“A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Not every rough outing for a football team arrives with a cavalcade of incompetence. Sometimes there is no one mistake, or one mismatch, which asserts itself as the reason a team of blue chip athletes is hanging on for dear life against Navy. Sometimes it’s the little things that add up to a loss that shouldn’t happen, or a disaster beyond comprehension.
For a very long time on Saturday, it looked like the Irish truly would fail for want of a nail. Injuries slowly whittled down the defense’s fighting strength. By the fourth quarter, the Irish defense was a shadow of what it had been for kickoff just three weeks ago. Louis Nix, out. Elijah Shumate, out. Ishaq Williams, out. Kona Schwenke and Ben Councell left the game with injuries partway through. Six original starters and five replacements took the field to hold back the Navy ground game.
The defense was not alone in facing problems. Notre Dame’s offense committed numerous penalties which moved the team back over fifty yards, and in one case took points off the board. The Irish also turned the ball over twice, once as the offense was marching its way into the red zone. Several Irish receivers bobbled and dropped passes that would have gone for ten or twenty yards had they hung on.
Navy capitalized on all of these. They knew they had to play a flawless game to have a chance of beating the Irish on Saturday. And they executed their plan very, very well. They allowed no turnovers and committed no penalties. They averaged over four yards a carry, deploying the option toss, tailback counter, and fullback dive in a variety of orders. Their receivers caught the passes thrown to them as Navy went 6 for 9 through the air for one touchdown. Neither defense, it seemed, was capable of stopping their opponent. Halfway through the fourth quarter, it looked more and more like the team who held the ball at the two minute mark would come away with the win, pushing one last touchdown down the throat of an opposition powerless to stop them.
But for all their stellar execution: Navy had committed the smallest and most pedestrian of mistakes: a missed extra point. Just one point. And that, like the nail from the very beginning, made all the difference. Down by three and holding the ball as the clock wound down, the Irish stretched the final drive out as long as they could, bleeding off the precious seconds Navy needed for a final drive. As Folston took to the air for his first Notre Dame touchdown,
Navy went down by four instead of three. And down four instead of three, getting into field goal range simply wasn’t good enough. Had they made that extra point, a field goal, made, would have sent the game to overtime. Navy would have relied on its disciplined, dedicated offense to march in for touchdowns. They would likely have gone for two point conversions each time, betting the Irish would come up short before they did. And there’s a decent chance, in that format, that Navy would have emerged victorious.
But for want of one extra point, this was not an option. Instead, Navy had to score a touchdown, and fast. So they deviated from their plan, dialed up some risky plays, and sent a bad option pitch sailing into the backfield. Two plays later, on fourth down with less than two minutes to go, they took another desperate gamble, and failed once again.
So in the end, injury piled on mistake piled on failure did not doom the Fighting Irish. In the last minutes of the game, the tables turned. Navy’s first mistake, small as it was, bred a multitude of problems which ultimately doomed the Midshipmen. And the Irish, tested as they were, escaped.
On to Pittsburgh.
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