Navy enters the game favored by more than three touchdowns, but if any team can knock them down its Army. “He can run through tackles and around defenders, he throws a great ball and puts it where the receivers can get it, and he has great poise because he has so much experience playing in this offense”. The biggest factor in Navy’s favor is senior quarterback Keenan Reynolds, who is on the verge of becoming the most prolific scorer in NCAA Division I history.
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There are few rivalries in sports filled with more tradition, more respect and more pure patriotism than the annual Arm-Navy football game. The Midshipmen are 22-point favorites over the Black Knights because of that.
The Black Knights have come tantalizingly close to winning in three of the past four meetings with Navy: 27-21 in 2011, 17-13 the next year, and 17-10 last December.
Over the years, the game continues to hold an historical implication, but one that irritatingly sticks with Army’s players, past and present.
The Midshipmen have won eight games or more in 12 of the last 13 seasons – appearing in bowl games each time.
Lincoln Financial Field, home of the NFL’s Eagles and Temple football, will be stuffed with cadets and midshipmen standing, bouncing and cheering the entire game Saturday.
Today it is best college football rivalry game of the year as for the 116 Army and Navy will square off for a 3 p.m. kickoff in Philadelphia. “It’s one of those things where nothing more would make me happier than for the streak to go away, just for the sake of the Army football brotherhood and those individuals and those players who are there right now”.
When Navy won its sixth game of the current run, a 38-3 victory in Baltimore in 2007, it set the record for the longest such streak in the series.
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This game usually ends the season for Army. On Saturday, the talented senior hopes to add another milestone to his impressive list of accomplishments: first quarterback to go 4-0 as a starter in the Army-Navy series. Reynolds needs just 36 yards passing to become the first quarterback in school history to rush AND pass for 1,000 yards in a season twice in a career. The Midshipmen finished 8-5 that season, earning a bowl berth for the first time since 1996 and capturing the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy for the first time since 1981. The game can be seen on CBS and heard on the tunein radio app with the broadband being on CBS All Access.
