Colvin In The Clutch

TigerBlog was asked yesterday if the Princeton-Dartmouth football game was really as good as he was saying.

The answer is, of course, yes. He likened it to a baseball game where the visitors got three in the top of the first, the home team got those three back in the bottom of the first, the visitors got a run on an error in the top of the third and then it was all strikeouts from there until the bottom of the seventh, when the home team left the bases loaded, and then the bottom of the eighth, when the home team finally pushed across the runs it needed.

If you want one more look back at the Tigers 14-9 win, TB's colleague Craig Sachson put THIS together yesterday. It's his compilation of the 10 plays that helped decide the outcome, and it's definitely worth reading.

The football game was huge, no doubt. It was also not the only huge event from this past weekend .

In fact, seven Princeton teams played games over the weekend, and not one of them lost. The record was 10-0-2, broken down this way:
* football, men's soccer, women's soccer, field hockey: 1-0 each
* women's volleyball, men's water polo: 2-0 each
* men's and women's hockey: 1-0-1 each

That's an incredible weekend, especially given how big some of those games were.

TB will start with a men's soccer question: How good has Jeremy Colvin been in the clutch this year for the men's soccer team?

The other day against Penn, he scored not one but two overtime goals. And this was in a game that was sudden death.

Okay, the first goal was disallowed by an offsides call. That one came three minutes into the overtime.

So what did Colvin do? He scored one that wasn't waived off four minutes later. Princeton 2, Penn 1.

For Colvin, it his fifth game-winning goal of the year, of which three have now come in overtime. Or four in OT, if you count the one that the officials didn't.

TigerBlog was next to the official's evaluator, who had called it offsides well before Colvin scored - and then thoughtfully explained why as he praised the officials who made the call. When TB saw Princeton head coach Jim Barlow on the field after the game, he told him that his opinion of the call went way up after Colvin scored again.

TB knows he was joking a bit, but think about how clutch a player has to be to already have two OT goals, then score another one that's waived off and then four minutes later score again anyway. And this wasn't just another game.

Princeton is in first place in the Ivy League, and this was the second-to-last game of the season. The Tigers were one point ahead of Columbia, meaning that this was no time to give away two points after Penn had tied it with six minutes to go. For the Quakers, by the way, that was to be expected - Penn has played 15 games this season, and of those, there have been 11 that have gone to overtime.

Colvin's goal pushed Princeton to 5-0-1 in the league and mathematically eliminated everyone else except for Columbia. As for the Lions, their game against Harvard this past Saturday started at 7, after the Princeton win. Once the Tigers had defeated Penn, Columbia needed a win to prevent Princeton from clinching the Ivy's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

The first score of that game TB saw when he checked it was 1-1, but Columbia got a second-half goal to win 2-1 and push the league race to the last weekend. The schedule has Princeton at Yale and Columbia home against Cornell.

This time, though, the times are reversed. Columbia plays at 1 and the Tigers at 4, so Princeton will know exactly what it needs to do. Here are the scenarios:

* if Columbia wins, then Princeton needs to win to win the championship and the league's automatic bid. A loss or tie would give both prizes to Columbia
* if Columbia ties, then Princeton would win the outright title with a tie or win. A loss by Princeton with a Columbia tie would still mean a co-championship - and the automatic bid for Princeton
* a Columbia loss gives the outright title and the automatic bid to Princeton before it ever plays a second against Yale

Anyway, that's where it stands with men's soccer. There's so much else going on, including the NCAA tournament for field hockey and women's soccer, and TB will get to that later this week.

Oh, and by the way.

Tonight? It's opening day of basketball season, as the women are at Rider at 7.