What was trendy the last time Army and Navy were ranked?

Even casual college football fans can look at the most recent AP rankings and see that it has been a strange year.

Indiana, who was projected second-to-last in many preseason Big Ten polls, is currently sitting at No. 13 after a 7-0 start to the season.

Alabama has lost twice before the calendar flipped to November for the first time since Nick Saban’s first year and will need some external help to remain in the SEC race.

But perhaps the most unexpected part of the 2024 season can be seen towards the end of the rankings. And no, it is not Vanderbilt.

At the No. 23 and 24 spots sit two pre-WWII college football powerhouses in Army and Navy.

Bryson Daily and Blake Horvath, quarterbacks of Army and Navy, have put on their best Captain America and Aquaman impersonations en route to boasting undefeated records at the midseason point.

The two military academies are simultaneously ranked for the first time since before Apple was founded, since before iconic movies such as “Rocky”, “Star Wars” and “The Godfather” were released, since even before the last time Florida State was ranked… wait, that was just this preseason? Feels like eons ago that the Seminoles were expected to be a top-10 team.

Regardless, the world has drastically changed since October 3, 1960, the last time the two academies were simultaneously ranked. Let’s flashback and take a look at what was in style during the 1960-61 season.

Popular movies

Universal’s “Spartacus” was the highest-grossing movie of 1960, grossing a box office total of $60 million. However, the most well-known movie today might be the box-score runner-up in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” a horror/thriller picture that broke through many stereotypical portrayals of both women and villains.

Other notable movies to release at the time were “Ocean’s Eleven” and “The Magnificent Seven.”

Popular songs

The fame of Elvis Presley was at an all-time high in the early 60s, with the year-end billboard charts attesting to that. Presley was the only artist to have two top-10 entries on the end-of-year list, with “It’s Now or Never” and “Stuck on You” coming in at the seventh and ninth spots, respectively.

The most popular song of 1960 was “Theme from A Summer Place” by Percy Faith. The song was originally written for the film “A Summer Place,” and Faith’s rendition of the song lasted an at-the-time record nine straight weeks at No. 1 in the recently created Billboard Hot 100.

Notable inventions/discoveries

The Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union was a huge part of the 1960s, with many breakthroughs in space travel being made in this timeframe.

The Soviet Union was the first nation to send a human to space, with Yuri Gagarin receiving recognition as the first person to travel outside of Earth’s atmosphere in 1961. The United States would send their first astronaut not even a full month later, as Alan Shepard Jr. completed the journey for the Americans.

The first-ever laser was created on May 16, 1960, after American physicist Theodore Maiman shined a flash lamp onto a ruby rod. The invention of laser technology made ripples in many different fields of study, most notably the medical field.

Army and Navy still have work to do to keep their dream seasons alive. Both teams have upcoming matchups against Notre Dame before their own rivalry game in what should be one of the most anticipated Army-Navy matchups in its history.

However, the two military schools competing for a playoff spot and returning to national relevance is not something many predicted would happen in the 2024 season.

Alex Perez is a third-year majoring in broadcast journalism. To contact him, please email app5877@psu.edu.