TigerBlog orginally was going to be a political science major and ultimately lawyer when he headed to college, and he started down that path first semester freshman year with a course on the Supreme Court.
It was taught by an extremely monotone professor, and TB's main memories of that class are that 1) it was in the University Museum opposite Franklin Field, 2) TB got a B and 3) the monotone guy really, really loved the Supreme Court. In fact, one part of the class included "The Official Monotone Professor Guy's Supreme Court All-Stars," which consisted of what he believed were the nine greatest justices of all time.
Eventually, the whole law school idea began to fade away once TB realized that there were people in the world who got paid to go to games and that TB would like to be one of them.
The political science part was a little too theoretical for TB, so he switched his major to history. American Political History, to be exact.
As an aside, TB took two semesters of the History of the American South with Drew Gilpin Faust, who is now the president of Harvard. He also took some great classes on unionization with a professor named Walter Licht, whose specialty was the railroads.
Anyway, one of his seminars had each student select a book and then a week to write a paper and give a presentation on that book. The order was determined by a random draw, and TigerBlog's name was called first, giving him the option of which book and which week he wanted.
One of the books on the list was written by Dr. Licht, and TB selected that book and Week 1. He then read the book (pretty interesting stuff about the railroads), wrote his paper, gave his presentation and cruised through the remaining three months of the class.
Years later, BrotherBlog's friend Ira - another Penn academic - asked TB if he could leave him four tickets to the Princeton-Penn game, and one of the people Ira brought with him was Dr. Licht. TigerBlog introduced himself and said that he had been a student of his years earlier, but Dr. Licht didn't remember - until TB mentioned how he had picked his book and Week 1. Dr. Licht then smiled and pointed out that nobody else had ever done that in any of his seminars.
TigerBlog much preferred the history classes, whether it was European history through 1870 (complete with a lecture that featured a recitation of a speech from the French Revolution delivered in French for effect) or Jeffersonian/Jacksonian America or the American Civil War or the origins of the Cold War or even the history of the 1960s.
Since graduation, TB has still been a fan of history, and he's read many books and watched many documentaries about any number of historical areas.
And, while he's working in a career that pays him to go to games, his career path is also heavy on the history. In fact, TB considers himself a Princeton athletics historian as much as anything else.
With that background, TB has always been fascinated by putting the achievements of current athletes and coaches into historical context.
All of which brings us to Kareem Maddox and his scoring outputs of late.
Maddox increased his scoring averages from 3.7 as a freshman to 5.0 as a sophomore to 6.2 a year ago. He then scored seven, six, four, eight and four points in Princeton's first five games this season.
And since? How about 30, six, 10, 13 and 31.
His two 30-point games make him one of just eight players in program history with at least two in the same season. He's also the only one in the last 27 seasons to accomplish the feat.
You know what that means? It means that Kit Mueller didn't do it. Neither did Brian Earl, Gabe Lewullis, Chris Young, Steve Goodrich, Rick Hielscher, Bob Scrabis, Judson Wallace, Will Venable and many other great Princeton players.
For that matter, only Mueller, Lewullis and Hielscher out of that group had even one 30-point game.
So who were the other seven?
Brian Taylor did it six times in 1971-72 after doing it four times the year before. Geoff Petrie did it four times as both a junior (1968-69) and senior (1969-70).
Going back to the 1950s, Carl Belz had 31 against both Illinois and Brown in his sophomore year of 1956-57, while Jim Brangan had 32 against both Temple and Army in 1958-59, his junior year.
Pete Campbell, who just happens to be the third-leading scorer in program history, had 30 against Yale and Dartmouth as a senior in 1962.
The most recent to pull it off was Kevin Mullen, who had 30 against Yale and then 38 against San Diego in the NCAA preliminary round game in 1984.
As with any discussion of Princeton basketball history, the large shadow of Bill Bradley is all over this one as well.
Bradley did it eight times as a sophomore (1962-63) and 13 times as a senior (1964-65). As a junior? How about 22 times. In 29 games.
TigerBlog also thought about looking up the last time Princeton had four players average in double figures for a full season, as Maddox, Ian Hummer, Dan Mavraides and Douglas Davis are all currently doing. TB figured it'd be a complete rarity, but it actually isn't.
Yes, it hasn't happened since 1987, when Scrabis, Alan Williams, Dave Orlandini and Joe Scott all did so. But it happened a bunch of times through the years, and Pete Carril's first Princeton team (1967-68) actually had five players do it: Petrie, Joe Heiser, John Hummer, Chris Thomforde and John Haarlow.
Then TB had one last historical thought. Maddox has two 30+ games, but he has no games in his career in which he finished with a point total in the 20s. Had any other player in program history done this?
Armed with the old blue notebooks written in pencil, TB went back ... and back ... and back ... and back.
All the way until Dec. 19, 1901, in the second season of Tiger basketball, when William McCoy scored 30 against Newark Academy. His next-best game was 16, a year later against Swarthmore.
Kareem Maddox and William McCoy. The only two to have done it.
And TB has a hunch that McCoy will be getting that distinction back for himself before the end of this season.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Time Out
Where to start from yesterday afternoon?
Let's start with Sal Alosi, the Jets strength coach who at this time yesterday was a virtual unknown and today is now one of the lead stories on foxnews.com, as well as every other media outlet in the country.
Alosi, as everyone knows by now, tripped the Dolphins' Nolan Carroll on the Jets' sideline as Carroll covered a punt in the second quarter yesterday, briefly injuring Carroll. Alosi, who has apologized, almost surely will 1) be the butt of jokes on every late-night show there is and 2) lose his job.
TigerBlog isn't sure what he would do with Alosi. On the one hand, it seems like some lines you simply can't cross, and what he did clearly crossed the line (and injured an opposing player). On the other hand, he deserves to have his entire record considered, and if this was out of character for him, then he should be allowed to keep his job, especially given how sincere his contriteness appears to be.
Then there's the whole collapse of the roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis, which caused the Giants-Vikings game to be moved to Detroit tonight. It also took the Giants off the hook for not getting to Minnesota Friday, before the storm came.
The video of the snow as it tore through the roof was fascinating. And did TB really hear correctly that the way the snow is usually removed from the roof involves having just six people go up to clear it?
And while we're talking snow, could this really have been that epic of a storm in Minnesota history? TB would have guessed that there were dozens of storms just like this.
Anyway, the collapse of the roof meant that there would be no Giants game on TV Sunday at 1, which meant that the Knicks were sort of off the hook for scheduling a game Sunday at noon. And how about those Knicks? And can Knick fans really root that hard for a team that is still owned by James Dolan?
Still, with all of that plus the rest of the NFL, none of it is today's main subject.
Nope. Today is all about comparing two sports that couldn't be more different, especially when it comes to crunch time.
TigerBlog spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching the Akron-Louisville NCAA soccer final with the sound turned down as he listened to Princeton defeat Tulsa in two overtimes in men's basketball.
TB is pretty sure that soccer is a better game to watch when one team scores an early goal, since it forces the other team to push forward. The NCAA final a year ago between Akron and North Carolina was a dreadful game in that it ended 0-0 and went to penalty kicks. Yes, there was drama to the PKs, but an NCAA final - or World Cup elimination game, for that matter - shouldn't be decided that way.
This time around, the Zips scored with 11:24 to play and then hung on through a wild, frantic scramble in the last minute, when the Cardinals had two great chances to tie it, to win the first NCAA title in any sport for the school.
As an aside, TB loves knowing that there was exactly 11:24 to play when Akron scored and not that it was the 80th minute. He also loved knowing exactly how much time was left for Louisville to try to tie the game, rather than simply waiting for the ref to decide to blow the whistle whenever he saw fit. Why is it that international and professional soccer can't simply have the time on the board? The ref clearly has the ability to relay to the timekeeper when to stop the clock in college soccer.
Shortly before Akron was able to celebrate, Princeton put the finishing touches on its 82-78 win over Tulsa in a very good win for the Tigers on the road.
Kareem Maddox scored 31 for the Tigers, giving him two 30+ games on the young season, a shocking number considering that there'd only been eight 30-point games by a Princeton player in the last 25 years prior to the start of this year.
Maddox has 119 points for the year, with 61 of them in two games. Princeton, somewhat stunningly, has four players averaging in double figures.
Princeton is also 3-0 in overtime games and has won five straight. Of the 10 games Princeton has played, five have been decided by five points or fewer, and a sixth was one of the OT games.
And yet, all of that is for another time. Finally, TB will get to today's point: The end of a soccer game couldn't be any more different than the ending of a basketball game.
The NCAA final had one TV timeout per half, which is one more per half than the World Cup final had. Almost no soccer game is played with timeouts.
The end of the game was a frantic scramble that played out with only the players on the field in control. The coaches could have yelled all they wanted; it's unlikely they'd even be heard.
Contrast that with the Princeton-Tulsa basketball game. The last two minutes of regulation and the two overtimes featured how many timeouts?
If you guess "eight," you'd be correct. Eight times in the final two minutes alone, one of the teams called timeout.
And that doesn't even count when Tulsa's Joe Richard fouled out, giving essentially another timeout.
There is no other sport besides Division I basketball that affords its coaches the number of opportunities to interrupt the game to control what happens next.
All Division I games (TB is pretty sure, at least) begin with nine scheduled media timeouts. Eight of those TOs come at the first deadball below the 16, 12, 8 and 4 minute marks of each half. The ninth comes on the first called team timeout of the second half, which becomes a full media timeout.
Then there are the timeouts the teams can call. Each team gets four 30-second timeouts (next time you're at a game, get your phone's stopwatch to show you how long there is between when the 30-second timeout is called and the game starts again) and one full timeout.
Since one of the timeouts called by a team is going to be a media timeout, then there are nine media timeouts and nine possible team timeouts, for a total of 18. Since each team gets a timeout per overtime, that meant 22 possible timeouts for Princeton-Tulsa.
And every one of the 22 was used.
TB understands the idea that coaches don't want to leave anything to chance, and that in game-deciding situations, they want to make sure that everyone knows exactly what they want, whether on offense or defense.
But still. Who wants to be at a game with 22 timeouts?
The worst is for an NCAA tournament game, when the final minute has endless timeouts that lead to endless commercial breaks, all of which makes the end of the game last forever.
If you're going to start with nine scheduled media timeouts, then how about no team timeouts on top of that? See what impact that has on the games.
TB guarantees they'll be better to watch.
Hey, it certainly was the case with Akron-Louisville.
Let's start with Sal Alosi, the Jets strength coach who at this time yesterday was a virtual unknown and today is now one of the lead stories on foxnews.com, as well as every other media outlet in the country.
