ANNAPOLIS — ANNAPOLIS | Navy was on the brink of a disastrous start to its season Sept. 20. The Midshipmen, at 1-2 and with road dates at Wake Forest and rival Air Force looming, were clinging to a 23-21 lead late in the fourth quarter against Rutgers.
The Scarlet Knights looked poised to win the back-and-forth affair on their final possession, but linebacker Ross Pospisil read an out route and intercepted Mike Teel to seal Navy’s win. It was the second time that game the Mids’ defense forced a critical turnover. At the end of the first half, safety Wyatt Middleton foiled a Rutgers scoring opportunity by forcing a fumble inside Navy’s 5-yard line.
“That game was key for our whole program,” defensive coordinator Buddy Green said. “We knew that Rutgers was a very good offensive football team, and as the season progressed, we found out they were a good football team. We did some good things in that game and had some success.”
Green considers that game the turning point of the season for Navy’s defense, which had given up 89 points in the first three games of the season. Even with their two most experienced players - linebacker Clint Sovie and safety Jeff Deliz - back from injury and seven returning starters from the young group that was thrust into action last season, the Mids looked as porous as ever. That was a bad sign for a unit that was expected to improve after yielding 36.4 points a game in 2007.
But despite the drawbacks, Green kept faith that the talent he saw every week eventually would mold itself into a stout defense.
“Prior to last year, we had an older group,” he said. “That’s what tends to happen. You have a lot of seniors playing, and we enjoyed some success in those years. Unfortunately, last year we were very young. And then we were banged up. But I saw these guys get better in spring, get better in fall camp and grow up a little bit.”
It took a month for the results to show, but the development of Navy’s defense over the course of the regular season has been unmistakable, culminating in back-to-back shutouts of Northern Illinois and Army.
And as a result, the Mids (8-4) will take with them the nation’s most improved scoring defense to Saturday’s EagleBank Bowl at RFK Stadium against Wake Forest (7-5).
“I think a lot of it is the attitude and mentality we approach the game with,” said Pospisil, who leads the team with 93 tackles. “Never settling - I think that’s something we struggled with early on in the season a little bit. Maybe it was our maturity, but we would play well and then come out flat in the second half or the next game. So just realizing that winning is a steep slope but we’ve got to keep climbing it was a big part of it.”
Navy went 7-2 after its initial three-game stumble, and an improving defense had a hand in each win. Sometimes it made opportunistic plays, such as Sovie’s fumble recovery for a touchdown to send the Temple game into overtime. Other times it dominated for 60 minutes, as was the case in Winston Salem, N.C., on Sept. 27, when it forced six Wake turnovers.
The Mids have been blessed with some good fortune as well. They have stayed relatively healthy after injuries ravaged their secondary last year, when Green used 10 different starters but could never find a combination that worked. Defensive end Michael Walsh is the only starter the Mids lost to a season-ending injury, but freshman Jabaree Tuani has exceeded expectations after taking over.
Ultimately, there was no magic formula that Green used to spark life into his defense. He just kept teaching the principles of the 3-4 scheme that worked for Navy defenses before last year’s debacle.
“We’ve all kind of started understanding our role, and the experience is starting to be a factor,” Deliz said. “We’re all doing our job; we’re not worrying about doing someone else’s job or doing too much. It’s allowed us to jell more, and that’s stemmed a lot of our success this year.”
As the wins started to pile up this year, so did the ever-improving defense’s confidence. Green was free to call a more aggressive game, and the results followed. Compared with last year, Navy has collected more sacks (17-12), forced more turnovers (28-15) and allowed nearly half as many touchdowns (34-61) .
“A big part of it is having fun,” Pospisil said. “I got tired of hearing the coaches yell, ’I don’t see any emotion out there.’ A lot of us were new last year, and we almost didn’t want to make mistakes more than we wanted to make plays. That hampered our collective unit. It’s kind of been a journey as a defense, growing up in different stages, but I’ve never had more fun playing defense.”
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