His would be the kind of story NBC broadcasters would spend an entire quarter telling. In a just world, Duffy would be running out of the Notre Dame Stadium tunnel this Saturday, a Navy SEAL facing Navy in a fitting finish to the week celebrating our nation’s 100th Veterans Day. Achieving your dream and all the work it takes to do that, it’s a cool feeling.”Īnd to think it almost worked out that way. “It probably felt the same as when I got the SEAL trident pinned on my chest,” Duffy says. He barely had time to catch his breath before Peloquin told him the staff liked what it saw. Unsure what the meeting would reveal, Duffy hurried into the Guglielmino Center and up the stairs. The next day he got an email from Director of Player Personnel Dave Peloquin to swing by the football offices. Still, Duffy left Loftus cautiously optimistic that he had made the team and would become the oldest known walk-on - and the first active Navy SEAL - in Notre Dame football history. Instead, he performed three stations, some agility and footwork drills before a 20-yard shuttle to cap it off. In other words, just another day for a Navy SEAL. Now trying to embody the role of underdog, he was banking on the tryout being a grueling endurance test, maybe some puking, probably some screaming.
That’s the place I need to be.”Ī lifelong Notre Dame fan, Duffy had grown up on a steady rotation of Rockne and Rudy. “Every time I step onto a field, I feel at home. I’m back in the same position that I was then,” Duffy says, before betraying his true feelings. What was the worst that could happen, anyway? Carney, who along with sophomores TaRiq Bracy and Jayson Ademilola had been summer school classmates. To recapture his football skills, Duffy had been running routes with walk-on quarterback J.D. Football is a game of muscle memory and repetition, of instinctive action when there’s no time to think. Walking on at Notre Dame was beyond Duffy’s wildest dreams while serving in the Middle East and at SOCSOUTH.
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