A Big Red Kickoff

As you know, the Ivy League football race is a tad crowded right now.

With only four weeks to play, there are five teams who are 2-1 in the league. No team is unbeaten. Two teams are 1-2. One is 0-3. 

As you probably know, only twice has a two-loss team gotten a share of the championship. The last time was in 1982. The time before that was 1963. 

In other words, it doesn't happen often.

Will it happen again this year? If you had to say yes or no, what would you say? 

TigerBlog goes back and forth. If he really had to make a prediction, he would say that no team goes 4-0 the rest of the way, which means that there will be a two-loss champ (or champs).

What that means is that the magical two-loss number doesn't mean you're necessarily eliminated. Taken a step further, that means that seven of the eight teams can still feel like they have a legitimate shot.

The eighth team? That's 0-3 Columbia, whose three losses are 10-7 to Princeton, 20-17 to Penn and 20-9 to Dartmouth. Would you think you're going to roll over the Lions if you still had them on your schedule? Of course you wouldn't.

The 2-1 teams are: Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, Penn and Dartmouth. The 1-2 teams are: Brown and Yale.

This weekend's matchups are: Brown at Penn tonight and then Princeton at Cornell, Columbia at Yale and Dartmouth at Harvard tomorrow.

The big picture says that no matter what, two more teams will get their second loss this weekend. That would be the loser of Princeton-Cornell and the loser of Dartmouth-Harvard.

Also, if Brown beats Penn tonight, then that would be two losses for the Quakers as well. 

To give you an even better sense of how wild this league is, here are some comparative scores: Brown 28, Princeton 27. Cornell 36, Brown 14. Dartmouth 23, Penn 20. Cornell 23, Yale 21. Yale 31, Dartmouth 24. Princeton 21, Harvard 14.

How do you make sense of all that? 

Well, one way is to look outside the league, as weird as that might seem. When Harvard beat then-No. 5 Holy Cross and rolled out to a 5-0 record, it looked like the Crimson were the clear favorites. When Lafayette beat Princeton on Powers Field, it looked like it wasn't quite Princeton's year. 

Then TB wrote this: If Lafayette wins its next game, then the game against Princeton will have a slightly different feeling to it. That next game was Holy Cross, and the Leopards in fact won that game, ending the Crusaders' long Patriot winning streak. 

Now all of the sudden, Princeton has a win over Harvard and a lot of momentum as it heads to Ithaca. So too does the Big Red after the hurting it put on Brown last week, one week after the Bears beat Princeton.

In other words, predictions? Why bother?

Do the stats say anything? 

Princeton has the nation's No. 1 rush defense, allowing 72.2 yards per game. A week ago, Princeton held Harvard, a team that came in with a run-first offense that gained 262 per game on the ground, to 68. That's nearly 200 fewer than the Crimson were averaging.

Cornell, on the other hand, is fifth in the league at 116.3 per game. Of those 116.3, the Big Red get a team-best 44.8 of them from quarterback Jameson Wang. Last week's challenge was stopping Harvard QB Charles DiPrima, who was the league rushing leader. DiPrima had 10 yards on the ground. 

Harvard's top two rushers, DiPrima and Shane McLaughlin, are the top two rushers in the league (DiPrima is now No. 2). In Wang's case, he throws it way more than DiPrima, partly because of game plan and partly because of game situation. 

Last week, Wang had five carries for 22 yards against Brown. He also completed 27 of 39 passes for 330 yards and two TDs. If he matches those numbers this week, that would not be ideal for the Tigers. 

Princeton has played six games to date. In only one of them has the final margin been greater than one score, and that was a nine-point win over San Diego in the season-opener. The last five weeks have seen Princeton play games decided by three (in OT), three (winning TD with less than two minutes left), three, one (in OT) and then seven (winning TD with less than two minutes left). 

It's been that kind of year, for Princeton and the rest of the league.

Why would this game be any different?