Alosi, as everyone knows by now, tripped the Dolphins' Nolan Carroll on the Jets' sideline as Carroll covered a punt in the second quarter yesterday, briefly injuring Carroll. Alosi, who has apologized, almost surely will 1) be the butt of jokes on every late-night show there is and 2) lose his job.
TigerBlog isn't sure what he would do with Alosi. On the one hand, it seems like some lines you simply can't cross, and what he did clearly crossed the line (and injured an opposing player). On the other hand, he deserves to have his entire record considered, and if this was out of character for him, then he should be allowed to keep his job, especially given how sincere his contriteness appears to be.
Then there's the whole collapse of the roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis, which caused the Giants-Vikings game to be moved to Detroit tonight. It also took the Giants off the hook for not getting to Minnesota Friday, before the storm came.
The video of the snow as it tore through the roof was fascinating. And did TB really hear correctly that the way the snow is usually removed from the roof involves having just six people go up to clear it?
And while we're talking snow, could this really have been that epic of a storm in Minnesota history? TB would have guessed that there were dozens of storms just like this.
Anyway, the collapse of the roof meant that there would be no Giants game on TV Sunday at 1, which meant that the Knicks were sort of off the hook for scheduling a game Sunday at noon. And how about those Knicks? And can Knick fans really root that hard for a team that is still owned by James Dolan?
Still, with all of that plus the rest of the NFL, none of it is today's main subject.
Nope. Today is all about comparing two sports that couldn't be more different, especially when it comes to crunch time.
TigerBlog spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching the Akron-Louisville NCAA soccer final with the sound turned down as he listened to Princeton defeat Tulsa in two overtimes in men's basketball.
TB is pretty sure that soccer is a better game to watch when one team scores an early goal, since it forces the other team to push forward. The NCAA final a year ago between Akron and North Carolina was a dreadful game in that it ended 0-0 and went to penalty kicks. Yes, there was drama to the PKs, but an NCAA final - or World Cup elimination game, for that matter - shouldn't be decided that way.
This time around, the Zips scored with 11:24 to play and then hung on through a wild, frantic scramble in the last minute, when the Cardinals had two great chances to tie it, to win the first NCAA title in any sport for the school.
As an aside, TB loves knowing that there was exactly 11:24 to play when Akron scored and not that it was the 80th minute. He also loved knowing exactly how much time was left for Louisville to try to tie the game, rather than simply waiting for the ref to decide to blow the whistle whenever he saw fit. Why is it that international and professional soccer can't simply have the time on the board? The ref clearly has the ability to relay to the timekeeper when to stop the clock in college soccer.
Shortly before Akron was able to celebrate, Princeton put the finishing touches on its 82-78 win over Tulsa in a very good win for the Tigers on the road.
Kareem Maddox scored 31 for the Tigers, giving him two 30+ games on the young season, a shocking number considering that there'd only been eight 30-point games by a Princeton player in the last 25 years prior to the start of this year.
Maddox has 119 points for the year, with 61 of them in two games. Princeton, somewhat stunningly, has four players averaging in double figures.
Princeton is also 3-0 in overtime games and has won five straight. Of the 10 games Princeton has played, five have been decided by five points or fewer, and a sixth was one of the OT games.
And yet, all of that is for another time. Finally, TB will get to today's point: The end of a soccer game couldn't be any more different than the ending of a basketball game.
The NCAA final had one TV timeout per half, which is one more per half than the World Cup final had. Almost no soccer game is played with timeouts.
The end of the game was a frantic scramble that played out with only the players on the field in control. The coaches could have yelled all they wanted; it's unlikely they'd even be heard.
Contrast that with the Princeton-Tulsa basketball game. The last two minutes of regulation and the two overtimes featured how many timeouts?
If you guess "eight," you'd be correct. Eight times in the final two minutes alone, one of the teams called timeout.
And that doesn't even count when Tulsa's Joe Richard fouled out, giving essentially another timeout.
There is no other sport besides Division I basketball that affords its coaches the number of opportunities to interrupt the game to control what happens next.
All Division I games (TB is pretty sure, at least) begin with nine scheduled media timeouts. Eight of those TOs come at the first deadball below the 16, 12, 8 and 4 minute marks of each half. The ninth comes on the first called team timeout of the second half, which becomes a full media timeout.
Then there are the timeouts the teams can call. Each team gets four 30-second timeouts (next time you're at a game, get your phone's stopwatch to show you how long there is between when the 30-second timeout is called and the game starts again) and one full timeout.
Since one of the timeouts called by a team is going to be a media timeout, then there are nine media timeouts and nine possible team timeouts, for a total of 18. Since each team gets a timeout per overtime, that meant 22 possible timeouts for Princeton-Tulsa.
And every one of the 22 was used.
TB understands the idea that coaches don't want to leave anything to chance, and that in game-deciding situations, they want to make sure that everyone knows exactly what they want, whether on offense or defense.
But still. Who wants to be at a game with 22 timeouts?
The worst is for an NCAA tournament game, when the final minute has endless timeouts that lead to endless commercial breaks, all of which makes the end of the game last forever.
If you're going to start with nine scheduled media timeouts, then how about no team timeouts on top of that? See what impact that has on the games.
TB guarantees they'll be better to watch.
Hey, it certainly was the case with Akron-Louisville.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Girls Don't Just Wanna Have Fun
In case you're wondering what the average 10- or 11-year-old girl is named, here are the first names of the nine players on the 5/6 grade basketball team that TigerBlog is currently coaching:
* Aileen
* Francesca
* Gianna
* Grace
* Little Miss TigerBlog
* Maggie
* Molly
* Paige
* Samantha
To this point, all of TB's coaching experience has been with boys' teams, mostly either the same basic group of boys that TigerBlog Jr. has played lacrosse with the last seven years or baseball at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School and Princeton Post 76 American Legion a long, long, long, long time ago.
This winter, though, he's taken on a different task: coaching the 5/6 grade girls.
Each team in the league had to take the name of a college team. TB selected, not surprisingly, Princeton.
The other choices shouldn't be too surprising: Villanova, Florida, Georgia Tech, Duke, Notre Dame, Penn State, Temple, UConn and North Carolina.
The Temple team in the league is coached by Mike Vreeswyk, who was a great three-point shooter for John Chaney's Owl teams of the late 1980s, including when Temple was ranked No. 1 much of the 1988 season. Vreeswyk, who scored 1,650 points at Temple, is a member of the Big Five and Temple Halls of Fame.
Before he played at Temple, Vreeswyk played on some great teams at Morrisville High School, and TB spent many a winter night covering the Bulldogs back then. Vreeswyk, who is about 6-7, played almost exclusively on the perimeter, while as TB remembers it two 6-1 or so kids played down low.
Vreeswyk, for the record, scored 2,019 points in his high school career, without the benefit of the three-point shot.
Anyway, TB's Princeton team opened up last week with a tough loss to Villanova. Up next is Florida tomorrow morning.
After the first game, one of the parents who knows TB from his lacrosse coaching had this piece of advice: "Coaching girls is a lot different than coaching boys."
TB spent a good deal of time during the week considering those words, and they rang through his ears all during last night's practice.
TigerBlog went into this determined not to treat the girls differently than the boys. In TB's mind, when people say that it's different to coach the girls than the boys, what they're saying is that the girls don't take it as serious or aren't as competitive or are just playing to be with their friends, and TB doesn't want 1) to contribute to that stereotype and 2) to make LMTB think that way.
The more TB thought about it, the more he rejected the idea.
When it's come to coaching youth lacrosse, TB's philosophy has always been to stress certain points:
* improve skills
* teach what it means to be part of a team
* begin to explain (or as time has gone by continue to enhance) the concept that to improve and to reach your full potential involves practicing hard and working on your own ... at the same time, TB also has been careful to make sure that he always keeps in mind that a huge goal is to get the kids to want to play again the next year and to give them the best possible opportunity to be playing in high school, so overdoing the hard work at too early an age is very, very counterproductive
* have fun
* play with proper sportsmanship
* play to win the game
Like teaching, coaching is in many ways about the messages that are sent from the authority figure to the pupil. If the coach of the 5/6 grade team gives off a vibe that this is not a valuable activity and that not giving your best effort is okay, then the kids will pick up on that.
This isn't to say that practicing and games are win-at-all-cost moments and that it's okay for the coach to berate or belittle players. In fairness to the majority of the youth coaches that TB has seen through the years, most kids are getting coached by people with the proper balance.
But that's not really what this about. It's about girls and boys. And to send the message to the girls that what they're doing is not as important as what the boys are doing would be irresponsible, harmful and wrong.
TB brought this subject up to a few coaches here in Jadwin, and he was surprised to hear that he got 100% agreement with him.
One coach (who has coached college and high school athletes of both sexes) said almost word-for-word what TB said earlier, that there might be a stereotype about the differences that may have been true years ago but no longer is.
When girls first began to have basically the same number of sporting options as boys a few decades ago, perhaps then there was a novelty to playing which overrode the competitive side.
Today, TB is convinced, that no longer even remotely exists.
Princeton, like all colleges, is filled with women athletes who are as competitive, who work as hard, who care as much, who push themselves as much as the male athletes. They wouldn't be college athletes if they didn't think and act that way.
And yes, maybe the judgment of the college coaches that TB spoke to this morning is a little clouded by the fact that the system has weeded out the athletes who lacked the ability and the drive to reach the college level, but that would be true for men and women.
As TB has said on many occasions, the idea that Princeton would treat its male athletes differently than its female athletes never enters anyone's mind. The term "gender equity" has come up, what, 10 times in all the time TB has been here, largely because it's simply innate to the people who work here.
It wasn't always that way, of course, and TB loves to meet the early women athletes of Princeton and hear their stories about what they had to go through to kick the doors in for the women who have followed them.
Their efforts have trickled all the way to a local 5/6 grade girls league, where the coach feels like his No. 1 responsibility is make sure the girls know that they should take athletics seriously and that they should be respected as much as any boy for choosing to play.
TB may be wrong about this, but his sense is that he's not.
Now if they could only figure out a pick-and-roll and how to box out.
* Aileen
* Francesca
* Gianna
* Grace
* Little Miss TigerBlog
* Maggie
* Molly
* Paige
* Samantha
To this point, all of TB's coaching experience has been with boys' teams, mostly either the same basic group of boys that TigerBlog Jr. has played lacrosse with the last seven years or baseball at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School and Princeton Post 76 American Legion a long, long, long, long time ago.
This winter, though, he's taken on a different task: coaching the 5/6 grade girls.
Each team in the league had to take the name of a college team. TB selected, not surprisingly, Princeton.
