CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Consider these rankings.
At No. 10 is D.J. Lagway, a five-star recruit from a year ago, a trendy Heisman pick who likely saved Billy Napier’s job and has Florida fans legitimately excited for the first time in years.
At No. 9 is Arch Manning, the most recognizable player in college football, as close to a Chosen One as has existed in football for a long while.
At No. 8 is Blake Horvath. Navy’s quarterback.
That’s the way EA Sports College Football 26 ranked those three quarterbacks ahead of the game’s release this summer, putting Horvath in an elite tier next to the game’s best. He’s part of a top 10 that includes Clemson’s Cade Klubnik, LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier and the rest of the names you’d recognize.
This being college football in 2025, that means everyone on that level is being well-compensated. It’s probably conservative to estimate that every elite quarterback in the country is at least a millionaire, with plenty of those names earning way more than that. Duke quarterback Darian Mensah is making a reported $4 million a year. Klubnik has an NIL valuation of $3.3 million, per On3. Manning is estimated to make more than $6 million.
“It’s funny sometimes to look around and be like, ‘Wow, that guy’s getting $6 million, that guy’s getting $4 million,” Horvath said at American Conference media days in July.
Horvath’s valuation is simple, and it isn’t an estimate. It’s $0.
Athletes at service academies are considered government employees and are not allowed to make money off their name, image and likeness. The service academies are also barred from opting into the House v. NCAA settlement that allowed schools to directly pay athletes for the first time.
For Horvath, who threw for 1,353 yards and rushed for 1,246 while leading the Midshipmen to a 10-3 record in 2024, that means (at least) hundreds of thousands and probably more that he can’t have access to. His NIL valuation might be in the seven figures.
Horvath won’t make a dime this season from NIL. He does earn about $1,300 per month in gross pay, like all other midshipmen do as part of their enrollment before graduation. But don’t get it twisted: He’s exactly where he wants to be.
“There was never a thought in my mind to leave,” he said. “I don’t think there’s another quarterback or player in the country who’s a better fit for a system than I am at Navy.”
How Blake Horvath ended up at Navy
“Every time he gets the ball, he scores,” Laura Horvath, Blake’s mom, once texted her husband. “I don’t know if that’s normal.”
This wasn’t during last season’s Navy-Memphis game, but it might as well have been. That was when Horvath announced himself as a legitimate quarterback to a national audience, amassing more than 400 yards of total offense and six combined touchdowns running and throwing in a game where every nearly photo of Horvath includes a defender chasing after him, somewhere in the distance.
Unlike Manning and Lagway, Horvath was not a five-star recruit. He grew up just outside Columbus, Ohio, born into a family of diehard Buckeye fans. It’d take longer to list the members of his extended family who didn’t go to Ohio State.
A three sport athlete (basketball, baseball and football), Horvath ran the triple-option offense at Hilliard Darby High School. Former coach John Santagata estimates they’d throw the ball an average of five times a game.
“It was a clone, at the time, of Navy’s offense,” Santagata said.
Perfect, then, that Navy was the only Bowl Subdivision team that recruited Horvath as a quarterback. Santagata typically put his best athlete at quarterback in his option scheme, and he’d had plenty of former high school quarterbacks transition to other positions in college. Horvath had offers from MAC schools to play wide receiver or defensive back. But he wanted to play quarterback.
Freshman rarely see significant playing time at Navy. Horvath was on the scout team for the kickoff unit.
He played only four games his sophomore year because of a finger injury, splitting time with Tai Lavatai at quarterback. The Midshipmen struggled and went 5-7. After a loss at Memphis, Horvath pulled his hood over his head and looked at the ground as he went to say hello to his mom. She’d never seen him do that before.
A year later, the game against the Tigers marked the peak of his career.
“If you really want to get to the nitty, gritty, the underlying cause of all that,” Laura Horvath said, “It’s Coach Cronic coming in. It’s just astronomical, the turnaround.”
How Drew Cronic changed Navy’s offense
Brian Newberry took over as Navy head coach in 2023, earning a promotion from defensive coordinator after Ken Niumatalolo was fired. After his first season in charge, Newberry decided to bring in a new offensive coordinator. He turned to Drew Cronic, who had been the head coach at Championship Subdivision school Mercer.
A few months after he arrived in Annapolis, Cronic and a few of the players went out to run some routes and go through some passing plays.
“It was awful,” he said.
For years, the service academies have run the triple-option as a way to level the playing field against teams that usually have bigger and better athletes. It gives them an advantage – a unique style of play that other teams aren’t used to seeing. But it can also be one-dimensional. When it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work.
Cronic wanted to give opposing defenses more to think about. That meant more time in the shotgun, more potential options. And, yes, the chance to throw the ball more. Horvath ultimately averaged about 10 pass attempts per game in 2024, a number that doesn’t put him close to the rest of those elite quarterbacks from the game’s rankings but still a higher number than most fans would expect from a service academy.
By the end of training camp, Cronic believed in what he’d created. The next few months more than validated it as the Midshipmen won 10 games for the first time since 2019 and finished the season with defeats of Army and Oklahoma.
