The third installment of the "Beyond The Stripes" video series was released yesterday.
The goal of the series is storytelling, in this case in-depth video storytelling. There will be one feature per week, released on Thursdays.
The first two featured football player John Lovett and women's volleyball player Nnenna Ibe.
The current edition features Mark Fossati, a linebacker on the football team. You can see it HERE.
Fossati, whom TB has never met, comes across as the kind of guy you can't help but like. Even when he talks about his season-ending broken leg a year ago, he makes the story funny.
And that doesn't even take into account his performance in the green screen videos. Trust TB on this one. It's worth watching.
Fossati and Lovett are coming back from injuries that pretty much derailed the 2017 season for the Tigers. Princeton is in a good position heading into this fall, with a deep, experienced team that doesn't have the target on its back.
The Tigers are heading out to Indianapolis this morning for their long-awaited opening day game. This one is at Butler, who will be playing its third game.
The Bulldogs are 2-0 on the young season, with wins over Youngstown State and Taylor. The first one, by a 23-21 score, is the more eye-catching, since Youngstown State is only two seasons removed from an NCAA championship game appearance.
This is the first meeting between Princeton and Butler. It's also the second time in 10 months that a Princeton team has opened its season at Butler, something the men's basketball team did last November.
That game was played in the venerable Hinkle Fieldhouse. This game will be played just east of that, at the Bud and Jackie Sellick Bowl.
The facility, which was the Butler Bowl from the time it opened in 1928 through last year, has a capacity of just short of 6,000. It had 36,000 seats when it was first built, and it was actually able to be expanded to 72,000 at one time.
According to Wikipedia, among the great players who have competed there are Red Grange from Illinois and Notre Dame's famed "Four Horsemen." According to Butler's website, the field didn't open until 1928.
Draw your own conclusions.
Princeton played in the first football game, back in 1869. How long after that did Butler play its first game?
If you said 1887, then you would be correct. Any guesses on the first opponent? It was a 45-5 win over Purdue, of all teams.
The Bulldogs went 3-0 that year (beating Purdue, Franklin and Hanover) and then took the 1888 season off.
Since then? Butler has had a team every year except for the World War II years of 1944 and 1945.
The coach with the most wins in Princeton history is Bill Roper, with 89. The Butler record is 165, held by Tony Hinkle, for whom the basketball arena is named.
And with good reason. Hinkle coached football, men's basketball and baseball (not always as the head coach) at Butler from the 1920s through the 1970s while also being an athletic administrator.
As for the game itself, it's the first time the teams have ever met. It's the third time this century Princeton has flown to a game, with the other two at Butler's Pioneer League-rival San Diego. The second meeting in this series will be next Sept. 21 on Powers Field in Princeton Stadium, by the way.
Princeton has never played a game in the state of Indiana. It has played two games against Notre Dame, both in the 1920s and both in Palmer Stadium.
If there's anything about Butler's stats through two games that jump out at you, it's that both the Bulldogs and their two opponents have exactly 770 total yards of offense. What that means for tomorrow's game is negligible.
Butler also is pretty evenly split between throwing and running through two games.
The big story for Princeton is that it is in what has to be the incredibly unique - if it's ever happened before - position of having graduated the league's Offensive Player of the Year from the previous year and having his replacement be the league's Offensive Player of the Year from the year before that.
Has that ever happened before?
Princeton graduated quarterback Chad Kanoff, who is now with the Arizona Cardinals after shattering about a million Princeton and Ivy passing records last year while winning the Bushnell Cup. His replacement is Lovett, the 2016 Bushnell Cup winner after his own ridiculous record-setting year, followed by a year away due to injury.
There are other Princeton stories as well, and more that will be known after this weekend.
For now, it's Opening Day 2018, against a first-time foe who is in its third game and is 2-0.
Oh, and the kickoff is at 6.
You can see it on Facebook Live or listen on the TuneInn app or on WPRB FM 103.3.
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The two Princeton-Notre Dame games in the 1920s were watershed events in the history of college football. Princeton went undefeated at 8-0 in 1922, including the famous dramatic intersectional victory over Amos Alonzo Stagg and his great University of Chicago team.
1922 would represent Princeton's last consensus national championship, when we received at least a plurality of the support from sports historians later voting for titles retroactively. (Princeton also has reasonable, though more tenuous, claims to national championships in 1933, 1935 and 1950.)
Knute Rockne had taken the reins of a mediocre Notre Dame program in 1918. The Irish immediately began to improve under his innovative leadership, in particular the regular use of the new-fangled forward pass. Rockne was also smart enough to know that, to be the best, Notre Dame had to beat the best. He made it a point to come east to confront the big name Eastern power programs.
So it was that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish came to Palmer Stadium, winning 25-2 in 1923 and 12-0 in 1924. The 1924 shutout was part of an undefeated 10-0 season for the Irish, including a victory over Stanford in the 1925 Rose Bowl.
The two Princeton-Notre Dame games in 1923 and 1924 represented over a very brief two-year period when the traditional Eastern powers ceded dominance to a newcomer from the Midwest. College football was solidified as a truly national game. Notre Dame won its first consensus national championship in 1924 and the landscape has never been the same since.
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