Navy also has to replace its top four rushers and Eli Heidenreich, the receiver who put up a Navy-record 243 yards on Air Force alone last year. That's a lot of production walking out the door for a team still favored to win the American Conference. Air Force's calling card stays intact — the Falcons ran for the 3rd-most yards in the country in 2025, and fullback Owen Allen (roughly 750 yards, 6 yards a carry) is still in the building. If this Falcons offense is going to climb back to respectability, it starts with the ground game it never really lost.
Neither program leans on the portal — academy rules make that a non-starter — so both rosters are built the old-fashioned way, through recruiting classes and years in the system. Navy's defense returns 6 starters, including linebackers MarcAnthony Parker and Coleman Cauley and a secondary anchored by Phillip Hamilton, who picked off 3 passes in 2025. That's a group that should keep Navy competitive even while its offense retools. Air Force's side of the ball needs a jump after a season that produced too many losses to close-out situations, and a soft-looking non-conference slate this year — Army, Navy, UConn, Duquesne — is the kind of schedule that's supposed to help fix that.
Air Force still leads this all-time series 34-24, but Navy's the one riding the streak — 2 straight, including last year's 34-31 shootout in Annapolis. history says whoever wins this leg tends to win the whole trophy race; it's happened in the vast majority of the last 53 years. Navy just doesn't have the same firepower it had a year ago, and Air Force is at least getting its best offensive weapon back from injury. That's enough to make this closer than the outside noise suggests, even with Navy the clear favorite on paper.