The Navy football team held a rare closed-door meeting this afternoon after practice during which Coach Ken Niumatalolo talked about the magnitude of this weekend’s game against Southern Mississippi in the wake of Saturday’s excruciating 35-34 overtime loss to Air Force.

Niumatalolo gathered his players immediately following practice today for a short meeting on the turf, then spoke with them again privately in the auditorium of Ricketts Hall. Last year, after a 14-6 loss to Air Force in Colorado Springs, then-captains Ricky Dobbs and Wyatt Middleton held a meeting of players that helped to turn around the season.

“I just want to get our minds right,” Niumatalolo said moments after the conclusion of the meeting that lasted roughly 20 minutes. “Just making sure that we’re all on the same page. All of our arrows got to be pointing in one direction to have a chance this week. [Southern Miss] is a very good team, and none of us can be selfish. It’s not about me, it’s not about you, it’s about us.”

Niumatalolo made the clear in no uncertain terms in practice when he stopped a defensive drill momentarily and bellowed about players being selfish as the reason for Navy’s heartbreaking loss to its service academy rival.

Navy was back on the practice field for just the second time since rallying from a 28-10 deficit in the second half to force overtime with a touchdown with 19 seconds to play in regulation. The Midshipmen scored the first touchdown of the extra session, but the jubilation of quarterback Kriss Proctor’s one-yard scoring run soon turned to despair when place kicker Jon Teague had a 35-yard extra point attempt blocked.

The point-after try was from that distance because officials had charged Proctor with an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after his touchdown. Air Force responded with a touchdown and the extra point for its second consecutive win in the series and inside track on keeping the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy it wrested from the Midshipmen last year.

“I look myself in the mirror as a man and say what I could have done,” Proctor said. “I could have done a lot of things that game to win. I think it’s a team loss, and we’re going to take it like that. Can’t have any excuses. There’s a lot of things that could have changed that outcome.”

Poor tackling in the early part of the game allowed Air Force to score the opening touchdown on quarterback Tim Jefferson’s 52-yard scoring throw to Ty MacArthur, who broke free from safety Kwesi Mitchell to reach the end zone. The Falcons made it 21-3 on a drive that included a roughing the passer against defensive end Jabaree Tuani, and Navy failed to get points despite an 18-play drive over 74 yards that ended with a missed field goal.

The Midshipmen also benefited from an inadvertent whistle by officials early in the second quarter that allowed them to keep the ball on a play in which it appeared Air Force had recovered a fumble.

“Yeah that was a tough game last week, but we’ve got the toughest stretch that I can ever remember here at the academy,” Niumatalolo said. “This is going to be a brutal, brutal stretch, and we all better be going this way, or forget the Air Force game, we’re going to get blown out the rest of our games.”