Horsted To The Bears

Bob Surace is going to be nervous all week.

His Philadelphia 76ers are locked in a tough series with the Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Surace is one of the Sixers fans who trusted the process the entire time and is now hoping that the team at least reaches the NBA finals.

TigerBlog has always been a Knicks fans, way back to the two NBA championship teams. He was a Bill Bradley fan long before he realized why he was supposed to be one. These days, though, the team is impossible to root for, as any longtime Knicks fan can verify.

The Sixers are a different. They seem to be easy to root for, and not just because they're much better. There's something endearing about a fan base that stuck with a team for as long as this one did, even when Philadelphia was fielding some of the worst NBA teams ever.

Plus, you either love or hate Joel Embiid, and TB is more the former than the latter.

On top of that, he's a big Surace fan, so why not root for his team in basketball? It balances out that whole Yankees thing.

Surace, of course, is Princeton's head football coach. This past fall he led the Tigers to their first perfect season in 54 years, as Princeton went 10-0 and, for good measure, had the highest scoring offense in Ivy league history.

Another of the stars of that team, Jesper Horsted, signed a free agent contract earlier this week with the Chicago Bears. Horsted is the all-time leader in Princeton history with 196 career receptions and 26 touchdown receptions.

TigerBlog wrote a story about Horsted's signing for goprincetontigers.com, which you can read HERE if you like. When TB was thinking back to the 10-0 season as he was writing it, he remembered two things more than anything else about Horsted.

First was the TAGD video, where he narrated the Grantland Rice poem and then appeared at the end to say "He writes not that you won or lost but how you played the game."

The second was the two catches he made on the 91-yard drive against Dartmouth in Princeton's 14-9 win in one of two games the Tigers played all year that wasn't a blowout. The other was a 29-21 win over Harvard, though the difference was that Princeton trailed for most of that Dartmouth game and never trailed against Harvard.

The 91-yard drive didn't end in points, but it did end with Dartmouth on its heels, though still ahead 9-7. At least until a three-and-out and punt set Princeton up on the Big Green 34, and it took only four plays to put the Tigers up 14-9.

The 91-yard drive is what completely turned the game around. Princeton had battled with awful field position all day while chasing a two-point deficit, and that drive changed it all.

And the two biggest plays were two Horsted catches, especially one on a third-and-eight where Horsted bobbled the ball before controlling it and getting 11. Without that catch it would have been fourth-and-eight from the Tiger 28, which would have meant another punt.

Even better, that catch came one play after Horsted dropped one that might have been a first down.

Next up for him is a shot at making the Bears. Horsted is 6-4 and fast with great hands. These are great qualities to have as he starts down the NFL path. 

Horsted was a finalist for the Bushnell Cup as the league's Offensive Player of the Year. The winner was John Lovett, the quarterback who threw him those passes against Dartmouth. Lovett is a two-time winner of the Bushnell Cup, in fact the fifth two-time winner and the first two-time winner from Princeton.

Lovett is currently at minicamp with the Kansas City Chiefs, who already seem to have their quarterback situation solved for the next, oh, forever, with Pat Mahomes. That doesn't mean that Lovett can't make the team, especially since he can play a lot of other places on the field.

TigerBlog enjoyed this quote from Chiefs' head coach Andy Reid:

“I thought he did a nice job. He’s still got a banged-up wrist, so he can’t do contact on the wrist, but it’s healing and he has about another month or so to go with that.

“Extremely smart and we had to kind of tame him down a little bit. For a quarterback, I said, ‘You are a wild man. You have to calm down here just a little bit’. He did a good job.”

As Surace subsequently tweeted, Reid had Lovett completely figured out.