Off To The Races

Note - Blogger returned while TigerBlog was playing squash. The status of Thursday's TB remains a mystery.

Note No. 2 - Thursday's post reappeared magically.

TigerBlog was greeted this morning with a question: How come there was no TigerBlog yesterday?

Not TigerBlog the person. No, TigerBlog the actual blog itself.

TB couldn’t help but wonder what the question was about, since there was a TigerBlog yesterday. It was about the women’s lacrosse game and how there is no other possible matchup in Division I between a school and another school whose namesake is an alum of the first school.

As in, Princeton at James Madison in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

So, before doing anything else, TB went to TigerBlog, and there it wasn’t. Yesterday’s entry, that is. The most recent one is Wednesdays, about the Ivy League meetings.

When TB attempted to log in to update the site, he was greeted by the words “Blogger Is Currently Unavailable.”

It’s possible that when the site comes back up, the Thursday post will reappear. At least, TB hopes that’s the case.

TB figured he’d wait a half hour or so to see if the site came back up, only that didn’t happen. Along the way, he read a bunch of stuff on the internet, including the story about the kid in Connecticut who can’t go to his prom because he posted a sign outside the school asking the young woman to go with him and therefore ended up banned from attending.

The story left TigerBlog wondering what rule he possibly broke? The one against being creative? The one against learning to put yourself out there?

The only question for Shelton High School is if it’s okay having administrators who can be this short-sighted, and not whether James Tate should be allowed in the prom.

Once TB was done with that, he went on to other things, like getting both of the words in the “guess the word” game that he wrote about earlier. And read the New York Post. And Inside Lacrosse.

And then TB went back to the site, and it’s still not up.

So he decided he would do the next best thing. Write today’s entry and put it on goprincetontigers.com in the interim.

It’s not about keeping alive his streak of posting every business day since Oct. 16, 2008, per se. It’s more like a newspaper attitude. The newspaper has to come out every day, regardless of the weather or mechanical breakdowns or anything.

That brings us to today’s entry, which was going to start out with the motorcyle in Lot 21 and eventually get to the Eastern Sprints in rowing that are going on this weeend.

TB will save the motorcycle for another day.

This weekend marks the awarding of the last three Ivy League championships of the year. So far, there have been Ivy titles awarded in 30 sports, and Princeton has won 14 to date.

The most any program has ever won in an academic year is 14, something Princeton has now done three times, including in 1999-2000 and 2000-01, and Harvard did in 2004-05.

In other words, one rowing title would mean a new record.

To get greedy, three rowing titles would mean Princeton would have won more than half of the league’s championships.

Of course, even should none win, Princeton will have at least a share of the record.

As for the races themselves, Princeton is undefeated this year in women’s open rowing, and it has lost in both men’s lightweight and men’s heavyweight.

And none of that will really matter when the boats get on the water.

Princeton is the top-ranked women’s first varsity open 8, which is the same position Princeton was in a year ago, when it lost to Yale by less than a second in the 2,000-meter race at Eastern Sprints.

This year, Princeton opened the season with a close win over Brown, who hasn’t lost since.

The women’s championships are on the Cooper River in Camden.

The men’s boats will race on Lake Quingsigamond in Worcester, Mass., where the lightweight men will look for a third straight title, something the program has never accomplished. The race for first could come down to a battle between Princeton and Harvard, who defeated the Tigers by one second during the regular season. Princeton lost to Harvard during last year’s regular season by 0.7 seconds and then won at Eastern Sprints by more than two seconds.

The men’s heavyweights also lost to Harvard during the season, and like in the lightweights, that figures to be a strong matchup at Sprints.

And there you have it.

By Sunday, the last Ivy titles will have been awarded for 2010-11. It’s already a record-tying year for Princeton.

Will it be a record-setting one?