The other choices shouldn't be too surprising: Villanova, Florida, Georgia Tech, Duke, Notre Dame, Penn State, Temple, UConn and North Carolina.
The Temple team in the league is coached by Mike Vreeswyk, who was a great three-point shooter for John Chaney's Owl teams of the late 1980s, including when Temple was ranked No. 1 much of the 1988 season. Vreeswyk, who scored 1,650 points at Temple, is a member of the Big Five and Temple Halls of Fame.
Before he played at Temple, Vreeswyk played on some great teams at Morrisville High School, and TB spent many a winter night covering the Bulldogs back then. Vreeswyk, who is about 6-7, played almost exclusively on the perimeter, while as TB remembers it two 6-1 or so kids played down low.
Vreeswyk, for the record, scored 2,019 points in his high school career, without the benefit of the three-point shot.
Anyway, TB's Princeton team opened up last week with a tough loss to Villanova. Up next is Florida tomorrow morning.
After the first game, one of the parents who knows TB from his lacrosse coaching had this piece of advice: "Coaching girls is a lot different than coaching boys."
TB spent a good deal of time during the week considering those words, and they rang through his ears all during last night's practice.
TigerBlog went into this determined not to treat the girls differently than the boys. In TB's mind, when people say that it's different to coach the girls than the boys, what they're saying is that the girls don't take it as serious or aren't as competitive or are just playing to be with their friends, and TB doesn't want 1) to contribute to that stereotype and 2) to make LMTB think that way.
The more TB thought about it, the more he rejected the idea.
When it's come to coaching youth lacrosse, TB's philosophy has always been to stress certain points:
* improve skills
* teach what it means to be part of a team
* begin to explain (or as time has gone by continue to enhance) the concept that to improve and to reach your full potential involves practicing hard and working on your own ... at the same time, TB also has been careful to make sure that he always keeps in mind that a huge goal is to get the kids to want to play again the next year and to give them the best possible opportunity to be playing in high school, so overdoing the hard work at too early an age is very, very counterproductive
* have fun
* play with proper sportsmanship
* play to win the game
Like teaching, coaching is in many ways about the messages that are sent from the authority figure to the pupil. If the coach of the 5/6 grade team gives off a vibe that this is not a valuable activity and that not giving your best effort is okay, then the kids will pick up on that.
This isn't to say that practicing and games are win-at-all-cost moments and that it's okay for the coach to berate or belittle players. In fairness to the majority of the youth coaches that TB has seen through the years, most kids are getting coached by people with the proper balance.
But that's not really what this about. It's about girls and boys. And to send the message to the girls that what they're doing is not as important as what the boys are doing would be irresponsible, harmful and wrong.
TB brought this subject up to a few coaches here in Jadwin, and he was surprised to hear that he got 100% agreement with him.
One coach (who has coached college and high school athletes of both sexes) said almost word-for-word what TB said earlier, that there might be a stereotype about the differences that may have been true years ago but no longer is.
When girls first began to have basically the same number of sporting options as boys a few decades ago, perhaps then there was a novelty to playing which overrode the competitive side.
Today, TB is convinced, that no longer even remotely exists.
Princeton, like all colleges, is filled with women athletes who are as competitive, who work as hard, who care as much, who push themselves as much as the male athletes. They wouldn't be college athletes if they didn't think and act that way.
And yes, maybe the judgment of the college coaches that TB spoke to this morning is a little clouded by the fact that the system has weeded out the athletes who lacked the ability and the drive to reach the college level, but that would be true for men and women.
As TB has said on many occasions, the idea that Princeton would treat its male athletes differently than its female athletes never enters anyone's mind. The term "gender equity" has come up, what, 10 times in all the time TB has been here, largely because it's simply innate to the people who work here.
It wasn't always that way, of course, and TB loves to meet the early women athletes of Princeton and hear their stories about what they had to go through to kick the doors in for the women who have followed them.
Their efforts have trickled all the way to a local 5/6 grade girls league, where the coach feels like his No. 1 responsibility is make sure the girls know that they should take athletics seriously and that they should be respected as much as any boy for choosing to play.
TB may be wrong about this, but his sense is that he's not.
Now if they could only figure out a pick-and-roll and how to box out.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Home Sweet Home
TigerBlog has a few jackets that say "Princeton Athletics" on them. Of course, he resists wearing any of them until he absolutely has to, since to do so is an admission that summer is over.
His favorite is the black one with white sleeves, a fairly lightweight one that works well in the late September/early October time. There's also the lightweight rain jacket, which is good pretty much anytime of year, especially when layering.
There's the all black with orange trim one with the thin lining that makes it a good one to wear when it gets a little chillier.
Then, lastly, there's the big winter one, which is the one TB will wear when he vacations at the North Pole one year, since it probably would keep him warm enough all by itself.
It takes a lot to get TB to break out the big one, though. Just as putting on any jacket at all means waving the white flag on summer, putting on the big coat means an acceptance of winter and, even worse, the possibility of snow.
As TB pulled into the parking lot today, he heard the weather on the radio say that it was 26 degrees, with the wind chill at 16. And yet TB refused to put on the big winter coat, so it was a long, freezing walk into Jadwin Gym, as it has been every day this week.
If the walk between the parking lot at Jadwin is 200 yards, then TB estimates that he's walked more than 1,200 miles back and forth through the years.
It long ago stopped being something that TB gave any thought to.
And yet it's important to remember that Jadwin isn't just a place with offices. In fact, to most of the people who come into this building, it's a place to go a few times a year to see a game, not a place to go every day to go to work.
TigerBlog did think about Jadwin as a basketball arena and not just an office building twice this week.
The first time was last Sunday, when TB sat in the balcony for most of the Princeton-St. Joe's men's game. The other time was when he looked at the pictures from Monmouth's new Multipurpose Activities Center, where Princeton defeated Monmouth 64-61 last night.
Jadwin was built more than 40 years ago as what was then a state-of-the-art multipurpose facility, and it's certainly served that purpose. If you've never wandered through the building, it has just about everything: an indoor track, tennis courts, squash courts, strength training facilities, a field turf field, offices, meeting spaces - and of course three basketball courts.
For a department like Princeton's, which has 38 varsity teams and a commitment to broadbased athletic participation, it's a must to have a place like Jadwin.
But as a basketball arena?
Well, TB does love the idea of a 5,000-seat basketball-only facility, with luxury boxes, offices, a wide open concourse from which to see the game, a huge video board, great acoustics and the rest of what comes with a great on-campus arena.
While TB is dreaming, how about having half the seats painted orange and the other half painted black?
Or maybe put a roof on Princeton Stadium and then use it like the Carrier Dome at Syracuse? Play basketball in the end zone across the football field?
How much could that possibly cost?
Speaking of which, one of the people who used to work at Princeton said when the stadium was completed at a cost of $45 million: "Couldn't they have built a stadium that cost $44 million and then a $1 million dollar house near here that any one who worked in the athletic department could use when they needed it?"
In all seriousness, there is a lot to be said for a basketball-only facility. The seats would be right on top of the court. The sound wouldn't be dispersed throughout a mammoth building. It would be new.
But there is something about Jadwin that TB likes.
When he sat in the balcony the other day, it was really the first time he'd done so for a long period of time during a game. The view was great from either of the two spots he was in, the section all the way in the end nearest Gary Walters' office and then at midcourt.
And yes, there are things about the building that TB would love to change, like the lower bowl seating and the lobby.
But Jadwin has its charm and its practicality. And most importantly, it has its history, something that has been represented even more so in recent years with the banners that now hang there.
This is the same building that has been the home for so many legendary players and coaches in Princeton basketball history, with so many great moments.
As for TB, he's been in the building for so many great games, so many tense endings, so many wonderful nights.
Maybe TB doesn't think about those every day as he walks his 200 yards to work.
But one day Jadwin won't be here anymore.
And TigerBlog, for one, will miss it.
His favorite is the black one with white sleeves, a fairly lightweight one that works well in the late September/early October time. There's also the lightweight rain jacket, which is good pretty much anytime of year, especially when layering.
There's the all black with orange trim one with the thin lining that makes it a good one to wear when it gets a little chillier.
Then, lastly, there's the big winter one, which is the one TB will wear when he vacations at the North Pole one year, since it probably would keep him warm enough all by itself.
It takes a lot to get TB to break out the big one, though. Just as putting on any jacket at all means waving the white flag on summer, putting on the big coat means an acceptance of winter and, even worse, the possibility of snow.
As TB pulled into the parking lot today, he heard the weather on the radio say that it was 26 degrees, with the wind chill at 16. And yet TB refused to put on the big winter coat, so it was a long, freezing walk into Jadwin Gym, as it has been every day this week.
If the walk between the parking lot at Jadwin is 200 yards, then TB estimates that he's walked more than 1,200 miles back and forth through the years.
It long ago stopped being something that TB gave any thought to.
And yet it's important to remember that Jadwin isn't just a place with offices. In fact, to most of the people who come into this building, it's a place to go a few times a year to see a game, not a place to go every day to go to work.
TigerBlog did think about Jadwin as a basketball arena and not just an office building twice this week.
The first time was last Sunday, when TB sat in the balcony for most of the Princeton-St. Joe's men's game. The other time was when he looked at the pictures from Monmouth's new Multipurpose Activities Center, where Princeton defeated Monmouth 64-61 last night.
Jadwin was built more than 40 years ago as what was then a state-of-the-art multipurpose facility, and it's certainly served that purpose. If you've never wandered through the building, it has just about everything: an indoor track, tennis courts, squash courts, strength training facilities, a field turf field, offices, meeting spaces - and of course three basketball courts.
For a department like Princeton's, which has 38 varsity teams and a commitment to broadbased athletic participation, it's a must to have a place like Jadwin.
But as a basketball arena?
Well, TB does love the idea of a 5,000-seat basketball-only facility, with luxury boxes, offices, a wide open concourse from which to see the game, a huge video board, great acoustics and the rest of what comes with a great on-campus arena.
While TB is dreaming, how about having half the seats painted orange and the other half painted black?
Or maybe put a roof on Princeton Stadium and then use it like the Carrier Dome at Syracuse? Play basketball in the end zone across the football field?
How much could that possibly cost?
Speaking of which, one of the people who used to work at Princeton said when the stadium was completed at a cost of $45 million: "Couldn't they have built a stadium that cost $44 million and then a $1 million dollar house near here that any one who worked in the athletic department could use when they needed it?"
In all seriousness, there is a lot to be said for a basketball-only facility. The seats would be right on top of the court. The sound wouldn't be dispersed throughout a mammoth building. It would be new.
But there is something about Jadwin that TB likes.
When he sat in the balcony the other day, it was really the first time he'd done so for a long period of time during a game. The view was great from either of the two spots he was in, the section all the way in the end nearest Gary Walters' office and then at midcourt.