Horvath was also one of the most efficient quarterbacks in the country last season, but didn’t qualify for the official ratings because he threw too few passes. He also rushed for 17 touchdowns, with plenty of his big plays coming out of the shotgun.
“I thought he’d be a good runner,” Cronic said. “But he’s a really good runner. It’s very subtle. He makes very subtle cuts without slowing down. He sees things, he has good vision. And can wiggle by you before you realize just how well he runs.”
Can service academies thrive in the revenue sharing era?
Were this a normal college football team, the next part of the story would be all too-familiar for college football fans.
Consider other programs outside the Power Four conferences that had successful quarterbacks in 2024. Tulane’s Mensah? Gone to Duke. South Alabama’s Gio Lopez? Gone to North Carolina. Washington State’s John Mateer? Gone to Oklahoma. New Mexico’s Devon Dampier? Gone to Utah. Liberty’s Kaidon Salter? Gone to Colorado. North Texas’ Chandler Morris? Gone to Virginia. Appalachian State’s Joey Aguilar? Gone to Tennessee, with a quick pit stop at UCLA.
Horvath was never going anywhere. That’s for a couple reasons.
For one, students at the Naval Academy sign what’s referred to as a “2 for 7” before they begin their junior years. It essentially means they’re committing to serve in the Navy for five years after graduation in exchange for the next two years of their education. Getting out of that contract would require significant legal maneuvering, and anyone doing it would have to pay back the money the government as already spent on their education.
In current college football terms: A six-figure buyout.
Horvath said he never had serious discussions about that.
“I don’t really entertain those,” he said. “I shut those down before they really even start.”
Horvath’s breakout came during his junior season. But what if it had happened a year earlier, before he’d signed his 2 for 7?
Consider Army running back Kanye Udoh. He rushed for 1,117 yards as a sophomore for the Black Knights in 2024, then entered the transfer portal and enrolled at Arizona State.
It’s something Army’s team has not had to even consider until the past few years. And it puts a service academy in a difficult spot, because they can’t recruit a replacement from the portal.
“If you’ve got a young man who grew up without luxuries in his life, didn’t come from a family where they had a lot of money and all of a sudden he’s got a chance to make hundreds of thousands of dollars immediately and change the lives of his family immediately, how do you argue with that?” Army coach Jeff Monken said. “What do you say? You want the guy to stay. You care about him, you love him. You want him to be compelled to stay with his teammates. But you also want to stand up, shake his hand and say, ‘Congratulations.’ Because it’s more money than maybe anybody in his family’s ever made in their lifetimes.”
Monken and Newberry usually have a similar recruiting pitch to offset questions about NIL money: The money is coming on the back end. It’s true, obviously — graduates of service academies tend to do pretty well for themselves in their careers.
They have differing views, though, on how the current state of college football is affecting their recruitment.
“What’s going on right now in college football is helping us,” Newberry said. “That’s been reflected in the way we’ve been able to recruit for the last two years. Because high school players aren’t getting the same amount of opportunities as they used to. There’s not that many scholarships going out for high school players. And so we’re able to recruit kids right now that we weren’t able to recruit before all this.”
Monken pushed back on that.
“Their recruiting pool and our recruiting pool is the same recruiting pool,” he said. “It’s always been the same recruiting pool. There are just certain young men who are not going to entertain an academy offer because they don’t want to go into the military. And so that cuts our recruiting pool down, way down.”
The academies are unique for a few other reasons, too. Because they did not opt in to the House settlement, they aren’t bound by any roster limits and can have an unlimited number of players. That’s extremely important because they don’t use the transfer portal to replace players who leave.
And they have pretty straightforward roster turnover. Most football players at the academies aren’t going to the NFL anyways, so they’re more than happy to move on with their lives after playing their four years.
Could Blake Horvath get another year of eligibility?
But what if it wasn’t just four years?
Service academies doesn’t redshirt players. That makes sense on the surface when you consider the entire point of the academies is to prepare students for careers in the military. But it puts those three teams at an obvious disadvantage on the field.
Army and Air Force have used something called “turnbacks” to sometimes get extra years for players. That’s a term that refers to a student who essentially applies to take an extra semester or two to graduate. Newberry wants to open the door for some players to take an extra year if they’ve had a serious injury.
His rationale is essentially this: At Navy, almost nobody ever plays as a freshman. If someone has a season-ending injury, that’s another year gone. That would leave someone with only two seasons of play.
Horvath is eligible for an extra year because of the season-ending finger injury in 2023.
Newberry said he’s cleared it with the Secretary of the Navy, but ultimately it’ll come down to a case-by-case basis.
“Maybe it’ll happen,” Horvath said. “But that’s after the season stuff. We’ll deal with that when it comes.”
For now, then, it’s back to the drawing board. Back to work with Cronic trying to figure out the next iteration of the Navy offense, one that gets them beyond 10 wins and to an American Conference title game.
The kid leading that team will do it without earning a dime, a perfect juxtaposition with the team that he grew up watching.
“I do know that everybody gets NIL money,” Laura Horvath said. “We hear about that all the time. We live in Columbus, Ohio. Nobody gets more NIL than them. It paid for a national championship.”
Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jdylan@gannett.com or on X @thejonahdylan.