It's Game Day

It's Game Day.

For the first time in the 2019-20 academic year, a Princeton team will compete in an athletic event. The opening kickoff will come from the women's soccer team, the two-time defending Ivy League champion and preseason pick to win again, as the Tigers head to Philadelphia to take on St. Joe's at 5.

The women's soccer game is the start of more than nine months of games and events as 37 teams and 1,000 athletes will compete more than 700 times. Some will win championships and make postseason runs, and, as is one of TigerBlog's favorite parts of Princeton Athletics each year, it won't always be the same teams doing so year after year.

In a remarkable run of success, Princeton has averaged 11.8 Ivy League championships the last five years, 11.4 the last 10 and 11.1 the last 20. Of course, as TB has often said, none of this is Princeton's birthright, and so none of this can ever be taken for granted.

To put it visually, there's THIS, the last scene from the movie "Patton," which speaks directly to what TB just said.

TB can assure you that nobody at Princeton ever expects to achieve this kind of success. It's a constant reinvention of what works, what needs to improve and what can be abandoned, all under the unwavering commitment to a set of core ethics called "Education Through Athletics" that values the entire undergraduate experience for the athletes who wear the Princeton uniforms.

It'll be hard for Princeton to match the success from last fall, which was just incredible. Princeton had four Ivy League championship teams in the fall of 2018, including its first unbeaten football team in 54 years.
The field hockey team didn't win the league title, but it still made a run to the NCAA Final Four, for the second time in three years.

The field hockey, men's soccer and women's soccer teams and women's volleyball team are all preseason favorites to win the Ivy championship this year. Will they? Remains to be seen, of course, but it's a nice thing for a team in the month of August.

As for cross country, Princeton is in the national top 25 for both men (21) and women (23) in the preseason.

Recapping, that's four preseason Ivy favorites and two top 25 teams.

The football team will be trying to do something it's only done once before - put together back-to-back perfect seasons. The only time it happened was in 1950 and 1951, when Dick Kazmaier was leading the team.

This is the 150th season of Princeton football. If you take off the 1800s and the World War I seasons of 1917 and 1918 (when the Tigers were a combined 3-0), Princeton has had perfect seasons in 1903, 1922, 1933, 1935, 1950, 1951, 1964 and 2018.

Here are the records for the following seasons:
1904: 8-2
1923: 3-3-1
1934: 7-1
1936: 4-2-2
1951: 9-0
1952: 8-1
1965: 8-1
2019 ???

In other words, in the other seven "year after" seasons, Princeton averaged 1.43 losses.

What will 2019 hold? You'll have to wait three more weeks for the opener, as it starts when Butler comes to Powers Field at Princeton Stadium on Sept. 21.

Ah, but for Princeton sports in general?

When last we saw competing Tigers, it was back in early June at the NCAA track and field championships. The last game between a Princeton team and another team was on May 18, when the women's lacrosse team fell in the NCAA quarterfinals to Boston College.  

In many ways, today is the most exciting day on the Princeton calendar.

There's so much that goes into fielding 37 varsity teams, for coaches and athletic staff as well, not to mention the athletes themselves. There are so many details that go into the entire process that it's important to always keep in mind what the actual goal is - using athletics to provide an extension of the overall educational experience.

Mollie Marcoux Samaan, the Ford Family Director of Athletics, always stresses that in addition to all of the work that goes into this, it should also be fun. And the most fun that TB has in his job is watching the athletes he's gotten to know - and the ones he hasn't - compete.

And it all starts today.

Good luck to all the Tigers this year.

They're clearly the best part of TigerBlog's job.