And yes, there are things about the building that TB would love to change, like the lower bowl seating and the lobby.
But Jadwin has its charm and its practicality. And most importantly, it has its history, something that has been represented even more so in recent years with the banners that now hang there.
This is the same building that has been the home for so many legendary players and coaches in Princeton basketball history, with so many great moments.
As for TB, he's been in the building for so many great games, so many tense endings, so many wonderful nights.
Maybe TB doesn't think about those every day as he walks his 200 yards to work.
But one day Jadwin won't be here anymore.
And TigerBlog, for one, will miss it.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Imagine
There's an episode of "WKRP In Cincinnati" in which Mr. Carlson is approached by a local watchdog group about playing lyrics to songs that the group finds offensive. At first, the leader is very buddy-buddy with Carlson, though it quickly becomes obvious that he is not wavering from his agenda.
It starts out with one song, which Mr. Carlson agrees has lyrics that are over the top. Armed with the words, he approaches his top two deejays, Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, and points out that they shouldn't play this song anymore.
Johnny and Venus warn Carlson that if they give in to the one song, the group will be back with additional requests - and with threats. Sure enough, the same man comes back with a list of songs that are not to be played, and when Carlson stands up to him, he begins to go after the station's sponsors.
Eventually, he gets the guy who runs the bait company (TigerBlog believes it was called "Red Wigglers") to bail on the station, which he apologizes for profusely as he admits he feels ashamed for doing so.
In the big scene at the end, the leader of the group comes back another time, trying to make it seem like he and Mr. Carlson are actually on the same side. Carlson then mentions that "other than making an old man feel like a coward," he doesn't see what the group has really accomplished.
He then pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to the guy, saying that Johnny had written them down and asked if they'd be acceptable.
Barely audibly, the man reads the words:
"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today."
He then continues to skim the lyrics, the part about there being no countries, no religion, no possessions. When he's done, he tells Carlson that clearly this would belong on the banned list.
When Carlson points out that there's not an inoffensive word in the song, he then dismisses it by saying a world without religion, without heaven and hell, without possessions is clearly Communist.
Carlson, as he's about to throw him out of his office, says that the author of those words never said that those things don't exist. He said to IMAGINE they don't exist.
The episode, lost in a fluffy - and extremely funny and underrated - sitcom, is one of the most powerful moments in television that TB has ever seen.
The author, of course, was John Lennon, who was shot and killed 30 years ago today in front of his apartment at the Dakota, one block to the west of Central Park.
There are no words that can explain strongly enough to someone who was too young to be around back then just how big a deal Lennon and his group The Beatles were. To many who know them simply from a video game or now that their songs are available on I-tunes, they have no way of knowing the impact that the four long-haired kids from Liverpool had on the entire world.
As for Lennon, he was a hero to the anti-war movement, with songs like "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" and his Christmas song: "Happy XMas - War Is Over."
Lennon also had great solo songs like "Watching The Wheels" and "Instant Karma," not to mention all the legendary songs that he and Paul McCartney wrote together for The Beatles, many of which debuted on I-Tunes recently.
Lennon was also seemingly a pretty down-to-Earth guy, one who mixed with the people on the streets of New York every day, who made time to sign autographs and pose for pictures outside of building, who never ducked the crowd.
In what became his final irony, he could have avoided Marc David Chapman easily had he allowed the car he was in to be driven into the courtyard at the Dakota. Instead, he got out in front, so as not to let down those who were waiting to meet him.
The story of the night of Lennon's murder and how it was first reported on "Monday Night Football" was the subject of an extremely well-done long piece on ESPN the other day.
TB was a big Beatles fan even before he ever heard of Bruce Springsteen, and almost all of his early record purchases were Beatles' albums. TB remembers the day Lennon was shot and what classes were like the next day like it was yesterday - even if it happened 30 years ago.
Women's track and field coach Peter Farrell is one of three Princeton coaches who was already working here when Lennon was killed, along with men's track and field coach Fred Samara and men's swimming coach Rob Orr.
TB knew Farrell, who is as accomplished a social commentator as he is a coach, would have something to say about Lennon, and TB was right.
"Lennon was The Beatles," Farrell said. "His breadth alone made them what they were. I couldn't really take McCartney or George Harrison or Ringo [Starr]. McCartney was saccharin without Lennon. I mean I couldn't sit through a Paul McCartney concert. 'Silly Love Songs?' No way. When Lennon wrote a song, he had something to say."
And then he added this:
"Lennon was the Bruce Springsteen of Great Britain."
John and Paul agreed to have every song either of them wrote for the group to be credited to Lennon and McCartney.
In a similar way, Princeton track is Farrell and Samara.
Track and field is not an easy sport to coach. It goes longer than any other sport at Princeton, beginning with cross country and then including indoor and outdoor. The numbers of athletes involved in the two programs is always more than 100, and coaching sprinters is much different than coaching distance runners or throwers.
It is physically demanding, and it takes a huge emotional toll as well, especially, TB assumes, to go from something like the NCAA cross country championships directly to the indoor season's earliest meet.
That first meet would be this Saturday, when Jadwin Gym hosts the New Year's Invitational for both the men and women. There will be 12 college teams competing, as well as some unattached individuals.
As with any track meet, it will be a well-choreographed and colorful competition, with different skills on display from event to event.
It begins at 11 and runs all day.
Oh, and it's free.
Imagine that.
It starts out with one song, which Mr. Carlson agrees has lyrics that are over the top. Armed with the words, he approaches his top two deejays, Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, and points out that they shouldn't play this song anymore.
Johnny and Venus warn Carlson that if they give in to the one song, the group will be back with additional requests - and with threats. Sure enough, the same man comes back with a list of songs that are not to be played, and when Carlson stands up to him, he begins to go after the station's sponsors.
Eventually, he gets the guy who runs the bait company (TigerBlog believes it was called "Red Wigglers") to bail on the station, which he apologizes for profusely as he admits he feels ashamed for doing so.
In the big scene at the end, the leader of the group comes back another time, trying to make it seem like he and Mr. Carlson are actually on the same side. Carlson then mentions that "other than making an old man feel like a coward," he doesn't see what the group has really accomplished.
He then pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to the guy, saying that Johnny had written them down and asked if they'd be acceptable.
Barely audibly, the man reads the words:
"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today."
He then continues to skim the lyrics, the part about there being no countries, no religion, no possessions. When he's done, he tells Carlson that clearly this would belong on the banned list.
When Carlson points out that there's not an inoffensive word in the song, he then dismisses it by saying a world without religion, without heaven and hell, without possessions is clearly Communist.
Carlson, as he's about to throw him out of his office, says that the author of those words never said that those things don't exist. He said to IMAGINE they don't exist.
The episode, lost in a fluffy - and extremely funny and underrated - sitcom, is one of the most powerful moments in television that TB has ever seen.
The author, of course, was John Lennon, who was shot and killed 30 years ago today in front of his apartment at the Dakota, one block to the west of Central Park.
There are no words that can explain strongly enough to someone who was too young to be around back then just how big a deal Lennon and his group The Beatles were. To many who know them simply from a video game or now that their songs are available on I-tunes, they have no way of knowing the impact that the four long-haired kids from Liverpool had on the entire world.
As for Lennon, he was a hero to the anti-war movement, with songs like "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" and his Christmas song: "Happy XMas - War Is Over."
Lennon also had great solo songs like "Watching The Wheels" and "Instant Karma," not to mention all the legendary songs that he and Paul McCartney wrote together for The Beatles, many of which debuted on I-Tunes recently.
Lennon was also seemingly a pretty down-to-Earth guy, one who mixed with the people on the streets of New York every day, who made time to sign autographs and pose for pictures outside of building, who never ducked the crowd.
In what became his final irony, he could have avoided Marc David Chapman easily had he allowed the car he was in to be driven into the courtyard at the Dakota. Instead, he got out in front, so as not to let down those who were waiting to meet him.
The story of the night of Lennon's murder and how it was first reported on "Monday Night Football" was the subject of an extremely well-done long piece on ESPN the other day.
TB was a big Beatles fan even before he ever heard of Bruce Springsteen, and almost all of his early record purchases were Beatles' albums. TB remembers the day Lennon was shot and what classes were like the next day like it was yesterday - even if it happened 30 years ago.
Women's track and field coach Peter Farrell is one of three Princeton coaches who was already working here when Lennon was killed, along with men's track and field coach Fred Samara and men's swimming coach Rob Orr.
TB knew Farrell, who is as accomplished a social commentator as he is a coach, would have something to say about Lennon, and TB was right.
"Lennon was The Beatles," Farrell said. "His breadth alone made them what they were. I couldn't really take McCartney or George Harrison or Ringo [Starr]. McCartney was saccharin without Lennon. I mean I couldn't sit through a Paul McCartney concert. 'Silly Love Songs?' No way. When Lennon wrote a song, he had something to say."
And then he added this:
"Lennon was the Bruce Springsteen of Great Britain."
John and Paul agreed to have every song either of them wrote for the group to be credited to Lennon and McCartney.
In a similar way, Princeton track is Farrell and Samara.
Track and field is not an easy sport to coach. It goes longer than any other sport at Princeton, beginning with cross country and then including indoor and outdoor. The numbers of athletes involved in the two programs is always more than 100, and coaching sprinters is much different than coaching distance runners or throwers.
It is physically demanding, and it takes a huge emotional toll as well, especially, TB assumes, to go from something like the NCAA cross country championships directly to the indoor season's earliest meet.
That first meet would be this Saturday, when Jadwin Gym hosts the New Year's Invitational for both the men and women. There will be 12 college teams competing, as well as some unattached individuals.
As with any track meet, it will be a well-choreographed and colorful competition, with different skills on display from event to event.
It begins at 11 and runs all day.
Oh, and it's free.
Imagine that.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Turn Out The Lights
If you were born in the early ’60s and grew up essentially in the ’70s, then you probably were like TigerBlog, whose parents let him stay up to watch at first the opening kickoff of "Monday Night Football" and then the first quarter and eventually the halftime highlights.
If all you know about "Monday Night Football" is what you've seen in the last two decades or so, then you have no idea what it was all about when it - and TigerBlog - was young.
Back then, you actually had to change the channel on the television set by walking over to the TV and turning a dial clockwise or counter-clockwise. Instead of having hundreds of viewing options at any one time, there were just a handful of channels.
NFL coverage back then consisted of watching the local teams and one national game per Sunday, at either 1 or 4. There were no primetime games, no cable outlets, no internet sites, no NFL Network, nothing. It was just a 30-minute pregame show and the games themselves.
