There’s one more college football game to be played before bowl season, and it’s happening in Baltimore. The Army-Navy game returns to Baltimore for the first time in seven years on Saturday.
Kickoff is set for 3 p.m. from M&T Bank Stadium. According to PressBox, Navy has won the last 12 straight games, and the Midshipmen enter Saturday’s showdown with the two teams’ lone winning record at 6-5.
Luckily, the Army-Navy game is about a lot more than what happens on the gridiron.
Festivities will get started early, as ESPN’s College Gameday crew will be in town broadcasting live from Inner Harbor beginning at 9 a.m.
Since this is the military, both sides will be bringing reinforcements along. Naval ships will be stationed in the harbor, assuming within view of ESPN’s set. Meanwhile, the Army tanks will roll in nearby, as well.
The Midshipmen and Cadets march in to the stadium just after noon. Once inside the stadium, the two sides conduct a formal “prisoner exchange,” where exchange students who are spending the semester at the other academy are allowed to return to their side to watch the game.
The Air Force doesn’t have a dog in this fight, but that doesn’t mean the skies are left out of the pageantry. In the last 20 minutes before kickoff, Navy’s Leap Frogs and Army’s Golden Knights parachute platoons are scheduled to jump into the stadium. Then, each team will take the field with a respective squadron flying overhead.
It won’t be too hard to tell when all this is happening. As we learned during the Star-Spangled Spectacular, fighter jets tend to make their presence known.
They were out flying around today. HUGE planes. Low and slow.