5-1 Navy is More then "Lucky"

It seems like Navy just can't get any respect. In fact, two days after defeating rival Air Force on the road, Navy's players and staff are busy defending their 5-1 record after whispers arose of the team being nothing but "lucky."

By now you've probably heard of these so-called "lucky" comments that were supposedly uttered by an Air Force player/coach in Saturday's game. Johnson, who didn't name a specific player or incident, went on to explain how his team gets decidedly little respect from teams they beat.

"You get tired of hearing it every year. Every day we pick up the paper we see something about how it's embarrassing to lose to us, we're the luckiest team in America. It gets old after a while. We've won four in a row, they can call it whatever they want. That's four years in a row now, any way you want to spin it."

I, along with just about every other writer who covers Navy football, have no idea where all this sprang from. Most likely it had to do with some on-the-field trash talk or behind the scenes stuff that none of us regular people see or hear about. When asked if the source of the comment was an Air Force player, Johnson responded with a "sure was." However when Johnson elaborated on his team being the "luckiest team in America," Navy's head Coach maintained that it wasn't just coming form the Falcons.

I've seen it a lot. I've seen it's embarrassing to lose to Navy, I've seen there's no way we are going to lose to Navy, I've seen we've been lucky to win the last three years.

Now this I have seen. All one has to do is take a quick glance around the Internet message boards to see that opposing fans aren't taking this Navy team seriously. A lot has to do with what has been a rather weak schedule over the past few years, but among the mot popular and misinformed arguments are the one's that deal with Navy's style of game. I don't know how many times I've heard opposing fans complain about Navy's blocking scheme, which believe it or not, is absolutely legal! Just the other day a misinformed Rutgers fan posted that Navy gets all the calls from the officials. Obviously he wasn't at the Tulsa game, and apparently didn't see those 12 penalties against UConn. I can certainly see why Johnson is frustrated. He has a 5-1 team which has gone 3-0 on the road, defeated decent competition, and taken a major step forward with a win over a very good Air Force on the road. Yet all everyone wants to talk about was how "lucky" the Mids are to have beaten UMass and to have played such poor competition. Yea, and I guess that missed PAT against Tulsa was "lucky" too, right?

Anyways, hopefully the Mids can silence all these critics with a win over 24th ranked Rutgers this Saturday. For the time being take comfort in the philosophical reflections of country-music-wannabe-turned-bulldozing-fullback Adam Ballard, who famously proclaimed that "It's better to be lucky the good, I guess"