In 1970, ABC bought into the football television world that to that point belonged solely to NBC (the AFL/AFC games) and CBS (the NFL/NFC games) and decided to move its game to Monday nights.
The result was a landmark moment in television, American sport and popular culture, all of which converged for really the first time.
Up until then, announcers were like Curt Gowdy or Jim Simpson or any number of men who were always secondary to the game and especially to the players, who were exalted. Until MNF came along, sport was sport and entertainment was entertainment, and they didn't overlap.
Until, that is, a New York lawyer and a real Cowboy from Dallas came together in the broadcast booth every Monday at 9 Eastern time.
Howard Cosell was a graduate of NYU undergrad and law school. Don Meredith grew up in the Texas town of Mount Vernon and then played for SMU and the Cowboys, having never played a home game outside of the Dallas area.
Cosell was a blowhard with an opinion on everything, which at that time wasn't what color commentators were supposed to have. His mantra was to "tell it like it is," and he was the first to have a defining moment of showing highlights of the previous day's games during halftime of MNF.
With his "nasal twang" as Oscar Madison once called it on an episode of "The Odd Couple," Cosell every year would win the poll in TV Guide that asked readers who their favorite sportscaster was. Oh, he'd also win the other one, asking who their least favorite was.
As for Meredith, he was a down-home folksy ex-Cowboys quarterback who was as much a comedian as he was an analyst and who was the basis for the quarterback character in the classic sports book "North Dallas 40." His signature call was to sing the Willie Nelson song "Turn Out The Lights" at the point of the game where it was obvious one team had won.
And so, if you are in TB's age bracket or older, you had to be sad yesterday to hear that Meredith had passed away, at the age of 72.
If you never saw Cosell and Meredith, know this: Every single thing that sports television/radio has become today started with those two. And the fact that it is now impossible to separate sports and entertainment on TV goes back to their broadcast booth.
Take for instance the Heisman Trophy presentation. It used to be announced during the day with no fanfare. Now, like everything else that TV has touched, it has become an extravaganza to be hyped, hyped, hyped.
As an aside, TB was watching one of the football shows the other day and heard a discussion of whether or not Auburn's Cam Newton is the greatest college football player of all-time. For some reason, the people on the panel actually found this a reasonable point and two even agreed. Just to clarify, Newton is not in the top, oh, 50 best college players of all time.
The Ivy League's decision to announce its Bushnell Cup winner in a Heisman-style way, with four finalists, was new this year.
In the past, the league announced the Player of the Year for football as it does with all other sports, at the same time the all-league team was announced. This time, there were four finalists: Harvard running back Gino Gordon, Dartmouth running back Nick Schwieger, Penn quarterback Billy Ragone and Princeton receiver Trey Peacock.
The winners were announced yesterday in New York at the National Football Foundation event, and Gordon and Schwieger shared the honor.
TigerBlog is on record as having said, quite impartially, that Peacock was the best player in the league this year and that his numbers would have been ridiculous had starting quarterback Tommy Wornham not gotten hurt in Week 5.
And TB would like to put up a disclaimer for the rest of this and say that it is pure conjecture, but it is also interesting to think about.
Since Gordon and Schwieger tied, they had to have had an even number of coaches who voted for them. If it was 4-4, then why would there have been two other finalists (and not just whoever was the distant third)? If it was 3-3, then that left two votes.
Penn's Ragone had a great year, but Penn won as a team, not because it had a star quarterback. In fact, if you had to write down the best players on Penn's team in order, would Ragone have made the top five? That's not a knock on him; it's just that the Quakers were so good in spots that don't usually generate Player of the Year votes, such as along both lines and all throughout the interior defense.
TB's point is that perhaps Peacock came within one coaches' vote of winning.
And as for the way the Ivy League handled it, TB is fine with it. The new method generated some interest on the league's fan poll and definitely on the various Ivy League blogs and such, and that can only be good for the league.
And, of course, it's how sports works these days. Why announce the winner when you can use it as part of a larger event?
Hey, it might seem small in the case of the Bushnell Cup, but like everything else these days, its roots go all the way back to a broadcast booth in the 1970s and two guys, one who died awhile ago and another who died yesterday.
If all you know about "Monday Night Football" is what you've seen in the last two decades or so, then you have no idea what it was all about when it - and TigerBlog - was young.
Back then, you actually had to change the channel on the television set by walking over to the TV and turning a dial clockwise or counter-clockwise. Instead of having hundreds of viewing options at any one time, there were just a handful of channels.
NFL coverage back then consisted of watching the local teams and one national game per Sunday, at either 1 or 4. There were no primetime games, no cable outlets, no internet sites, no NFL Network, nothing. It was just a 30-minute pregame show and the games themselves.
In 1970, ABC bought into the football television world that to that point belonged solely to NBC (the AFL/AFC games) and CBS (the NFL/NFC games) and decided to move its game to Monday nights.
The result was a landmark moment in television, American sport and popular culture, all of which converged for really the first time.
Up until then, announcers were like Curt Gowdy or Jim Simpson or any number of men who were always secondary to the game and especially to the players, who were exalted. Until MNF came along, sport was sport and entertainment was entertainment, and they didn't overlap.
Until, that is, a New York lawyer and a real Cowboy from Dallas came together in the broadcast booth every Monday at 9 Eastern time.
Howard Cosell was a graduate of NYU undergrad and law school. Don Meredith grew up in the Texas town of Mount Vernon and then played for SMU and the Cowboys, having never played a home game outside of the Dallas area.
Cosell was a blowhard with an opinion on everything, which at that time wasn't what color commentators were supposed to have. His mantra was to "tell it like it is," and he was the first to have a defining moment of showing highlights of the previous day's games during halftime of MNF.
With his "nasal twang" as Oscar Madison once called it on an episode of "The Odd Couple," Cosell every year would win the poll in TV Guide that asked readers who their favorite sportscaster was. Oh, he'd also win the other one, asking who their least favorite was.
As for Meredith, he was a down-home folksy ex-Cowboys quarterback who was as much a comedian as he was an analyst and who was the basis for the quarterback character in the classic sports book "North Dallas 40." His signature call was to sing the Willie Nelson song "Turn Out The Lights" at the point of the game where it was obvious one team had won.
And so, if you are in TB's age bracket or older, you had to be sad yesterday to hear that Meredith had passed away, at the age of 72.
If you never saw Cosell and Meredith, know this: Every single thing that sports television/radio has become today started with those two. And the fact that it is now impossible to separate sports and entertainment on TV goes back to their broadcast booth.
Take for instance the Heisman Trophy presentation. It used to be announced during the day with no fanfare. Now, like everything else that TV has touched, it has become an extravaganza to be hyped, hyped, hyped.
As an aside, TB was watching one of the football shows the other day and heard a discussion of whether or not Auburn's Cam Newton is the greatest college football player of all-time. For some reason, the people on the panel actually found this a reasonable point and two even agreed. Just to clarify, Newton is not in the top, oh, 50 best college players of all time.
The Ivy League's decision to announce its Bushnell Cup winner in a Heisman-style way, with four finalists, was new this year.
In the past, the league announced the Player of the Year for football as it does with all other sports, at the same time the all-league team was announced. This time, there were four finalists: Harvard running back Gino Gordon, Dartmouth running back Nick Schwieger, Penn quarterback Billy Ragone and Princeton receiver Trey Peacock.
The winners were announced yesterday in New York at the National Football Foundation event, and Gordon and Schwieger shared the honor.
TigerBlog is on record as having said, quite impartially, that Peacock was the best player in the league this year and that his numbers would have been ridiculous had starting quarterback Tommy Wornham not gotten hurt in Week 5.
And TB would like to put up a disclaimer for the rest of this and say that it is pure conjecture, but it is also interesting to think about.
Since Gordon and Schwieger tied, they had to have had an even number of coaches who voted for them. If it was 4-4, then why would there have been two other finalists (and not just whoever was the distant third)? If it was 3-3, then that left two votes.
Penn's Ragone had a great year, but Penn won as a team, not because it had a star quarterback. In fact, if you had to write down the best players on Penn's team in order, would Ragone have made the top five? That's not a knock on him; it's just that the Quakers were so good in spots that don't usually generate Player of the Year votes, such as along both lines and all throughout the interior defense.
TB's point is that perhaps Peacock came within one coaches' vote of winning.
And as for the way the Ivy League handled it, TB is fine with it. The new method generated some interest on the league's fan poll and definitely on the various Ivy League blogs and such, and that can only be good for the league.
And, of course, it's how sports works these days. Why announce the winner when you can use it as part of a larger event?
Hey, it might seem small in the case of the Bushnell Cup, but like everything else these days, its roots go all the way back to a broadcast booth in the 1970s and two guys, one who died awhile ago and another who died yesterday.
Monday, December 6, 2010
A Friday In Baltimore
The best public speaker that TigerBlog has ever heard is, by far, Dick Vitale. Whether you find him overbearing or too over-the-top (or way too pro-Duke) on television, it doesn't change the hold that he can have over a room.
TB has seen Vitale in several different settings through the years, from a small handful of people to an informal gathering to a spotlight on him at center court in an arena with 15,000 people in attendance. It hasn't mattered. Every single time, he has been enthralling, funny, emotional, serious, emphatic and empathic.
Each time, TB has been too moved to muster any response other than something like "wow."
The second-best public speaker TB has heard is former Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril. Unlike Vitale, Carril doesn't have the overwhelming emotion involved when he speaks, but Carril can tell stories that are funny while also talking about the great lessons that he's learned in his life.
Both men speak without a script, and both speak directly from the heart.
TB was at the 1992 Princeton men's basketball banquet when Carril first awarded the Paul Friedman Award, given to that member of the program who "does his very best every day in every way."
Carril took about 20 minutes to introduce the story of how he came to decide to have this award, about how he had told Friedman that he didn't think he could play at Princeton, how Friedman came to Princeton anyway, how he had been a jayvee player, how he'd worked his way to the varsity team - only to be afflicted with a terminal case of cancer. Even then, Carril told the audience, Friedman continued to work as a coach with the jayvee program until he couldn't any longer. Eventually, Friedman finished his thesis and graduated in 1981, only to pass away a short time later.
Carril then brought Friedman's parents up, and they spoke about how being part of Princeton basketball had helped keep their son alive. Together with Carril, the Friedmans presented the first award to Sean Jackson.
By the time they did, every single person in the room was in tears.
Carril prefaced his remarks about Friedman by referring to what is essentially the Princeton basketball MVP award, the B.F. Bunn Trophy, named for a 1907 grad and given out since 1931. Nobody knew who B.F. Bunn was, Carril would say, and so you measure that award not by who it is named for but rather the people who have won it.
