There is no secret to the Navy football team’s 6-0 start. There might be no secrets to Navy football at all.

A black gate surrounds the practice field on the Naval Academy’s campus in Annapolis, but in an era of paranoia about spying, Navy practice is open to the media. The athletes, while accomplished, don’t have freakish measurements or run 4.2-second 40-yard dashes. The Midshipmen offense is a modified Wing-T — a decades-old scheme favored by undersize high school and Pop Warner squads.

Aside from a drone buzzing over the proceedings, providing a bird’s-eye view for film study, a Navy football practice — with the sun lazily setting over the tops of passing sailboats, glinting off the team’s golden helmets — feels like a throwback.

And quarterback Blake Horvath, the Heisman Trophy candidate? After every win, his mom sends baked goods to his offensive linemen. First-year offensive coordinator Drew Cronic called the chocolate-covered cake balls she made after the Charlotte game last week “life-changing stuff.” The defense has started putting in requests, too.

“She’s the greatest baker I’ve ever met,” Horvath said, holding a cake ball up to the camera on a Zoom call this week. “I may be biased.”

These guys are undefeated? This is the No. 24 team in the country?

If it doesn’t seem to add up that Navy, a team that finished 5-7 last season with one of the worst offenses in football, is suddenly having success, flip on the tape. This team hung 56 points on 6-1 Memphis last month, as Horvath threw two touchdowns and ran for four more — in spite of distinct gaps in size and athleticism.

Although Cronic has touted his playbook as an updated version of an old scheme — the “Gen Z Wing-T” is a particularly catchy tagline — the fundamentals of Navy’s offense are the same as every Wing-T in history.

Make the formations look the same. Keep the defense guessing. Run the same play three times, then use misdirection to get the opponent to move the wrong way.

“It’s about making things really look complex,” Horvath said, “when it’s simple to us.”

While the Midshipmen have made the single biggest jump in scoring — going from 17.7 points per game last season to 44.8 — much of their success is rooted in the program’s tradition. Horvath, who ran the Wing-T in high school, has more than 800 passing yards, but the program still lives by the option-based rushing attack (fourth in the country with 274.8 rushing yards per game).

Unlike other college football players, the Midshipmen cannot accept name, image and likeness money because of Department of Defense regulations. The transfer portal — as you’d imagine for a service academy — isn’t much of a thing at Navy.

The program’s trajectory resembles the Midshipmen’s offense: College football zigged; Navy zagged. And now the Midshipmen are one of the sport’s biggest success stories.

“We’re building from within, and that’s been huge for us,” Horvath said. “I’m not saying NIL has made people play not for the love of football anymore but the love of money … but our team is just solely built on the love of football.”

Egos? Not really. The most ostentatious display of showmanship thus far was last week, when fullback Alex Tecza did a backflip in the end zone after scoring a touchdown. He later sheepishly admitted he’d probably have to do up-downs for his demonstration of bravado.

But a general head-down approach doesn’t mean the Midshipmen aren’t aiming high. The 6-0 start, making them bowl eligible for the first time since 2019, is not all they want. Ahead of Saturday’s matchup with No. 12 Notre Dame at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Horvath wasn’t shy about the program’s ambitions.

“We want to be relevant,” he said. “We don’t just want to be just another game that Notre Dame has to play. We don’t want to be just another game that anyone has to play.”

For the first time in a while, Navy football is relevant. And, given its supposed disadvantages, it’s more surprising than ever.

The Midshipmen have had remarkable teams and players in the past few decades, including two 11-2 campaigns under former coach Ken Niumatalolo. But what makes this run more surprising — as well as archrival Army’s undefeated start — is that, just a few years ago, a rule change to cut blocking seemed like a death knell to service academy football programs.

The NCAA rolled out a change in 2022 preventing under-the-waist blocks outside the tackle box. Classically, playing Navy meant opposing linebackers had to prepare for their legs to get taken out, which was a mental edge for a program that was outmatched by size.

“They were rules specifically made to target academies,” Horvath said. “We’ll just call that what it is.”

Finding a path forward has been a huge adjustment, coach Brian Newberry admitted. It has taken more creativity in play design and formations. “You gotta be a little more smoke and mirrors,” he said.

But experience and continuity help, too. Navy has three senior offensive linemen, and almost every starter on both sides of the ball is an upperclassman. The biggest adjustment was mentality, senior offensive tackle Connor McMahon said. The blockers — especially perimeter blockers such as tight ends and receivers — had to learn to approach their assignments without hesitation or fear.

A fearless blocker is a fast one, which is perhaps why Navy has gotten off to such rip-roaring starts, outscoring its foes 159-47 in first halves this season. The continuity and cohesiveness of the program’s culture, meanwhile, help steamroll the opposing team’s sense of hope late in games.

“A lot of the teams we play, it’s a lot of guys playing for themselves rather than the team,” McMahon said. “I think it makes it almost easier for us because you got teams that are giving up after the second half when you’re winning by like three or four touchdowns.”

The Midshipmen opened the season with a rousing pregame speech from NFL legend Bill Belichick — the son of a Navy coach — and a 49-21 victory over Bucknell. But even before then, in the spring, they had started to believe something special had changed about their offense.

“Just even in the offseason going against our defense, we were scoring a lot more than we usually were,” McMahon said. “That gave me a huge confidence boost in what we were doing.”

The upcoming megawatt tilt with Notre Dame will be the biggest measuring stick yet. Last year, Navy was crushed 42-3 by the Fighting Irish, underscoring how physically dominant the Golden Domers can be.

It will be an uphill battle — but then again, with Navy, it always is. Horvath thinks the rule changes, once seen as a detriment, ultimately forced the Midshipmen to stiffen their upper lips.

“We really needed to get back to the traditional, old-school Navy football mentality of the toughest team in America,” he said, “going to just crush people.”

In a college football world that has changed almost immeasurably in the last few years, the key to Navy football is not changing much at all. There are no secrets here.

Except, perhaps, the Horvath family’s chocolate-covered cake ball recipe. Just like everything with the Midshipmen, baked goods have to be earned, too.