Old Timers' Day

The Ivy League announced its ESPN football schedule for the 2019 season earlier this week, and not surprisingly, Princeton is featured most prominently.

That's what happens when you go 10-0 the year before and are one of the two focal points of the 150th anniversary of the sport. In all, three of Princeton's 10 games this coming season will be on one of the ESPN linear networks, which ranks the Tigers first among league schools.

Those three include one home game (Friday night, Oct. 11, against Lafayette), one away game (Friday night, Nov. 1, at Cornell) and one neutral site game (Saturday, Nov. 9, against Dartmouth at Yankee Stadium, time to be determined.

The first two will be on ESPNU and start at 7. The Dartmouth game will be on an ESPN network to be announced.

As for Princeton's other four home games, they'll all be on ESPN+. The season opener will be against Butler on Sept. 21, with a 5:00 start for Community and Staff Day. The other four games will start at 1, including home games against both Harvard (Oct. 26) and Yale (Nov. 16) for the first time.

TigerBlog updated the schedule on the webpage yesterday, and as he did, he wondered what to do about the Cornell game. If it's a 7:00 kickoff, then the game won't end until at after 10. Even if you factor in one hour after to get on the road, now it's after 11.

That's a four-hour ride. Stay over? Come back after the game? Hmmm. What to do?

Princeton football now has start times for eight of its 10 games. The Sept. 28 game at Bucknell will begin at 3:30, and it's a 12:30 kick in Providence on Oct. 19 against Brown.

That game, by the way, will be the first between Princeton head coach Bob Surace and his former offensive coordinator, James Perry, who is now the Brown head coach.

The only games remaining without start times are the game at Yankee Stadium and the season finale at Penn.

TB will remind you of this a lot this year, but this is a huge year for the Tiger football team. For starters, it's the year after the 10-0 season, one that saw Princeton have the highest-scoring offense in Ivy League history.

The 2019 Tigers have a unique opportunity. There have been 12 Ivy League championship teams at Princeton, but only once - in 1963 and 1964 - have the Tigers repeated. Also, Princeton has now won three Ivy titles in six years, and Princeton has only once had four in seven years - 1963, 1964, 1966, 1969.

Plus, this team has the immediate intrigue of seeing who will be filling the big shoes left by, among others, quarterback John Lovett, the two-time Bushnell Cup winner.

Factor in the 150th celebration, and you have the making of a very exciting season.

Princeton football dates back to 1869, of course. Football, though, was not the first sport at Princeton.

If you go back five years earlier, you'll see that Princeton played a baseball game against Williams College on Nov. 22, 1864. It must have been chilly.

TigerBlog has always been intrigued by the fact that the first baseball game in school history had what would now be considered a football score - Princeton won 27-16 - while the first football game in school history had a baseball game - Rutgers won 6-4.

Speaking of Princeton baseball, head coach Scott Bradley is a former Major Leaguer who played for the New York Yankees among other teams. Each year he heads back to Old Timers' Day at Yankee Stadium, and this year, he was mic'd up for the occasion.

The result is a really entertaining video that you can see HERE.

The best parts are, well, really the whole thing is one continuous best part.

Princeton alum David Hale, who pitched for Bradley and is now on the Yankees, makes an appearance. Hale is pitching out of the bullpen for the Yankees, and he's 1-0 with a save in nine appearances.

Hale has pitched in 79 career games, with 20 starts and an 11-10 career record. He's also pitched for Atlanta, Colorado and Minnesota, and he's also been a member of 11 different minor league teams at various points of his career.

In the video for Old Timers' Day, he was a Yankee, hugging his college coach, a former Yankee.

The rest of the video is pretty classic Bradley. You'll figure it out when you watch it.

It's a perfect late June Princeton Athletics video.