ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Navy may have been hustling, and Duke may have been taking a beating, but it was the Naval Academy's student body who had the most visible workout in the second half of Saturday's football game. Every time Navy scored, the midshipmen ran onto the field and racked off a number of push-ups equal to the number of points on Navy's side of the scoreboard. In the second half alone, they knocked out 305 push-ups.
At halftime, few would have predicted that the game would be such a blowout. Duke had rallied from 14 points down late in the first half to notch its first non-zero tie score of the season at 21 a piece. Momentum had shifted in the Blue Devils' favor. Duke band members were doing reverse pushups in a mockery of the plebes as the two teams left the field at halftime.
The band didn't have a chance in the second half to continue its frivolity. The Midshipmen scored a field goal on their first drive of the half. Duke's Cedric Tate fumbled the kickoff return, and Navy scored again, a mere 11 seconds after its field goal. Here began the Devils' second-half woes, which included a total of five turnovers and six touchdowns given up. Duke didn't score again until its final possession of the game, only 21 seconds before the final gun.
"It doesn't matter what adjustments [you've made], you go out and you fumble the kickoff and then you throw an interception and do things like that-then, all of a sudden, the game plan was of no consequence," Blue Devil coach Fred Goldsmith said. "[We] are starting to get a little more balance, but not enough to overcome the mistakes we've made.... You can't turn around and give away gobs of points and make it easy on the opponent. All our opponents are too good for that."
Duke's third quarter mistakes created a momentum swing that catapulted Navy ahead. The Mids capitalized on Duke's errors early in the half, and gained enough momentum that by the fourth quarter, they were scoring seemingly at will, regardless of which of their units was on the field.
"Once a couple of bad things happened, it just kind of snowballed," Navy coach Charlie Weatherbie said. "They're a team that has had a couple of games snowball on them."
To Duke, Navy's second-half explosion resembled more of an avalanche than a single snowball. The Midshipmen scored on all but their final three possessions, when their second and third-string players had taken over the game.
Navy credits its second-half success to the attitudes of both players and coaches at halftime. Coming off of a disappointing second quarter, the team could have become disheartened. This was, after all, the second straight game in which Navy had lost a 14-point lead. Instead, the coaches and players remained collected and focused on correcting problems.
"The coaching staff took the approach of coming in kind of calm and told us, 'Everything's not lost, you know, just go in there and settle down-we put up 21 points in the first half, we'll put up 21 points in the second,'" Navy fullback Omar Nelson said.
In fact, the Navy players may have been more responsible than any halftime speeches for the tough second-half attitude.
"I think [the coaches] knew that we knew what we had to do," Navy linebacker Clint Bruce said. "I think the coaches know that we're a good team at motivating ourselves. We've got a lot of leaders on the team. The whole team's a leader, if you look at the school we're at. Everyone's got that ability."
On the Duke side of the locker room wall, a motivated attitude would prove not to be enough to overcome the errors.
"We were real optimistic," junior offensive guard Chad Melita said. "We weren't going out there, saying it was going to be easy, but we were really optimistic. We thought we were going to go in there, move the ball and stop them, but right off the bat we made some crucial mistakes and just never got going, and the rest is history."
The rest was indeed history, for Navy, at least. Scoring records were set left and right as the game progressed. The third quarter was Navy's most productive quarter of football since 1988. The 64 points scored was Navy's most since 1953, when the Mids beat Princeton 65-7, and the most it ever had racked up against a Division I-A opponent.
While the Navy homecoming crowd celebrated one of its most prolific games ever, the Duke players seemed stunned by the dramatic nature of the loss, their second-largest margin of defeat this year.
"It's definitely embarrassing," Melita said. "When somebody scores 64 points on you, it's probably the most embarrassing loss I've ever endured at Duke. It's one thing if someone beats you in the first game, but if someone just embarrasses you at the end and keeps on putting up points, it's horrible. No matter how close the game was in the beginning, it doesn't matter because when you get beaten by 40 or whatever points-it's horrible."
Even the more experienced players could not find a precedent to the second-half tidal wave.
"It was really kind of awful," senior inside linebacker Billy Granville said. "I've never really been in this type of game, where there's such a momentum shift."
Though the loss was stunning, the Blue Devils no longer feel that inexperience is to blame. In fact, some of the players have come to accept the "no excuses" attitude held in all aspects of life at the military academies.
"We just need to take a step back and look at ourselves and stop putting the blame on our youth," junior quarterback Dave Green said. "We're five games into the season now, our guys have got experience-half these guys are getting letter jackets this year. We're experienced enough right now not to be making the mistakes that we did throughout this game."
What is left for Duke is to pick up the pieces and regroup for next week's home game against Clemson. The fact that many of the players are young and relatively inexperienced may afford them an extra level of resiliency to the 0-5 season.
"I don't look at more than one game at a time," Melita said. "You'll kill yourself over that. I'm not thinking 0-11 or anything, just next time we've got Clemson. [We've got to] think we can beat them."
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