Glorious imperfection

It looked, for all the world, like what happens in your backyard on the morning of Thanksgiving. Snow tumbled and swirled and sifted down from a leaden sky, sugaring the field of play out there in Philadelphia. They'd plowed out the hashes and yard-lines, so when you saw the gridiron in the overhead shots, it was an actual grid. And the football?

Well. It wasn't exactly Alabama-Auburn.

No, this was throwback football, leather-hats-and-a-hearty-punch-in-the-schnozz football, and it took the game back to the turn of the century. And, no, not this century.

Army and Navy took it all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt and the Wright Brothers, to Jim Thorpe 'n' them dazzling America with that newfangled invention, the off-tackle run. The two quarterbacks, Ahmad Bradshaw for Army and Malcolm Perry for Navy, kept taking direct snaps and plowing through the slush into the grunting mass at the center of the line of scrimmage. Bradshaw lugged it 21 times for 94 yards. Perry hauled it 30 times for 250 yards.

Navy attempted two passes, neither of which were thrown by Perry. Bradshaw threw one -- an end-over-end quacker straight out of 1911 that some Army receiver somehow caught 20 yards downfield.

It was ugly. It was imperfect. It was your cousin Mike throwing to your uncle Tim out in the snowy barnyard before the big chowdown. It was ... damn glorious.

As a recovering sportswriter, I faithfully make only one college football game a year appointment viewing, and it is Army-Navy. Part of that is because I love the pageantry, love watching the corps of cadets and the midshipmen march in lockstep into the stadium. And part of it is because Army-Navy is the epitome of what college football is supposed to be, and in fact used to be before the TV and apparel money turned it into the gray engine of commerce it is today.

In that world, we have grown so used to football as an exercise in technical expertise that we've all but forgotten what it looks like when played by normal human beings. Army-Navy shows us that every year, and that's why it's special. It's extraordinary  young men playing very ordinary football, because those extraordinary young men have better things to do down the road. And so, maybe more than anyone else in college football, they play in service to their institutions, not their institutions' bottom line.

For them, after all, the bottom line comes later. In a field of strife that looks nothing like a well-ordered grid, under circumstances that carry far, far more weight.