ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The late afternoon sky is a flat, dark gray drizzle of mist that settles on the swarm of gold helmets below, making them shine that much brighter under the floodlights of Rip Miller Field, a spit of land jutting into the Severn River, across Annapolis Harbor from the Chart House and the yacht club. Facing the quiet, impending darkness of an early December evening, it is the lone beacon of light facing out toward the water, with no land in sight on the other side.
A sea of young men is tucked into those gold helmets, sporting either white or navy jerseys along with gold pants. If a casual college football fan didn’t know better — if they were dropped in from a helicopter with no awareness of where they were or what they were looking at beyond the navy, the white, the gold and the mist — they might think they were watching Notre Dame.
Perhaps that’s fitting, seeing as the Irish are the only team other than Houston to beat this Navy squad this year. Both those losses were away from home, from here, where the Midshipmen have created one of the toughest home fields in the sport. Navy hasn’t lost in the state of Maryland since the Notre Dame game last year at FedEx Field, and hasn’t dropped a game in Annapolis since Sept. 27, 2014, a span of 10 straight victories.
There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the biggest, the man most responsible, is one of the smallest on the field, one of the only ones in a Kelly green jersey, marking him as a quarterback. He’s a guy too small — at 5’11” and just a shade over 200 pounds — to even have been considered by most schools to play the most important position on the football field. And while he might have been too small in those other places, on this spit of land, pressed against the northwest edge of the Chesapeake Bay, he’s been a perfect fit.
“Running and jumping and all that physical stuff is a part of it, but we want good kids,” says Navy Head Coach Ken Niumatalolo. “Because when you come here, not only do you represent our football program and our school, but you represent our country.”
Navy runs the triple option, a remnant of an older era of college football, before the Air Raid, or the Bear Raid, or any other spread offense variation. It relies heavily on the correct, snap decision-making of its signal caller.
And that’s where Keenan Reynolds stands apart.
“Character” can be an overused trope in sports, a stand-in for athletes who aren’t as talented, a narrative weaved to show that hard work is more important than talent. Don’t make that mistake when assessing Reynolds.
“You’ve got to be able to play Division I football, you know what I mean?” Coach Niumatalolo says. “We’re not going to recruit all Eagle Scouts who can’t play a lick.”
And as much as Reynolds may thrive in Navy’s triple option, he has succeeded at unprecedented levels compared to those who have quarterbacked the team in the past. The system hasn’t changed, so there must be more to it than that.
“I think a lot of guys made a mistake,” says Niumatalolo of those who failed to recruit Reynolds. “There’s so many guys in the shotgun that he definitely could have played in a shotgun offense, the spread, people throwing the ball. People just didn’t think he was tall enough. But he has the arm strength, the accuracy and all of that.”
Reynolds broke Montee Ball’s NCAA record for career rushing touchdowns (77) earlier this season. He’s already got 83, with two games still to play. He’s also broken Kenneth Dixon’s mark of 84 total touchdowns with 86. Reynolds knew, as the season progressed, that he was on the brink of etching his name in the history books. But more than anything, he wanted to get past it to keep it from being a distraction for his team.
“By the midseason point, I was just trying to get it over with so I wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore,” he says.
While Reynolds was chewing away at the record books, Navy kept racking up wins. By 24 over East Carolina. By 22 over Air Force. By 25 on the road against a ranked Memphis team.
As a result, Reynolds began to garner buzz about being chosen as a Heisman Trophy finalist. An unofficial campaign was mounted. His name began to appear on the list for the Heisman House, a co-branded promotion between ESPN and Nissan where the public could vote among the experts’ picks.
Reynolds was dominating the vote. Then, after the team lost to Houston despite nearly 400 yards from Reynolds, relinquishing their grasp on the Group of Five spot in a New Year’s Day bowl game, his name disappeared from the site. The school raised an uproar, and eventually his name was added back to the list.
But the damage was done. The Heisman finalist list was announced Monday and included just three names, none of them Reynolds’.
“The Heisman Memorial Trophy annually recognizes the outstanding college football player whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity,” reads the opening line of the Heisman Trust Mission Statement. It’s difficult to imagine a student-athlete that better represents such purported values better than a record-setting service academy quarterback. As the voting showed, the American public clearly agreed.
Out here, under the fog, it’s still a week before Reynolds will find out that all of this, that the records, the raised profile of his school thanks to his performance, the superlative senior season to cap the best career in his or many other school’s history, won’t be enough to merit an invitation to New York. But even without knowing all that, the Heisman hype is secondary to the thing that will mean the most to him: beating Army one final time.
Navy has won 13 straight in the rivalry against Army West Point. Reynolds and his fellow seniors have never lost. But no quarterback ever, in the history of the rivalry, has won four straight games. Reynolds can do just that when the Midshipmen take on the Black Knights in Philadelphia Saturday afternoon.
“It’s everything,” he says of the rivalry. “You always want to finish on top as a senior. You want to get the (Commander in Chief’s) trophy back where it belongs.”
Beyond the touchdown record, the potential career sweep over Army, any of the other accolades that may come, perhaps Reynolds’ most lasting mark will be the one he left on the perception of the program. Slot back Demond Brown, a fellow senior from just down the road in Glen Burnie, has watched the rise of how the program has been perceived.
“I think the program definitely grew,” said Brown. “I remember the first time I was here, the program was going through some things. Right now the program’s on a great path, projecting up.”
Reynolds recognizes the notoriety he has brought the school, but is even happier that it has allowed his teammates a chance for attention as well.
“Obviously it brought more attention to the program,” he said. “And it also gave me the opportunity for me to express how grateful I was to my teammates, because those guys don’t get nearly enough credit that they deserve. They’re an integral part of any success that I’ve had, and the success of the team is due in large part to the seniors and the leaders on this team buying into what we want to accomplish and the hard work that we put in all offseason and during the season.”
The eyes of the college football-watching nation will be on Reynolds and his teammates one final time Saturday, as the Army-Navy game is the only one of the day, at 3:30 p.m. ET, on CBS.
