The Greatest Rivalry in College Football

Since you know me, you already know I’m a huge college football fan. Yes, I follow the Fightin’ Irish, but I also follow my alma mater (Army) and just about every other game I can watch. It was an obsession from my youth that has settled into one of my two hobbies in retirement (the other being blogging, so this is a twofer for me).

So when I tell you I know something about college football, you can take that as gospel truth. Or not. See, one of the great things about college football is there is almost nothing that can’t be argued about. Best teams, best players, best coaches? All of it is up for discussion. The sport has changed so much over the last 150 years that it barely resembles its beginnings. One of the best aspects of college football is its rivalries. I’d like to make an argument for one in particular. But first, as always, let’s define our terms.

What is a rival? Like most things these days, the words we use to describe things are seriously devalued. People “love” all kinds of things they just actually enjoy. Folks who don’t know the difference between “affect” and “effect” impact our hearing using “impact” as a verb. And just about anybody claims to be somebody’s rival. But is this true?

In college football, every team can have only one rival. It’s arbitrary, but that makes the rule no less real. For there to be a rivalry, the teams must play regularly, both teams must win more than occasionally, the fans must dislike each other, the stakes of winning/losing must be high, and the rival designation must be reciprocal. There is still a lot of subjectivity in those criteria: You may not care much about the Egg Bowl trophy, but someone does (Mississippi State and Ole Miss, to be exact). The one-rival rule is based on the simple notion that few teams can meet all those criteria for each other.

For example, Notre Dame plays Navy every year, based on a commitment made during World War II, when Navy kept Notre Dame alive as a university by starting an Officer Candidate Training course there. So Notre Dame pledged to return the favor by playing Navy as often as they wanted. And Navy wanted to play every year. Some pundits call it a rivalry, based on how often it is played. But Notre Dame dominates the series (82-13-1) including a record forty-three game winning streak, our fans like each other (generally), and the stakes are rarely great. Not a rivalry.

Michigan State likes to claim Michigan is their rival, but it’s a one-way relationship. They play almost every year, and Michigan holds a 73-38-5 advantage. The fans hate each other, and the games sometimes decide who might win the conference title, but generally not. And Michigan already has a clear rival. Likewise, Boston College fans like to think of Notre Dame as their rival, and some younger Irish fans agree (they’re young, what do they know?). But the teams have only played twenty-seven times (ND 18-9 series lead). The rivalry seems to stem mainly from the 1993 game when BC beat Notre Dame, preventing them from playing for the national championship, and the feeling among BC fans that Notre Dame fans look down on them. The vast majority of Notre Dame fans don’t even notice Boston College.

Here’s a helpful way to think about it. Rivalries are not a love-hate or even a hate-hate relationship. They form out of a challenge among equals, or schools with some similarities. Familiarity breeds contempt, but there always remains a hint of grudging admiration for a rival. A team may have many enemies, other teams they hate, teams they wish would disappear from the sport. But you need your rival, if for no other reason than to be a foil for your own team. Rivalries are not static; they can grow or die. Notre Dame-Army used to be a rivalry, but the teams went their separate ways. Same for Oklahoma-Nebraska, which might have eclipsed Texas-Oklahoma as rivals, but then teams changed conferences, and it withered.

Now that we have established what rivalries are, how do we judge which is greatest? Should it be the one played most often, or the one where the fans hate each other the most? The one most competitive, or the one with the biggest stakes? All of the above? These are good criteria for establishing a rivalry, but not for measuring between rivalries. The one most people would choose is which rivalry has the greatest impact. The problem with this option is it changes radically over time. Harvard-Yale would have been the winner for decades, but now? The old Southwest Conference produced national champions for years in the 60s and 70s, but those rivalries don’t matter very often now. ND-USC and Ohio State-Michigan have had multiple hey-days. And there’s the whole argument about impact itself: does it have to be national, or regional, or just local. When you have fanatics poisoning trees, that’s pretty serious business, right Iron Bowlers?

To establish what rivalry is the greatest, I posit you need a different criterion from the qualification for rivalry. Which rivalry best exemplifies the essence of the entire sport, at its purest level? So we’re looking for a rivalry where there is deep respect for the opponent, but real hatred, too. The rivalry should embrace whatever shreds of the “student-athlete” or “amateurism” mystique that still exist in the sport. And it must matter to a lot of people: the students and alumni, of course, but also the more general fan of the sport, even the curious on-looker.

Ladies & Gentlemen, I give you Army-Navy. Is it a rivalry (let’s go through the motions)? They play every year. The series is fairly even (Navy will lead the series 63-56-7 after they lose this year). The cadets and midshipmen genuinely dislike each other. They spend (as do others) all year talking about (1) who won the last game, (2) when is the next game, and (3) how much their team will win by. In my years at the Military Academy (note: this connotes the other side is not a military academy. Are they paramilitary? civilians in funny uniforms?), we lost three years in a row, before forging a 3-3 tie in our senior year. You never saw anybody happier about a tie game in your life. We always won the party afterward, but tying the game felt like getting a pardon while on death row.

The feelings are mutual. While both academies also have Air Force to play, it’s not the same (sorry, Zoomies!). But what about the stakes? When was the last time Army-Navy made a difference on the national scene? You’d have to go back at least to the 1960s, and probably better to the 1940s. But the stakes are high for the cadets and middies: life at the Academy changes for the better after a win. It’s not just a happier place; they actually relax the rules, and Lordy, do they have rules.

And that effect stretched around the world, to the millions of active duty service members and veterans of the two services. Now I have met enlisted people who saw the whole affair as “much ado about nothing” to do with them. But even people with no direct ties to the academies find something entertaining in the competition.

Finally, especially in the modern era of college football, where players can jump from team-to-team every year, receive tens-of-thousands of dollars in Name/Image/Likeness deals, and leave early to play in “the league,” Army-Navy is the last, best hope of amateurism. There is the rare service academy player who goes to the pros, but the vast majority go to work, defending the country. Like the millions of other college athletes who end their athletic endeavors at college, the cadets and middies on the gridiron are playing for the love of the game, for each other, for their team and university. That’s what made American college football the phenomenon it remains today.

Other rivalries have more glitz, more championship effect, better players, more money at stake. Army-Navy is pure football, college football. And that makes it the greatest rivalry of all. There’s a reason this game gets a Saturday all to itself: even the money-grubbing barbarians who rule the sport today recognize it as something different, almost sacred. So watch the game this Saturday. Join me in praising the precision of the cadets during march-on and critiquing the wavy entry of the middies. Assess the one-time only special uniforms, always with a tie to history, not just football. Enjoy the President changing sides at half-time, giving both teams their due. Marvel at how the cadets and middies will survive the massive parties which will erupt post-game, regardless of the outcome.

Oh, and Go Army (Beat Navy)!