Is This The Greatest Season Any Princeton Quarterback Has Ever Had?

Harrisburg, of course, is the capital of Pennsylvania.

York is not. It is, however, close to Harrisburg. They're about a half hour apart actually.

Back when TigerBlog Jr. used to play in summer club tournaments in Baltimore, TigerBlog would stay as far away from I-95 on Sunday afternoons for the return trip. Instead, he'd head up I-83 into Pennsylvania, near York, and then pick up the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Harrisburg.

Harrisburg and York were separated by less than that Saturday afternoon, when TigerBlog was reading the script for senior day at Princeton football. They were the hometowns of consecutive players, Mike Perloski from Harrisburg and Erik Ramirez from York.

TB wondered if they knew each other before they came here. Probably not, he'd guess. 

Not that it matters if their hometowns were close. Here were two football teammates at Princeton for the last four years who grew up a few miles apart. And then there were the rest of the seniors, from 12 different states, stretching from East to West and North to South.

Princeton Athletics always talks about the 40-year experience, not the four-year one. The friendships that are formed on these teams stand the complete test of time, with the starting point of hometowns from anywhere.

As TB always says, it's something that makes Princeton Athletics very, very special. The love for the programs and the impact they have had on those who have come through them never ends.

If you had any doubt about that, the halftime ceremony Saturday hammered it home nicely. Princeton is finishing its 148th year, and it has had 186 football captains all time. Of those 186, there are 84 who are still alive.

And how many of them were on the field at halftime Saturday? How about 52 of them.

It's what Princeton does so well. It breeds loyalty. Its value is stressed from Day 1 when freshmen arrive, and it never goes away.

The 2017 Princeton football season ends Saturday in Hanover, when Princeton plays Dartmouth in a game that could have an impact on the championship race.

The standings through nine weeks have Yale at 5-1 having clinched at least a tie for the title. Dartmouth and Columbia (who plays Brown) are both 4-2, and one or both would get a share of the championship with a win and a Yale loss to Harvard.

Princeton, the 2016 champ, is finishing off a year that will be remembered by a few things. Injuries, for one, which cost the team much of its starting defense, not to mention reigning first-team All-America and Offensive Bushnell Cup winner John Lovett.

Princeton will also remember 2017 for its four excruciating Ivy losses, all of which saw Princeton have the lead in the fourth quarter. It's hard to say how different things might have been with Lovett, since without him, Princeton had to abandon a lot of what it did that made Lovett so good.

Instead of having Lovett and Chad Kanoff in the backfield at the same, Princeton has gone almost exclusively with Kanoff. As a result, Kanoff has thrown 70 more passes through nine games than he did in 10 a year ago, and he's putting the finishing touches on quite possibly the best single-season any Princeton quarterback has ever had.

If you want to look at this purely statistically, Princeton has scored 37.6 points per game, tops in the Ivy League and eighth in the Football Championship Subdivision. A year ago, Princeton scored 34.6 per game.

At the same time, Princeton has gone from second to seventh in the league in time of possession, averaging four fewer minutes per game. This is usually the most misleading stat there is, in that Princeton has a quick-strike offense that can put points up in short bursts, so possession time isn't a great barometer.

On the other hand, this is where Lovett's impact is at its greatest. His ability on short yardage keeps some drives going, which would have kept the ball away from the opponent. His ability to score in close then turns into even more points.

Had Lovett not been hurt, TB's sense is that Kanoff would have pretty much matched what he did and Lovett would have been an even better complement to him because of that. The result would have been an even better offense.

Unfortunately, there's no way to know if that's the case. TB doesn't think it would be like basketball, where any shots that Player A took would take shots away from Player B. In this case, Kanoff and Lovett would have blended together in a way that would have made Princeton's offense unstoppable.

For all that, it's still worth it to consider all of the records that have been or might be shattered this year by Kanoff and his receivers:

* touchdown passes in a season - Kanoff already has the record with 26
* touchdown receptions in a season - Jesper Horsted alread has the record with 12, though Stephen Carlson has 10 of his own (it's the first time in Ivy history that teammates have reached double figures in the same year)
* completion percentage in a season - Kanoff can go 0 for 20 against Dartmouth and still break the record; his 72.2 percent leads the FCS
* passing yards in a season - Kanoff has 3,030, which leaves him 145 away from tying Doug Butler's record from 1983

And, of course, there is passing yards in a career. Kanoff has 7,066 yards with one game to go. The record is 7,291, held by Butler. That means Kanoff needs 225 yards to tie that record.

And that takes TB back to the original question. Is this the greatest season any Princeton quarterback has ever had?

That's hard to quantify, since not all offenses are the same. In fact, you can make a case that Lovett's season a year ago - 20 rushing touchdowns, 10 passing touchdowns, one receiving touchdown - had a great impact.

So you can make your own conclusions.

TigerBlog? He'll just say that he would have loved to see what Kanoff and Lovett together would have done this year.