A Rival Retires

The Ivy League has again sent a football all-star team to Tokyo for the Japan Dream Bowl.

The game will be played Saturday at 11 pm Eastern time, which is 1 pm Sunday in Japan. The game will be seen on ESPN+ on Jan. 24 at 7 pm.

There will be six Princeton players in the game — grads Dylan Classi, Cole Aubrey and Michael Ruttlen Jr. and seniors Caleb Coleman, Caden Dumas and Will Perez.

The team arrived in Tokyo last weekend. In addition to game preparation, the players and coaches — led by Brown head coach James Perry, the former Princeton offensive coordinator — have also done tourist and cultural activities, including meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to Japan and visiting the ancient city of Kamakura.

And with that, today's subject might as well stay with football.

TigerBlog saw a story the other day that said that Tom Izzo wanted to go out like Nick Saban just did, and he immediately thought of one person: Merrily Dean Baker.

When Baker was 28 years old, she was tasked with starting the women's athletic program at Princeton. This was in 1970. She did such a great job over the next decade that she ended up moving on in the world of college athletics, eventually becoming the Director of Athletics at Michigan State. 

When she had a football opening, she hired Saban. When she had a men's basketball opening, she hired Izzo. That's quite a record, no? 

By the way, TigerBlog hasn't posted the link for his book on the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton, so HERE IT IS.

While football coaching searches in the NFL dominate the headlines, not to be overlooked was the news yesterday that Tim Murphy has retired as the head coach at Harvard. Murphy coached the Crimson for 30 years, coaching his team to 10 Ivy League titles; there are not many coaches in any sport who ever coached against Princeton for longer.

Murphy had a 16-13 record against Princeton, though the Tigers did win the last six games between the two. Some of those Princeton-Harvard games that Murphy coached were epic and just plain crazy ones.

How crazy? The 14-12 Harvard win in 1997, when the Crimson had four field goals and a safety and the game was tied 5-5 after three quarters, isn't even in the top three. Chris Thorne, the longtime Star-Ledger sportswriter, wrote of that game: "It was 5-5 after three quarters. Then it got weird." 

The winning field goal that day, by the way, was actually deflected by a Princeton lineman and redirected through the uprights anyway. Had it not been partially blocked, it probably would have been wide.

So if that wasn't in the top three, what was? 

Well, there was 2013, when Princeton won 51-48 in three overtimes in Cambridge. There was 2012, one year earlier, when Princeton trailed 34-10 in the fourth quarter and won 39-34. 

And then there was that 2021 game. The details are a little fuzzy, but give TB a timeout to see if he can remember. Oh yeah. Princeton won 18-16 in five OTs.

With Murphy's retirement, Bob Surace is now the longest tenured Ivy football coach, with a two-year lead on Yale's Tony Reno. The Ivy League has lost, in a short time, Murphy and Al Bagnoli to retirement and of course Dartmouth's Buddy Teevens, who tragically passed away last year. Murphy and Teevens were incredibly close.

Murphy finished with 200 win, the all-time Ivy record, with 89 losses, for a .692 winning percentage. Surace is currently tied with Steve Tosches for second all-time at Princeton with 78 career wins, which leaves him 11 away from Bill Roper's all-time record. 

Surace also has a 78-42 record, for a .600 winning percentage. If you factor out the 2-22 start he had, Surace is 76-20, or .792 percentage. 

Of the 10 Ivy titles Murphy won, six came before Surace won his first at Princeton (in 2013). Since then, they've both won four. 

Here's what Surace had to say about his longtime rival:

"In addition to Princeton being my alma mater, one of the great attractions to coaching football in the Ivy League is the historic programs and legendary coaches that we get to compete against.  Almost every game against Coach Murphy and Harvard was an epic contest where the outcome was determined on the final drive in regulation or in the 3 overtime games we had the past 15 years.  In the last 13 of those years that result was a major factor in the Ivy Football Championship.  I’m grateful to have been across the field against someone that will most certainly be selected to the College Football Hall of Fame as soon as he’s eligible."

By any measure, Murphy is obviously one of the greatest football coaches that the Ivy League has ever seen. TigerBlog has never actually met him, but he knows enough people who say he's a tremendous person as well as coach.

TB wishes him the best.