Title hopes on the line as Penn sprint football faces off with Navy

You won’t find many sports where the league’s most important game happens halfway through the regular season, but for the Collegiate Sprint Football League, Friday night’s Franklin Field matchup pitting Penn against Navy will be just that.

With both the Quakers and the Midshipmen entering the game tied atop the standings at 3-0, the winner of this game will be the odds-on favorite to win the league. That is because in the CSFL, there are no playoffs. The team with the best regular season record wins it all. And with just seven games in the regular season, one loss can easily end a team’s championship hopes.

“It’s a title game,” Penn head coach Bill Wagner said. “You can’t look any further than the next game and the next game happens to be the Naval Academy. Anybody who has ever won this league, including the academies, has to beat the academies.”

The Red and Blue already beat one academy with a 14-9 triumph over Army, but for the Quakers to win this game, they will have to slow down the Mids’ explosive offense. In wins over Cornell, Franklin Pierce and Post, the Midshipmen have averaged 48 points a game. And Penn’s run defense will be especially important. At times, the Quakers have struggled against the run, even allowing 251 rushing yards against Army. Containing Navy’s rushing attack will be key, but accomplishing this will be no easy task. The Midshipmen enter the game averaging over 260 rushing yards per game.

On the other side of the ball, Penn senior captain and quarterback Mike McCurdy will have to continue his high level of play against a defense that has only been allowing six points per game. McCurdy will certainly look to get the ball early and often to his talented receivers like junior Andrew Sutton and sophomore Aidan Kelly. Penn will also look to pound the ball with sophomore running back Jake Klaus.

“We have explosive players who can make explosive plays and we’re definitely not going to shy away from that,” McCurdy said. “But a more consistent attack is something we need against a team as disciplined as this.”

Being consistent against any team as good as Navy is difficult, but a slew of early-season injuries will make it even tougher. Penn has so far been able to overcome the ankle injury to sophomore running back Max Jones, but more injuries on both sides of the ball will force even more young players to make big impacts.

“Our running game has to be better, and I think that some more unknowns have to step up — guys who have been getting experience these last three weeks,” Wagner said. “And it happened, we had some young guys really step up this past week. We had five starters out.”

One doesn’t need to know a lot about sprint football to see how important this game is. If Penn were to win Friday night’s game, it would be the first season since 2000 that the Quakers beat both service academies. And even in that year, Penn needed overtime to pull out a one-point victory against Navy. A win on Friday would also put Penn in position to win its first championship since 2010.

“It would mean everything. There are a lot of seniors who have worked a lot of hours. It’s been four long years to be able win a championship,” McCurdy said. “And now we have got this game in front of us that’s essentially a championship game, and we don’t take that lightly.”

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