Monday, June 24, 2013

13 More

Princeton University won 12 Ivy League championships in the 2012-13 academic year.

It's won 13 more since the year ended.

How is that possible, you might ask? Well, TigerBlog will get to that in a minute.

First, there's the little matter of 14 foods no one should ever eat. Or at least that's what the title of the article that TB's friend Todd emailed him this morning.

TB of late has been watching what he's been eating, and he's learned a great deal about food consumption during that time. Mostly, eating poorly is a bad habit, one that is breakable.

In fact, it doesn't really take that long to get past a, say, 1,000-M&M a week habit and get into a say, 14-banana a week habit.

What TB also has noticed is that he - and he can't speak for all of humanity here - gets into the routine of eating the same foods over and over again. Should it come out that bananas are bad for people, well, then TB is in some degree of trouble. The same goes for baked potatoes. And Corn Flakes.

So what foods shouldn't people eat?

Well, some of it is common sense, like the heading of "anything at McDonald's." Some of the other entries aren't as obvious, like corn, non-organic strawberries and sprouts.

And bread? When TB was a kid, he never would have imagined that bread could ever be on the avoid list.

And diet soda? Too many artificial sweeteners, which, as it turns out, is its own category as well.

Eating well + regular exercise = better health. It's not very tricky - except when what constitutes eating right is constantly evolving. Perhaps one day M&Ms will be on top of the list of what everyone should eat.

For now, that isn't the case, so it isn't worth worrying about.

Let's get back, then, to the 13 Ivy titles that Princeton has "won" since May.

Actually, they were Ivy League championships that Princeton won through the years, except they weren't reflected on the spreadsheet that TB was using.

TB has an excel spreadsheet, in fact, that lists Ivy champions through the years, from the start of official Ivy play back in 1956-57.

TB has no idea where the original list came from. All he knows is that he's been adding to it every year since he's been here, which could come across as throwing his predecessors under the bus, unless TB wants to add that he probably could have checked over all of the lists of winners at some point in the last 20 years.

Fortunately, someone else from the OAC (Kristy McNeil) did just that. TB isn't quite sure what started her on the project; perhaps it was just one of those things that can get done in the summer when there are no events, though TB never thought to do it himself.

The result are two lists that Kristy compiled and put on goprincetontigers.com.

The first is Ivy League championships won sport-by-sport.

The other is Ivy League championships won year-by-year.

In the course of her research, Kristy found out that Princeton has actually won 13 more Ivy titles than were previously listed, bringing the total number of all-time Ivy League championships Princeton has won to 430.

And by Ivy League titles, that means championships won since 1956-57, which is reflected on the year-by-year list. The sport-by-sport list is a little trickier, since some teams competed for league championships before the formal creation of the Ivy League while others didn't.

The first Ivy League championship that Princeton won was in men's squash, back in that first year of 1956-57. Princeton then won three spring titles - men's lacrosse, men's lightweight rowing, men's tennis.

The first officially recognized Ivy women's championship was in basketball in 1974-75, when the champ was determined by a tournament and there was no round robin, let alone double round robin.

Anyway, the 430 number should be the accurate one.

And hey, it was a pretty good week last week. It's not easy to win 13 more Ivy titles, especially when not a single game was played.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps TB is too modest to mention that 430 Ivy championships is substantially greater than second-place Harvard (369) and, incredibly, more than double third-place Cornell (214).