He said that for the new award, he wanted everyone to know who Paul Friedman was.
TigerBlog felt the same way Friday in Baltimore, when he accepted the Doyle Smith Award from the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association at the Intercollegiate Men's Lacrosse Coaches' Association convention. The Doyle Smith Award is the USILA's annual media award.
The room at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront was filled with men's lacrosse coaches, almost all of whom were from the Division II or Division III level. Everywhere you looked, there were shirts that said "F&M Lacrosse" or "LeMoyne Lacrosse" or, at TB's table, "Kean Lacrosse."
It was a younger crowd, with many who were just starting out in the field. Also in the room sat some of the biggest names in the sport: Dom Starsia from Virginia, Richie Meade from Navy, Dave Pietramala from Johns Hopkins, Jeff Tambroni from Penn State, Tony Seaman from Towson, Don Zimmerman from UMBC, John Danowski from Duke, Scott Marr of Albany, Joe Breschi from North Carolina - and of course Bill Tierney from Denver.
The Ivy League coaches were late getting to the luncheon because their meeting ran long, but Chris Bates also was there by the time the awards part started moving along.
The emcee was Carl Runk, the longtime coach at Towson. To say that Runk was funny wouldn't do his performance justice. He has enough stories to fill a book (which is something he's currently doing), but here were just two:
* he told a story about how he'd woken his wife up the other day and reminded her of something her father - a local chief of polic - had said to him a long time ago when they were first dating, how if he wasn't careful, he'd send him to prison for 35 years. When his wife asked why he was bringing that up now, Runk replied: "Because I would have been out by now."
* when he was a kid, he saved (or stole) old bottles to return for the deposits so he'd be able to afford to buy a lacrosse stick. When an old Polish man saw it and asked what it was, Runk explained it was a lacrosse stick. He then said that the old man told him something in Polish, which he then repeated perfectly, following it up with: "That was 55 years ago, and I've never forgotten what he said. I have no idea what it means but I've never forgotten it."
The two highlights were when Meade emotionally introduced one of his former coaches, longtime Nassau Community College Richie Speckman, whose remarks included his belief that his players have an opportunity to learn something through competing in lacrosse - or athletics in general - that cannot be duplicated in a strictly academic setting, and when former Cornell coach Richie Moran accepted the Spirit of the Game award.
Moran spoke directly to the young coaches in the room about his experiences, how much lacrosse had done for him and how important it was for them to honor and respect the tradition of the game. His speech was one of the best TB has ever heard.
As for TB, his part was very small. He was the third person to accept his award, after the first person (Georgetown coach Dave Urick, who won the USILA's lifetime achievement award) didn't speak and after Maryland assistant coach Dave Slafkosky said just one sentence after he won the service award.
But TB, like Carril, wanted those there to know who the award was named for and what he had meant for the game.
And so he spoke, briefly, first about Doyle himself. Doyle had been one of the first people TB had met in lacrosse, back when Doyle was the sports information contact at Virginia.
TB said that Doyle was a kind man and that it was special to win an award named for someone he considered a friend, though it was also bittersweet because both Doyle and last year's winner, Mike Colley, another friend from UVa, had died so young.
Afterwards, TB received two emails from people who played at Virginia back when Doyle was there, two men TB has never met.
The first was from a man named Tom Duquette, who said this about Doyle:
I matriculated at the University of Virginia, and in the fall of 1969 met E Doyle. He was a mentor and a friend until he died. For 10 years I was his spotter in football and his visiting team statistician in basketball. Watching him defend my assist stats to a less than happy Dean Smith is one of my fondest memories. Doyle helped many young lacrosse players at Virginia find their way, and I was fortunate enough to be one. Doyle helped me get to Australia as a member of the US National team in 1974. When he called and shared his diagnosis of Parkinson's, he was of more help to me than I to him, and when he passed away I was honored to be one of the speakers at his memorial service. Trust me, as one who knew E Doyle almost too well, he would have been the first to shake your hand and celebrate your work. Following hard by, he would have encouraged you to be keep it up and challenged you to keep getting better.
The second was from a man named Kris Snyder:
He was so intelligent but accessible to all the athletes; very demanding but equally fair; extremely generous but expected us to treat others in a similar manner. All these attributes set the bar high for me (and others) and, by example, gave me the tools to tackle life away from the comforts of college. I relocated to Seattle not long after my UVA years but continued to stay in touch with Doyle nearly every week afterwards until his untimely passing. He continued to offer me great advice as I moved through life's paces and still think of him whenever I have tough decisions to make. He was the absolute definition of a great friend. I was honored to be at his table for his Hall of Fame induction and be part of the group that created the Doyle Smith Cup, awarded in his memory to the annual winner of the UVA - Hopkins game.
TigerBlog grew up by the Jersey Shore, where the sport of lacrosse didn't exist. He didn't see his first game until he was in college, and he had almost no background in the sport when he was first sent to cover the 1990 Princeton-Bucknell game on a freezing day at Finney Field.
By that time, Doyle Smith was already a giant in the game, one of the most respected members of the lacrosse community and one of the most important people involved in the coming explosion of the sport. He had already been diagnosed with Parkinson's, a disease that he would fight until his death in 2004.
The more TB thought back about his time with Doyle, the more one thing kept coming back to him - Doyle was always happy to see TB. He would always, always give TB a hug when he saw him and greet him with a huge smile.
TB mentioned that there was no way that he would ever have won an award in the sport of lacrosse had it not been for Tierney and for TB's good fortunate to stumble upon the Princeton program in 1990. Since Friday, TB has received a bunch of emails from former Princeton players, and he's appreciated every one of them.
To be honest, the opportunity to work with Tierney, David Metzbower, Bryce Chase and the long line of young assistant coaches on their staff all those years was great, but the real award TB won was the chance to be around the great players and people who have worn the uniform here the last 21 seasons and who continue to do so.
When Tierney left for Denver in June 2009, TB wondered if Princeton lacrosse would ever be the same. Now, in more than a year with Chris Bates, TB realizes that he couldn't possibly have asked for more in Tierney's replacement.
TB has been extremely proud to be associated with Princeton lacrosse all these years, whether it's been on the day of an NCAA championship or after an excruciating loss.
Winning the Doyle Smith Award is one of the greatest honors TB has ever had, and he didn't realize how much it meant to him until he was there Friday. To be recognized by the lacrosse coaches for work that is done almost exclusively out of the spotlight is humbling.
As TB said, he had no background in the sport at all until he started following it at Princeton. Today, lacrosse has become an important part of TB's life, and both TigerBlog Jr. and Little Miss TigerBlog are growing up playing the game.
TB owes a lot of that to the people who were in the room in Baltimore Friday.
And to one who wasn't.
The name "Doyle Smith" didn't belong to just some forgotten person from a long time ago, and having an award in his honor every year helps keep his spirit alive.
Doyle Smith was a tremendous human being. TB is quite honored to have the award that bears his name - and the memory of his time with an old friend.
Friday, December 3, 2010
I'm Honored
One of the very first people that TigerBlog got to know in the world of college lacrosse was Doyle Smith, who was the sports information contact at Virginia and an unparalleled giant in the game. He was a kind man who treated TigerBlog like a nephew of sorts, perhaps because he saw how much TB was embracing the sport.
Today in Baltimore, TB will be accepting the Doyle Smith Award, given by the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association in Doyle's honor each year to recognize a person who, like Doyle himself, has contributed to the promotion of the sport. Last year's winner was another friend from UVa, Michael Colley. Unfortunately, both Doyle and Michael passed away tragically young, and TB would have been happier had they both been there to share in the event.
If given the opportunity to speak, TB will thank Princeton Director of Athletics Gary Walters for giving him the chance to be as creative as he would like. He will also thank current assistant coaches Greg Raymond and Stephen Brundage, long-time program consilere Bryce Chase, former associate head coach David Metzbower, former head coach Bill Tierney and current head coach Chris Bates, as well as all of the great young men who have played lacrosse at Princeton in the last 22 years.
TB-Baltimore, who has spent more than his share of time listening to TB talk about the game, took it upon himself to write a guest entry. TB, who knows that much of that time that TB-Baltimore spent listening was against his will, was extremely touched by the gesture:
TigerBlog takes plenty of good-natured ribbing from friends and colleagues about his devotion to lacrosse, whether the Princeton variety or TB Junior’s various youth teams. Occasionally, he even takes some serious criticism from readers of this blog, who apparently enjoy reading the “labels” on the right in the hope that one day all of Princeton’s 38 sports will have the same number of TigerBlog entries.
TB’s devotion to the sport has now earned him more than the occasional comment. It’s earned him the Doyle Smith Sports Information/Media Award from the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association, one of several honors that the USILA will present at its annual meeting this week.
Doyle Smith was a long-time sports information officer at the University of Virginia who is credited with standardizing the statistics of modern-day lacrosse. He began his own love affair with the game as a student at Johns Hopkins in the 1960’s; by the time he retired from UVa, in 1999, he was regarded as the game’s ultimate historian, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of college lacrosse. In 2000, he became the first and only person who never played or coached to be inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. Smith suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which eventually took his life in 2004.
In 2006, Hopkins and UVa began playing each season for “The Doyle Smith Cup.”
While readers of this blog may know about TB’s own encyclopedic knowledge of the last 20 years or so of Princeton lacrosse, they may not know about his other contributions to the promotion and media coverage of the college game.
Just two years ago, he joined with a group of colleagues to create a new official NCAA lacrosse statistics manual, one that the group dedicated to Smith’s memory. For the past six years, he’s served as the chief statistician for the NCAA championship weekend in May. With the possible exception of a few writers for the fantastic Inside Lacrosse magazine and website, no person has done more or better long-form feature writing about lacrosse in the last 15 years.
Like Smith, TB didn’t grow up with lacrosse. He came to it later, bringing both his experience as a newspaper reporter and his love of college football and college basketball to the table. The newspaper background always gave him a good sense of what made a great story, whether it was written by him or someone else. As for the latter, he was one of the first in his field to begin to treat lacrosse with the same kind of respect given to football or basketball. To TB, and others like him, lacrosse was “big-time” well before the NCAA championship game was played in front of 45,000 fans in NFL stadiums.
TB would be the first to tell you that his love of the game never would have existed if not for his friend Bill Tierney and his Princeton lacrosse program; being around for six NCAA championships in 10 years and watching stars like Justin Tortolani, Scott Bacigalupo, Kevin Lowe, Jesse Hubbard and Ryan Boyle would have that effect on a lot of people. Being around one of the sport’s great dynasties has done more than just give TB great memories, though. It’s given him a great respect for the game itself, respect that he’s transferred to the next generation and to many his own age.
