Pate Makes His Case for Navy as This Year's Playoff Sleeper
With a mandated Group of Six spot up for grabs, Pate argued the Midshipmen have the resume to actually use it — and got heat from his own table for saying so.
Pate argued that Navy is a real College Football Playoff sleeper this season, not a courtesy nod to the Group of Six mandate but a team with an actual case.
The premise came from a viewer question: Michael from Philly wanted sleeper picks from outside FanDuel's top 14 playoff-odds teams, and asked for something other than chalk. Pate noted the playoff format guarantees a spot to a Group of Six team, which means someone from that pool is making it regardless of how it looks on paper. His answer wasn't a hedge.
Pate said it plainly on the show earlier in the day, and it did not go over well with the people sitting across from him. "Forget about the power four. Give me Navy." He described the reaction bluntly: "I got some of the most anti-American looks across the table that you could ever get." Pate wasn't picking Navy to be contrarian. FanDuel had the Midshipmen with the third-best odds of any Group of Six team to make the playoff, which by his logic makes them the obvious sleeper conversation rather than a novelty pick.
The case itself is built on continuity. Pate pointed to "21 wins last two years" under Brian Newberry, now in his fourth year running the program, plus a veteran offensive line that isn't rebuilding on the fly. He didn't lean on schedule softness the way he did for Penn State earlier in the segment — Navy still plays Notre Dame — but he argued the loss wouldn't be fatal to a playoff push, pointing to JMU making the field last year despite getting run out of the building by Louisville and not beating anyone else ranked in the top 50 of strength of schedule. If that path worked once, Pate's reasoning goes, it can work again for a Group of Six team that otherwise takes care of business.
The why here matters more than the box score. A veteran offensive line means fewer negative plays and a quarterback who isn't managing chaos snap to snap — that's the difference between a Group of Six team that survives one bad night and one that gets buried by it. Continuity at head coach matters too. Programs outside the power conferences rarely have the roster margin to overcome scheme confusion, so a fourth-year staff running a system the players have lived in for years is a structural advantage, not a talking point.
But Pate didn't oversell it either. Right after building the case, he pulled back: "I may have just talked myself into it." That's the honest complication sitting right in his own delivery. The JMU comparison is doing a lot of work for an argument that otherwise rests on one bad loss being survivable rather than good wins piling up. Navy still has to actually beat the schedule in front of it, and a Group of Six path to the playoff has exactly one blueprint so far — which means it's also exactly one data point. The third-best odds among Group of Six teams is still a G6 ceiling, not a power-conference floor, and Pate's own table made clear not everyone is buying that those numbers travel.
Where this lands isn't really about Navy proving Pate right in November. It's about what he's willing to say out loud when the incentives point the other way — pick the mandate spot and move on, or actually defend it with a case. He picked the case. Whether the anti-American looks were fair is a different question than whether the argument holds, and on the tape, at least, the argument holds better than the room let on.
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