A Team of Rudys!

from RICK TELANDER Sun-Times Columnist 11/7/07:

How about Navy, people?

The service academy's dedication to pressing matters such as steering
battleships and maintaining nuclear submarines makes football something it
can embrace only as a ferocious after-school passion undertaken by the few,
the proud, the rejected.

Why, Navy's adrenaline-fueled, David-slaying-Goliath, heart-pounding
goal-line stand at the end of that triple-overtime battle made ''Rudy'' look
like a frat-house vanity film.

Navy didn't have a Rudy -- it was infested with Rudys.

''We had only two defensive starters coming back this season,'' Navy
associate athletic director Scott Strasemeier said, ''and we lost them both
on the first series of the second game. We've started 23 guys on defense so
far, a school record.''

More than that, Navy already has started 11 players in its secondary.

Against Notre Dame, 18-year-old, 175-pound freshman Kevin Edwards started
for the Middies at cornerback, his first start.

Fellow teenage freshman Wyatt Middleton, whose sister graduated from Notre
Dame, started at safety and led the team with 14 tackles.

''The vast majority of our players had no other Division I offers,''
Strasemeier said. ''They came here because nobody else wanted them. And to a
man, they came here because they wanted to play Notre Dame.''

Even if it meant getting steamrolled for, say, years 64, 65, 66 ad nauseam.

Navy had guys on the field Saturday you wouldn't notice in real life unless
they had birdbaths on their heads.
Navy peerless

The Middies' two starting running backs, Zerbin Singleton and Reggie
Campbell, go 5-8, 174 and 5-6, 168.

When team captain Campbell came out for the coin toss, standing next to the
Notre Dame giants, one wanted to rush out and yell, ''This kid's lost.
Where's his mommy?''

There was even a Navy player -- walk-on reserve defensive end Steve Dorman,
from a small town in Washington -- who got into the game and thus played in
his first football contest, at any level, any age, down to birth.

Everywhere you looked on the Navy side, there were young men whose hearts
were twice the size of their uniforms.

Navy's quarterback, 5-11, 194-pound Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada (''We just call
him Kaipo,'' the SID said) might not even be your first pick in a flag
football league.

But Kaipo completed some of the sweetest, most pressure-packed passes you'll
ever see.

Navy's ''D'' had gotten five sacks all year, and then they sacked Notre
Dame's Evan Sharpley four times.

One of those sacks was created by perhaps the most ridiculous, improper,
joyous play of this or any season: Navy's outside linebacker Ramiro Vela
launching himself like Batman over Irish blocker Armando Allen and
swan-diving into Sharpley.

''The linebacker, 34, I forget his name off the top of my head, launches
over Armando's head,'' Weis said afterward, not too happily.

They call him Ram, Coach, or as he's now known in Annapolis, ''Super Ram,''
and he's a mighty kid from San Antonio who goes a superhuman 5-9, 196.

A D-I linebacker, folks.

Maybe you even want to include Navy no-name coach Paul Johnson in the hero
mix.

After Notre Dame had curiously been given a second chance at a two-point
conversion to tie the game in the third overtime, Johnson told his players
to blitz.

All 11 of them.

Some players were quizzical.

''Just sell out!'' Johnson said. ''They're gonna run it. If they pass, it's
on me.''

Notre Dame did run it. The Middies did blitz.

And if you don't think this was a game that made the angels sing, you got no
religion at all.