Promoting lacrosse isn’t always easy. The game is seen as insular and lacking in diversity, played first at prep schools in a relatively small area of the country and then on the collegiate level at a relatively small number of institutions. The game is sometimes seen as being important solely to “the lacrosse community”; there would never be a reference to the “football community” or “basketball community,” since it’s assumed that there is such a large following that those communities are almost universal.
Debating those perceptions is fodder for another time. The fact is that the media coverage of the college game has grown exponentially since the beginning of the 21st century; as TB often says, fans that used to be happy to find one college game a week on TV anywhere now have to miss games they want to watch because there are too many on television. The NCAA Division I semifinals were played in prime time last season.
Being there myself, it was simply an electric atmosphere under the lights at M&T Bank Stadium when UVa met Duke in one of the classic NCAA tournament games ever played.
Men like Bill Tierney and his Hall of Fame coaching colleagues have a lot to do with that, as do all of the great players who starred for Coach T and his fellow coaching greats.
But you shouldn’t forget about the men and women whose love of the game, whether lifelong or just for a few years, made it much easier for fans to follow and enjoy the fastest sport on two feet. They’ve been a big part of it too.
So congratulations, TB. The world of college lacrosse wouldn’t be the same without you.
Today in Baltimore, TB will be accepting the Doyle Smith Award, given by the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association in Doyle's honor each year to recognize a person who, like Doyle himself, has contributed to the promotion of the sport. Last year's winner was another friend from UVa, Michael Colley. Unfortunately, both Doyle and Michael passed away tragically young, and TB would have been happier had they both been there to share in the event.
If given the opportunity to speak, TB will thank Princeton Director of Athletics Gary Walters for giving him the chance to be as creative as he would like. He will also thank current assistant coaches Greg Raymond and Stephen Brundage, long-time program consilere Bryce Chase, former associate head coach David Metzbower, former head coach Bill Tierney and current head coach Chris Bates, as well as all of the great young men who have played lacrosse at Princeton in the last 22 years.
TB-Baltimore, who has spent more than his share of time listening to TB talk about the game, took it upon himself to write a guest entry. TB, who knows that much of that time that TB-Baltimore spent listening was against his will, was extremely touched by the gesture:
TigerBlog takes plenty of good-natured ribbing from friends and colleagues about his devotion to lacrosse, whether the Princeton variety or TB Junior’s various youth teams. Occasionally, he even takes some serious criticism from readers of this blog, who apparently enjoy reading the “labels” on the right in the hope that one day all of Princeton’s 38 sports will have the same number of TigerBlog entries.
TB’s devotion to the sport has now earned him more than the occasional comment. It’s earned him the Doyle Smith Sports Information/Media Award from the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association, one of several honors that the USILA will present at its annual meeting this week.
Doyle Smith was a long-time sports information officer at the University of Virginia who is credited with standardizing the statistics of modern-day lacrosse. He began his own love affair with the game as a student at Johns Hopkins in the 1960’s; by the time he retired from UVa, in 1999, he was regarded as the game’s ultimate historian, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of college lacrosse. In 2000, he became the first and only person who never played or coached to be inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. Smith suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which eventually took his life in 2004.
In 2006, Hopkins and UVa began playing each season for “The Doyle Smith Cup.”
While readers of this blog may know about TB’s own encyclopedic knowledge of the last 20 years or so of Princeton lacrosse, they may not know about his other contributions to the promotion and media coverage of the college game.
Just two years ago, he joined with a group of colleagues to create a new official NCAA lacrosse statistics manual, one that the group dedicated to Smith’s memory. For the past six years, he’s served as the chief statistician for the NCAA championship weekend in May. With the possible exception of a few writers for the fantastic Inside Lacrosse magazine and website, no person has done more or better long-form feature writing about lacrosse in the last 15 years.
Like Smith, TB didn’t grow up with lacrosse. He came to it later, bringing both his experience as a newspaper reporter and his love of college football and college basketball to the table. The newspaper background always gave him a good sense of what made a great story, whether it was written by him or someone else. As for the latter, he was one of the first in his field to begin to treat lacrosse with the same kind of respect given to football or basketball. To TB, and others like him, lacrosse was “big-time” well before the NCAA championship game was played in front of 45,000 fans in NFL stadiums.
TB would be the first to tell you that his love of the game never would have existed if not for his friend Bill Tierney and his Princeton lacrosse program; being around for six NCAA championships in 10 years and watching stars like Justin Tortolani, Scott Bacigalupo, Kevin Lowe, Jesse Hubbard and Ryan Boyle would have that effect on a lot of people. Being around one of the sport’s great dynasties has done more than just give TB great memories, though. It’s given him a great respect for the game itself, respect that he’s transferred to the next generation and to many his own age.
Promoting lacrosse isn’t always easy. The game is seen as insular and lacking in diversity, played first at prep schools in a relatively small area of the country and then on the collegiate level at a relatively small number of institutions. The game is sometimes seen as being important solely to “the lacrosse community”; there would never be a reference to the “football community” or “basketball community,” since it’s assumed that there is such a large following that those communities are almost universal.
Debating those perceptions is fodder for another time. The fact is that the media coverage of the college game has grown exponentially since the beginning of the 21st century; as TB often says, fans that used to be happy to find one college game a week on TV anywhere now have to miss games they want to watch because there are too many on television. The NCAA Division I semifinals were played in prime time last season.
Being there myself, it was simply an electric atmosphere under the lights at M&T Bank Stadium when UVa met Duke in one of the classic NCAA tournament games ever played.
Men like Bill Tierney and his Hall of Fame coaching colleagues have a lot to do with that, as do all of the great players who starred for Coach T and his fellow coaching greats.
But you shouldn’t forget about the men and women whose love of the game, whether lifelong or just for a few years, made it much easier for fans to follow and enjoy the fastest sport on two feet. They’ve been a big part of it too.
So congratulations, TB. The world of college lacrosse wouldn’t be the same without you.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Parcells, Barlow And Barlow
TigerBlog spent the first half of his time in the newspaper business covering high school sports and the second half of his time there covering colleges.
Every now and then, there'd be something a little different, and TB did spend some time covering some of the local pro teams.
In his entire experience in athletics, nobody has ever intimidated him the way Bill Parcells did. Parcells, then the Giants coach, didn't even need to look at TB or anything like that. His presence was enough to do the trick in a manner that nobody else has ever matched.
TB remembers one day at a Parcell's interview session in the preseason in which the coach absolutely crushed a reporter for a question he didn't like. As it happened, TB was standing close to the front, though off to the side, and the whole time Parcells was taking apart the reporter, TB was thinking "who is he to do this? He's a football coach. Shouldn't somebody call him on this behavior?"
Suddenly, Parcells looked from one side to the other and made eye contact with TigerBlog, as if he knew what TB was thinking, and said: "Don't you agree with me?"
TB remembers muttering something similar to what Kramer did in the episode of Seinfeld when George's girlfriend comes out of the pool at the house in the Hamptons.
TigerBlog has been in press conferences with many similar coaches, yet nobody impacted him like Parcells did. TB never really understood exactly what separated Parcells from some of the others he seen - until he saw the NFL Films piece entitled "Bill Parcells, Reflections On A Life In Football."
After watching it, TigerBlog has a better understanding of why Parcells left him so intimidated all those years ago: It was because Parcells was a bully without meaning to be one.
The documentary shows any number of examples of when Parcells would rip into an assistant coach or a player in what seemed to be a highly personal manner, only to expect to be forgiven for doing so immediately. It was like he had no memory of it. And this was to people like Charlie Weiss and Romeo Crennell, whose names should be familiar to most football fans.
In fact, he comes across as a funny, engaging guy who never forgot his roots, who needs to be in control of every situation, who is extremely loyal to his guys, who understands how to motivate, who has, uh, a bit of an ego and who looks like he'd be fun to hang out with.
Adding it all up, Parcells is complex, somewhat larger than life and, to a young reporter, frightening.
The best part for TB was when the documentary clipped together a thread of Parcells during interview sessions. It put TB right back to his own experiences.
The Parcells documentary was produced by Chris Barlow, who certainly got access to a ton of people to talk about Parcells. Barlow was also part of the piece on the "America's Game" series that featured the Giants' upset win over the Patriots.
In addition to being a veteran at NFL Films, Chris Barlow is also the brother of Princeton soccer coach Jim Barlow.
While Chris was immersed in Bill Parcells, Jim was busy putting together his best season at Princeton.
The Tigers went 13-4-1 overall and became the first group in the history of the men's soccer program to go 7-0-0 in the league.
Princeton's 2010 men's soccer team started out 1-3-1 before winning 12 straight games, a school record. The season was filled with great games and great performances, especially considering how tough Ivy League men's soccer is.
And then it ended abruptly, with a loss at home to a tough UMBC team in the first round of the NCAA tournament. That loss came three days after the Tigers did not get a bye in the first round, something that would have made sense considering three of the remaining seven Ivy teams got at-large bids.
And, of course, those three teams all won their first games. And two of them won their second, earning spots in the Sweet 16 before they both lost on the road in California.
All of this begs the question of whether you would have rather been the Ivy League champion - with a perfect league record, no less - or not have won the league but reached the Sweet 16 of the tournament.
There's something to be said for both. And in the interest of complete honesty, perhaps if this were "BearBlog" or "DartBlog," then the answer would be different.
But there is something to be said for putting together a nearly three-month run to achieve something that nobody else in program history had ever done. That's not something that could be ruined by one 90-minute game.
For the other Ivies, the NCAA tournament was a way to salvage the season, and clearly they did, especially Brown and Dartmouth.
But TB will take what Princeton did, a tangible achievement that also included wins over all three of those schools.
Does it make the fact that Princeton was the first Ivy out of the tournament any easier to take? Probably not. And the Brown and Dartmouth players also have their own tangible accomplishment to point to, and it's an impressive one.
In TB's mind, it doesn't beat what Princeton did.
Every now and then, there'd be something a little different, and TB did spend some time covering some of the local pro teams.
In his entire experience in athletics, nobody has ever intimidated him the way Bill Parcells did. Parcells, then the Giants coach, didn't even need to look at TB or anything like that. His presence was enough to do the trick in a manner that nobody else has ever matched.
TB remembers one day at a Parcell's interview session in the preseason in which the coach absolutely crushed a reporter for a question he didn't like. As it happened, TB was standing close to the front, though off to the side, and the whole time Parcells was taking apart the reporter, TB was thinking "who is he to do this? He's a football coach. Shouldn't somebody call him on this behavior?"
Suddenly, Parcells looked from one side to the other and made eye contact with TigerBlog, as if he knew what TB was thinking, and said: "Don't you agree with me?"
