Navy Football

Navy football coach Ken Niumatalolo said Wedneday that he received a text message from the family of freshman quarterback Ralph Montalvo, saying that the player who was critically injured in a car accident near his home in South Florida last week has been upgraded to “serious but stable” condition. Montalvo remains in a medically-induced coma at the Kendall Regional Medical Center in Miami, according to Niumatalolo. Reading from the text message, Niumatalolo said that Montalvo's setback on Monday was due to a sinus infection, but added that the swelling on Montalvo's brain has gone down in the past day. Montalvo was a passenger in a car that was involved in a single-vehicle accident Thanksgiving night.

As the Navy football team returned to the practice field Monday in preparation for its Dec. 8 game against rival Army, Coach Ken Niumatalolo and his players were thinking about one of their own fighting for his life in a Miami hospital after being seriously injured in a Thanksgiving night car accident. Ralph Montalvo, a freshman who recently had made it from the scout team to the travel roster as the third-string quarterback, is listed in critical condition after being placed in a medically-induced coma at the Kendall Regional Medical Center, according to a spokesman for the hospital.

A reserve freshman quarterback on the Navy football team is in a Miami, Fla., hospital in critical condition after he was injured in a single-vehicle accident Thanksgiving night. According to a report Sunday in the Annapolis Capital , Ralph Montalvo was put in a medically-induced coma after being transported to the Kendall Regional Medical Center. Navy athletic spokesman Scott Strasemeier said Sunday night that he received a text message from Montalvo's family saying that "he showed more improvement today" but that he remains in the medically-induced coma.

Marcus Curry is still in touch with many of his former Navy football teammates, most of them having moved on to their post-graduate military commitments and a few others who are now finishing their college careers for the Midshipmen. Curry would have been in the first group, in his second year at Navy flight school in Pensacola, Fla., had he not been kicked off the team in the spring of 2010 for violating team rules. Curry later resigned from the academy and transferred to Texas State that summer.

The initial diagnosis was a sprained right knee. But as the two weeks Matt Aiken expected to miss turned into a month and the 2012 Navy football season began without him, the junior wide receiver made a rare request for an athlete at the academy. Aiken wanted to know if he could redshirt. The answer came back quickly, before his knee healed and as Navy got off to its worst start in a decade. Aiken, who would miss the first four games, said he was told that taking a redshirt - sitting out a season without losing a year of eligibility - was done at the academy only when an athlete was unable to attend class because of an injury.

Kevin Spacey sure is getting around Baltimore. First he shows up with Bill  Clinton last week at a Mount Vernon Starbucks . This past weekend, he was in the stands at a Navy game. The U.S. Naval Academy Tweeted a photo of the actor at the game against Indiana, surrounded by midshipmen. You can make out Spacey in the crowd --  he's the one with the softer-edged hat. "Even Kevin Spacey is rooting for Navy today!" the Academy Tweeted. Folks were surprised and thrilled to see him there.

The blowout defeats the Navy football team suffered early this season are a distant memory, in the record books but no longer embedded in its collective psyche. The struggling offense and a quarterback plagued by turnovers are also no longer part of the game plan. They have been washed away by a three-game winning streak and an emerging star named Keenan Reynolds. Reynolds, the first freshman to start at quarterback at Navy in more than two decades, helped the Midshipmen erase an early 10-point deficit and, more significantly, a nine-point deficit in the final 12:18 to beat Indiana on Saturday, 31-30, at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium before an announced homecoming crowd of 33,441 that included NBA Hall of Famer David Robinson.

As last Friday's game at Central Michigan unfolded for the Navy football team, one thing became abundantly clear: With freshman quarterback Keenan Reynolds running the offense, the Midshipmen began to resemble the teams from Ken Niumatalolo's first three seasons as head coach and Paul Johnson's last five years in Annapolis. It was not only the first time that Navy had dominated a Football Bowl Subdivision opponent both in terms of the scoreboard (31-13) and time of possession (35:47 to 24:13)

Ricky Dobbs holds a special place in the recent history of Navy football. In the two seasons he started at quarterback, he led the Midshipmen in rushing and put up more than respectable numbers passing. He led the team to 10- and nine-win seasons. He helped Navy twice beat Notre Dame, as well as Missouri in a bowl game. He nearly beat Ohio State at "The Horseshoe. " As a result, Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo and offensive coordinator Ivin Jasper have been hesitant to compare any of their team's quarterbacks since to Dobbs.

For most of Ken Niumatalolo's first four years as coach at Navy, the references to the past were nearly all positive reminders of how the program had kept up the standard set by his mentor and predecessor, Paul Johnson. Even last year, when Niumatalolo suffered his first losing season and Navy had its first losing record in nine years, there seemed to be a feeling that the Midshipmen weren't very far off, with five of the seven losses coming by a total of 11 points. This season is different - a painful flashback to what Navy football was like when Johnson first arrived in 2002.