Navy Loses With Surprising Execution Problems

It should be noted that Navy did gain 485 yards and average about 6 yards per play, while they held Maryland to only 272 yards. Maryland did average close to 7 yards per play though, so they did win that battle.

Even though Maryland spent most of the game gashing Navy’s defense with big runs, Navy made enough plays on defense to force several punts. Conversely, Maryland was unable to stop Navy for most of the game. This explains why Navy ran 82 plays and Maryland ran only 39, which itself is a somewhat amazing stat.

Anyway, Navy did lose the game with poor execution. Not poor execution in terms of blocking and running their plays with good team coordination, but poor execution in terms of being sloppy with turnovers. They fumbled twice inside of the 5 yard line (and, ahem, if they had not fumbled, my prediction probably would have been on the money). They also let the clock run out in the first half, deep in Maryland territory. Ricky Dobbs, as an experienced quarterback, should have known to throw that ball away since they were out of timeouts.

Speaking of Ricky Dobbs, after I talked him up, he played a pretty poor game, at least passing the ball. He had a couple good throws, but he also missed a guy wide open 20 yards down the middle of the field, missed a few other throws, and made that mistake at the end of the first half.

However, the most important thing for me is that even though Maryland controlled the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball, AND Navy threw away arguably as many as 20 points with silly mistakes, Maryland still had to get a stop on 4^th and goal from the 1 with 30 seconds to go in the game to preserve a 17-14 win. Even with Navy doing a poor job taking care of the ball, I think its clear how difficult this scheme is to stop when it is executed at a high level. Navy, despite all the fumbles, did execute very well in terms of moving quickly, blocking hard, and making the proper reads. And they gained 485 yards and gave themselves numerous opportunities to score touchdowns against a team that had clearly superior athletes.

In other news, I am curious to see how Maryland performs in the conference, because they do appear to be much improved on the O line and the D line. We will see.

Go Jackets!