Navy and Notre Dame meet at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., this coming Saturday, Oct. 26, in a game with massive postseason implications, but the game also extends one of the more intriguing rivalries in college football.
The teams have never been conference rivals, nor are they geographic rivals. Yet Notre Dame, a perennial national power, has retained Navy on its schedule for seven decades as a nod to history, and how the Navy helped Notre Dame endure its most trying time as a university during World War II. Four decades later, the allure of playing Notre Dame helped Navy’s football program endure one of its most trying stretches.
During World War II, both the enrollment and endowment at Notre Dame, an all-male school at the time, plunged, as many able-bodied young American men were serving in the military. The university was on the brink of financial ruin.
Notre Dame’s president, Rev. Hugh O’Donnell, approached the Navy about using the South Bend campus as a training ground — O’Donnell reportedly made a similar overture to the Army, which rejected the idea — and more than 1,800 Navy seamen eventually trained at Notre Dame.
The U.S. government paid Notre Dame more than $470,000 — roughly $8.5 million in today’s dollars — plus a stipend for each trainee on campus. By 1943, Navy had expanded its footprint on the South Bend campus with the V-12 program, and enlistees could become Naval officers while also taking undergraduate classes.
Notre Dame’s 1943 football team, which won the national championship, included 14 apprentice Navy seamen. One of them, Johnny Lujack, later went off to war for two years and returned to South Bend and won the 1947 Heisman Trophy.
Speaking to the South Bend Tribune in 1992, former Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore Hesburgh recalled that, “We were out of business during World War II. Navy came in and kept us afloat until the war was over.”
Hesburgh served as Notre Dame’s president for 35 years. The university’s main library is named for him and features the iconic “Word of Life” mural — better known as “Touchdown Jesus” — on its exterior wall facing Notre Dame Stadium. And it was Hesburgh, in deference to the favor Navy paid during wartime, who reportedly said, “As long as Navy wants to be on Notre Dame’s schedule, they’ll be on Notre Dame’s schedule.”
Navy had a run of five wins in eight years in the rivalry from 1956-63, including a 35-14 triumph in South Bend with 1963 Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach at quarterback. After that, though, Navy went more than four decades without a win in the series.
Still, as Hesburgh promised, Navy remained on the schedule every year. And the allure of playing the Fighting Irish helped Navy’s program endure some of its most trying times.
Navy football struggled mightily in the 1980s and early 1990s, averaging fewer than three wins a year from 1983-1992. Some Navy brass began to openly wonder whether big-time football had passed the academy by. A contingent of Navy supporters thought the academy would be better served dropping down to what was then NCAA’s Division I-AA and aligning itself with smaller, like-minded academic schools such as Bucknell and Lehigh in the Patriot League.
A stronger, larger, more determined faction scoffed at that idea. We are Navy, the reasoning went. We don’t aim medium, and we don’t back down from a challenge. Besides, if we move to I-AA, that’s the end of playing Notre Dame.
And for a struggling program that was already asking recruits to commit to five years of military service after graduation, one thing Navy could offer was the chance to play Notre Dame on national television four times, including twice in legendary Notre Dame Stadium.
Navy never dropped down to I-AA, the series with Notre Dame continued, and a 43-game losing streak ended with Navy’s epic 46-44, triple overtime win in South Bend in 2007. That began a run of three wins in four years for Navy — the Mids beat Irish coach Charlie Weis twice and Brian Kelly in his first year in South Bend in 2010.
Since then, Notre Dame has won 11 of 12 meetings, with Navy’s lone win in that stretch coming in 2016 by a 28-27 score.
This year’s game has implications unlike any in the 96-game history, with both teams in contention for the new 12-team College Football Playoff. But regardless of what happens this year, or next, or the one after that, both sides have reason to be grateful that this rivalry has endured.
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