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Navy 23, Notre Dame 21. Watching a game like this unfold is almost a surreal experience when you stop to size up the absurd physical differences between these two teams, especially between Notre Dame's offense and Navy's defense. It's one thing to think about how difficult it must be for the Midshipmen's secondary to match up with Notre Dame's 6-foot-6 god of a receiver, Michael Floyd, and another altogether to actually observe the physical impossibility of it with your own eyes, even on television.

And it's not like Navy really stopped Notre Dame's high-flying offense, either, despite the final score: Floyd and receiving mate Golden Tate hauled in 19 passes between them for 275 yards, more than half of the Irish's 513-yard total, and ND didn't punt once.

But Navy was able to mitigate the damage by limiting big plays -- before Tate's 31-yard catch-and-run for Notre Dame's last (and ultimately meaningless) touchdown in the final minute, the Midshipmen hadn't allowed a play longer than 30 yards, forcing the Irish to string together long drives that more often than not ended in the Middies' favor; five ND drives of seven plays or longer ended deep in Navy territory with the Irish failing to put points on the board. More importantly, the Midshipmen forced turnovers, three of them, including a Jimmy Clausen fumble at the Navy goal line and then a pick off Clausen inside the Navy five in the fourth quarter. Most of the Irish's obscene output was sound and fury in the service, ultimately, of nothing.

The other overriding theme in the box score, of course, was the complete domination of the Midshipmen's vaunted triple-option attack, which ate up the vast majority of the first quarter and part of the second on two long touchdown drives that featured a single pass attempt (for four yards) between them; set up a 52-yard touchdown pass on Navy's third and final pass of the game to extend the lead to 21-7 in the third quarter; and finished with 348 bruising, frustrating yards on six per carry -- a dominating performance for the scheme to accompany a resourceful, resilient one by the defense, which is what physically mismatched upsets are made of.

And in this case, it's a season-deflating shocker on top of the details: Their third loss means the Irish are certain to fall from next week's polls, which essentially closes off their route to the top 15 by the end of the year, and with it any hope of returning to one of the big-money bowls in January, no matter what happens over the last three weeks against Pittsburgh, Connecticut and Stanford. With that critical benchmark out of reach, at least the Gator Bowl must be very happy, along with all the Irish haters who get to go another year without having to endure Notre Dame in a BCS game.