Army, Navy May Get Extra Game to Help College Football Playoff Chances

The NCAA Football Oversight Committee is going to look at giving both Army and Navy a shot at an extra regular-season game.

Dec 14, 2024; Landover, Maryland, USA; Navy Midshipmen fullback Alex Tecza (46) carries the ball against the Army Black Knights during the second half of the the 125th Army-Navy game at Northwest Stadium. / Danny Wild-Imagn Images

When the Army West Point Black Knights joined the American Athletic Conference as an affiliate member this season, part of the deal was to preserve the Army-Navy game and its date on the calendar — the second Saturday in December.

To accommodate that, both Army and the Navy Midshipmen and the AAC agreed that the game would be a non-conference game.

That isn’t changing. But, CBS Sports reported that the NCAA football oversight committee may consider allowing both Army and Navy an opportunity to play a 13th regular-season game.

The committee is set to meet next month and it would revisit the rule that sets the schedule limit, which is NCAA by-law 17.11.

The only exception is NCAA by-law 17.11.4.1, which allows a 13th game for teams that play a regular-season game in Hawaii.

Army and Navy scheduled 11 games before the window for the AAC title game — three non-conference games and eight league games. Army finished with an undefeated conference mark and won the AAC title game over Tulane. Navy was 8-3.

Navy won the annual rivalry game, but the outcome couldn’t be considered for purposes of the College Football Playoff because the field was already set. Army finished No. 22 in the final rankings, based on its 11-2 record and its league title.

At one point, Navy was 6-0 and nationally ranked.

It likely wouldn’t have mattered this year, as Boise State was the one Group of 5 conference champion to make the field and did so with a first-round bye. But Army athletic director Mike Buddie said to CBS that the idea has been under discussion for about a year and this year’s CFP playoff race only reinforced the idea.

“When it was a four-team playoff, there was language in the agreement that if Army or Navy was in consideration, they would hold off on the [CFP] announcement until after the Army-Navy game,” Buddie said. “When they switched to the 12-team playoff, they removed that language, which essentially rendered the Army-Navy game irrelevant for conference standings and irrelevant as a data point for the CFP.

“So it makes sense for Chet [Gladchuk, Navy AD] and I to approach it from this angle.”

As always there are moving parts that need to be considered. For instance, Buddie said the additional data point (12th game) could help put Army and Navy on equal footing. He also said that a zero-week game wasn’t a consideration due to academy training. And, Buddie said it was possible it could be implemented for 2025, depending upon whether the NCAA approves.

Plus, there’s the potential cascading effect. When the Big 12 petitioned to change the rules to have a conference championship game with just 10 teams, it eventually led other conferences to adopt the division-less format the Big 12 had at the time.