame can. They have physical requirements, military obligations and institutional restrictions that most programs never contemplate.
The fact that Navy remains competitive at all is remarkable.
But competitive balance is relevant when one of Notre Dame’s 12 precious regular-season dates is permanently reserved.
College football scheduling has become more difficult. Conference schedules consume more inventory. Traditional nonconference rivalries are disappearing. Playoff selection rewards résumé strength, while one unexpected loss can completely alter a season.
Notre Dame has chosen independence partly because independence provides freedom.
Yet one-twelfth of the schedule is effectively spoken for before anyone opens the calendar.
There is another complication unique to Navy: preparation.
Defending a service-academy offense is not like preparing for a conventional opponent. Navy’s option concepts, blocking schemes and unusual offensive structure require specific work that may have little applicability to the rest of Notre Dame’s schedule.
You can call that a valuable test of discipline.
You can also call it spending a week preparing for something you may not see again until next year.
Both are true.
And then there is the question Notre Dame fans inevitably raise whenever somebody limps off the field against Navy: Is this worth the physical toll?
That argument can become exaggerated. Football players get injured playing every opponent, and service-academy football is not some lawless exercise in human demolition.
But the concern is not entirely imaginary either. Navy's offense creates a different type of game in the trenches, and Notre Dame is usually entering the matchup with a roster built for a very different style of football.
When the Irish are chasing a playoff berth, every injury creates an obvious reaction:
Why are we risking this?
The counterargument is equally obvious.
Because football involves risk.
If avoiding injury became sufficient reason to cancel a series, the logical conclusion would be to stop playing football.
So What Exactly Is a Rivalry?
Perhaps the strangest thing about Notre Dame–Navy is that nobody seems to hate each other.
That is normally considered something of a prerequisite.
Notre Dame–USC has venom.
Notre Dame–Michigan has history, arrogance and approximately three centuries of accumulated grievances.
Notre Dame–Navy has…gratitude.
It may therefore be less of a rivalry than an annual commemoration played at full speed.
And maybe that is precisely why it deserves to survive.
The sport has spent the last decade bulldozing traditions for television money. Stanford and Cal play in the Atlantic Coast Conference. USC and UCLA are in the Big Ten. Oregon travels to Rutgers for conference games because apparently geography is now considered an outdated concept.
Against that backdrop, there is something wonderfully stubborn about Notre Dame continuing to play Navy because two institutions decided generations ago that the relationship mattered.
Not because ESPN demanded it.
Not because a conference office scheduled it.
Because they wanted to.
That has value.
The question is whether the value requires annual renewal.
Tradition does not necessarily disappear if Notre Dame and Navy play every other year.
Army was once one of Notre Dame’s defining opponents. The Irish and Black Knights met almost annually for decades and produced some of the most important games in college football history. Then the sport changed. The relationship survived even though the annual game did not.
The same could happen here.
Notre Dame could play Navy every two or three seasons. The game could remain a national event. The Midshipmen could continue hosting it at major venues. The alma maters could still be played. The shared history would remain exactly where history belongs: remembered.
Or Notre Dame could decide that this particular promise is different.
That some relationships are valuable precisely because they have never been reduced to a cost-benefit analysis.
That amid a sport increasingly governed by spreadsheets, television windows and playoff probabilities, there should still be room for a game played because your institution remembers who helped it when it needed help.
Which returns us to Knute Rockne.
In 1926, one of the greatest coaches in football history considered Army–Navy so important that he left his undefeated Notre Dame team in Pittsburgh and traveled to Chicago to watch it.
His own team promptly lost 19–0.
Rockne made a spectacularly bad football decision.
But almost a century later, we're still telling the story.
Perhaps that is the point.
College football would probably be more efficient without many of its traditions.
It would also be considerably less interesting.
Notre Dame and Navy will play again because they have been playing for nearly a century, because Navy once helped Notre Dame when it mattered, because generations of players and fans have inherited the relationship, and because sometimes “we have always done this” actually carries some weight.
Whether those reasons are enough to permanently occupy a place on Notre Dame’s schedule is a different question.
There is a perfectly reasonable argument that they are.
There is a perfectly reasonable argument that they aren't.
As we approach ninety-nine games later, you can decide which one you believe.