TB remembers muttering something similar to what Kramer did in the episode of Seinfeld when George's girlfriend comes out of the pool at the house in the Hamptons.
TigerBlog has been in press conferences with many similar coaches, yet nobody impacted him like Parcells did. TB never really understood exactly what separated Parcells from some of the others he seen - until he saw the NFL Films piece entitled "Bill Parcells, Reflections On A Life In Football."
After watching it, TigerBlog has a better understanding of why Parcells left him so intimidated all those years ago: It was because Parcells was a bully without meaning to be one.
The documentary shows any number of examples of when Parcells would rip into an assistant coach or a player in what seemed to be a highly personal manner, only to expect to be forgiven for doing so immediately. It was like he had no memory of it. And this was to people like Charlie Weiss and Romeo Crennell, whose names should be familiar to most football fans.
In fact, he comes across as a funny, engaging guy who never forgot his roots, who needs to be in control of every situation, who is extremely loyal to his guys, who understands how to motivate, who has, uh, a bit of an ego and who looks like he'd be fun to hang out with.
Adding it all up, Parcells is complex, somewhat larger than life and, to a young reporter, frightening.
The best part for TB was when the documentary clipped together a thread of Parcells during interview sessions. It put TB right back to his own experiences.
The Parcells documentary was produced by Chris Barlow, who certainly got access to a ton of people to talk about Parcells. Barlow was also part of the piece on the "America's Game" series that featured the Giants' upset win over the Patriots.
In addition to being a veteran at NFL Films, Chris Barlow is also the brother of Princeton soccer coach Jim Barlow.
While Chris was immersed in Bill Parcells, Jim was busy putting together his best season at Princeton.
The Tigers went 13-4-1 overall and became the first group in the history of the men's soccer program to go 7-0-0 in the league.
Princeton's 2010 men's soccer team started out 1-3-1 before winning 12 straight games, a school record. The season was filled with great games and great performances, especially considering how tough Ivy League men's soccer is.
And then it ended abruptly, with a loss at home to a tough UMBC team in the first round of the NCAA tournament. That loss came three days after the Tigers did not get a bye in the first round, something that would have made sense considering three of the remaining seven Ivy teams got at-large bids.
And, of course, those three teams all won their first games. And two of them won their second, earning spots in the Sweet 16 before they both lost on the road in California.
All of this begs the question of whether you would have rather been the Ivy League champion - with a perfect league record, no less - or not have won the league but reached the Sweet 16 of the tournament.
There's something to be said for both. And in the interest of complete honesty, perhaps if this were "BearBlog" or "DartBlog," then the answer would be different.
But there is something to be said for putting together a nearly three-month run to achieve something that nobody else in program history had ever done. That's not something that could be ruined by one 90-minute game.
For the other Ivies, the NCAA tournament was a way to salvage the season, and clearly they did, especially Brown and Dartmouth.
But TB will take what Princeton did, a tangible achievement that also included wins over all three of those schools.
Does it make the fact that Princeton was the first Ivy out of the tournament any easier to take? Probably not. And the Brown and Dartmouth players also have their own tangible accomplishment to point to, and it's an impressive one.
In TB's mind, it doesn't beat what Princeton did.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Plenty Of Points
One day back in 1996, then-Princeton men's basketball coach Bill Carmody was talking about his team's Division III opponent, which would be coming up in a few weeks after exam break.
The opponent was Hamilton, and the team had gotten off to a good start, going unbeaten through seven games, and Carmody was talking about how tough it was going to be to play them later on. TigerBlog was keeping close tabs, waiting to point out when Hamilton finally lost, which happened in Game 8.
It led to this actual conversation:
TB: "Hamilton lost."
BC: "Who beat them?"
TB: "SUNY-Oneonta."
BC: "Home or away?"
TB: "At Oneonta."
BC: "You're not going to win there."
Anyway, the final was Princeton 90, Hamilton 48. Along with the 90-49 win over Catholic three years later, it marked the most points a Princeton team under Carmody ever scored in a game. For Division I purposes, Carmody's teams never scored more than 88.
As for John Thompson, his high score in four years with the Tigers was 99, scored against another Division III opponent, Ursinus. TB remembers being glad that Princeton didn't reach triple figures, something that hasn't happened in a Princeton game since the Tigers scored 108 against Yale on Feb. 26, 1971; TB didn't want to see it happen again against a D-III team.
As for a Division I opponent, Thompson reached as high as 89, in an 89-75 win at Lafayette in a 2002 game that TB 1) was at and 2) has no memory of.
Last night, in back-to-back games on TV, Carmody's current team (Northwestern) and Thompson's current team (Georgetown) both beat their Princeton highs. Northwestern took care of Georgia Tech 91-71, while No. 14 Georgetown had a more dramatic night in a 111-102 win over No. 8 Missouri.
Georgetown and Northwestern both remained undefeated on the year. Georgetown has itself a big signature win in its pocket for the rest of the year for NCAA tournament purposes; Carmody is trying to get Northwestern to the NCAA tournament for the first time ever.
In case you didn't stay up, Georgetown's win was not unlike Princeton's win over Siena Sunday in that it looked all the world like the Hoyas were done before Chris Wright's three-pointer just before the buzzer tied it and forced OT, which Georgetown then dominated.
In fact, the games were so similar that both Princeton and Georgetown outscored their opponents 17-8 in the OT.
The Hoyas had some great numbers along the way, shooting 15 for 32 from three-point range and 18 for 18 from the foul line for the night.
While Georgetown and Northwestern were winning last night, Princeton was putting away Lafayette, scoring in comparison to the others a paltry 82 points in the 82-64 win. Ian Hummer - a rising star, by the way - scored 22 points, while Dan Mavraides had 17 and Douglas Davis had 16.
The Tigers continue to be a very entertaining team in the early going. So does the other Princeton basketball team, the women's team, who is a very, very impressive 3-2 through five games.
Princeton opened at home with a 41-point win over FDU, who has since won three of four, including double figure wins over Columbia and Rider.
After that, it was a thrilling one-point loss to national power Rutgers, a game that went to the final buzzer. Princeton rebounded to knock off Lehigh, the defending Patriot League champ, by 17, ending the Mountain Hawks 33-game home winning streak.
That was followed by a win over USC, who had beaten Gonzaga, Georgia and Long Beach State and another close loss against a national power, this time by six at Vanderbilt.
Tonight Princeton is at Delaware in a game that could make the casual fan say "so what," but this is a great matchup. Delaware is 5-0 and led by Elena Delle Donne, who averages 27.4 points and 7.4 rebounds per game. Delle Donne, who stands 6-5, was originally going to play at UConn before she transferred to Delaware and played volleyball for one year before returning to basketball.
Among Delaware's five wins are an 18-point decision over Yale. Delaware has also beaten Villanova, La Salle, St. Francis (Pa.) and UMBC.
Princeton defeated Delaware 68-59 a year ago at Jadwin, when Della Donne scored 35 points.
The teams are home Sunday in a doubleheader, with the women against Rider at 2 and the men against St. Joe's at 5.
The opponent was Hamilton, and the team had gotten off to a good start, going unbeaten through seven games, and Carmody was talking about how tough it was going to be to play them later on. TigerBlog was keeping close tabs, waiting to point out when Hamilton finally lost, which happened in Game 8.
It led to this actual conversation:
TB: "Hamilton lost."
BC: "Who beat them?"
TB: "SUNY-Oneonta."
BC: "Home or away?"
TB: "At Oneonta."
BC: "You're not going to win there."
Anyway, the final was Princeton 90, Hamilton 48. Along with the 90-49 win over Catholic three years later, it marked the most points a Princeton team under Carmody ever scored in a game. For Division I purposes, Carmody's teams never scored more than 88.
As for John Thompson, his high score in four years with the Tigers was 99, scored against another Division III opponent, Ursinus. TB remembers being glad that Princeton didn't reach triple figures, something that hasn't happened in a Princeton game since the Tigers scored 108 against Yale on Feb. 26, 1971; TB didn't want to see it happen again against a D-III team.
As for a Division I opponent, Thompson reached as high as 89, in an 89-75 win at Lafayette in a 2002 game that TB 1) was at and 2) has no memory of.
Last night, in back-to-back games on TV, Carmody's current team (Northwestern) and Thompson's current team (Georgetown) both beat their Princeton highs. Northwestern took care of Georgia Tech 91-71, while No. 14 Georgetown had a more dramatic night in a 111-102 win over No. 8 Missouri.
Georgetown and Northwestern both remained undefeated on the year. Georgetown has itself a big signature win in its pocket for the rest of the year for NCAA tournament purposes; Carmody is trying to get Northwestern to the NCAA tournament for the first time ever.
In case you didn't stay up, Georgetown's win was not unlike Princeton's win over Siena Sunday in that it looked all the world like the Hoyas were done before Chris Wright's three-pointer just before the buzzer tied it and forced OT, which Georgetown then dominated.
In fact, the games were so similar that both Princeton and Georgetown outscored their opponents 17-8 in the OT.
The Hoyas had some great numbers along the way, shooting 15 for 32 from three-point range and 18 for 18 from the foul line for the night.
While Georgetown and Northwestern were winning last night, Princeton was putting away Lafayette, scoring in comparison to the others a paltry 82 points in the 82-64 win. Ian Hummer - a rising star, by the way - scored 22 points, while Dan Mavraides had 17 and Douglas Davis had 16.
The Tigers continue to be a very entertaining team in the early going. So does the other Princeton basketball team, the women's team, who is a very, very impressive 3-2 through five games.
Princeton opened at home with a 41-point win over FDU, who has since won three of four, including double figure wins over Columbia and Rider.
After that, it was a thrilling one-point loss to national power Rutgers, a game that went to the final buzzer. Princeton rebounded to knock off Lehigh, the defending Patriot League champ, by 17, ending the Mountain Hawks 33-game home winning streak.
That was followed by a win over USC, who had beaten Gonzaga, Georgia and Long Beach State and another close loss against a national power, this time by six at Vanderbilt.
Tonight Princeton is at Delaware in a game that could make the casual fan say "so what," but this is a great matchup. Delaware is 5-0 and led by Elena Delle Donne, who averages 27.4 points and 7.4 rebounds per game. Delle Donne, who stands 6-5, was originally going to play at UConn before she transferred to Delaware and played volleyball for one year before returning to basketball.
Among Delaware's five wins are an 18-point decision over Yale. Delaware has also beaten Villanova, La Salle, St. Francis (Pa.) and UMBC.
Princeton defeated Delaware 68-59 a year ago at Jadwin, when Della Donne scored 35 points.
The teams are home Sunday in a doubleheader, with the women against Rider at 2 and the men against St. Joe's at 5.
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