A Deadline To Meet

TigerBlog has no time to write today.

He has a big deadline coming up. It's the football yearbook, which will be given away (for free) at all five home football games.

It's a little different than it's been in years past. The football game program forever has been one program for one game, with a mix of change pages that were different each week and constant pages that were the same for the entire season.

Now it'll be one yearbook for all five home games, and then a roster card with lineups, rosters, schedules and stats for each individual game.

This means that once the initial 64-page (plus covers) yearbook is done, the game program will be finished for the entire season.

If you're a Princeton football fan, that doesn't really mean much. If you're someone who worked in the Office of Athletic Communications in the 1990s, that probably makes you laugh.

If you're Craig Sachson, that probably makes you laugh and makes you a little nutty.

Craig was the football contact here for the last 17 years before leaving the University in the spring. For all 17 of those years, Craig designed, wrote, laid out, produced and did pretty much everything else that goes into making a 64-page football game program five or six times a year.

It was a really, really involved process. And now, in the first year that he's gone, it's all been changed.

It's still a pretty time-consuming endeavor, but it's also going to be done for the year this week. It's not going to be nearly what it was for all of the years that Craig did it.

Of course, with something that will be constant for the course of the season, there is the fear that something will be wrong and unchangeable. For instance, every Princeton football player's head shot is in the publication. What if TB forgot one? What if one of the pictures isn't who it's supposed to be?

That's happened before, back in the days of media guides. TigerBlog, in his first go-round as football contact, accidentally swapped the head shots of the two newest, youngest coaches on the staff. It took awhile for them to grasp that they were stuck with it for the entire season.

TB is sorry about that still.

Here's another question - would you include program records in a book that doesn't change at all once the season starts?

Say those records are listed and then someone breaks a record in Week 1? For the next four games after that, the information will be incorrect. On the other hand, if you're at at the game and you see that someone is having a huge day, you might want to be able to check to see if he's getting close to a record.

Then again, if you're following the livestats while you're at the game, then you're probably tech-savvy enough to check out the records on the webpage too. But then maybe you don't want to keep opening a bunch of different windows?

TigerBlog is very deadline driven. He's always worked that way.

It goes back to his time in the newspaper business, he supposes. One of the best things about the newspaper business is that you could never really be more than one day behind, right?

On the other hand, every day was it's own new challenge, with one deadline and then another and then another.

It's sort of been the same way his entire time here. He knows when things are due, and he gets them done by then. He also doesn't really stress over deadlines, which is good, because who wants that?

The deadlines for the football game program were always Tuesday mornings. Back in the old days, that meant doing the football game program for hours and hours every Monday, often well into the night and then early morning, even until dawn every now and then.

Technology back then was not the same. Things that are incredibly easy to do now took a lot of time then, especially placing pictures into documents and packaging final products. Now that takes seconds.

TB still has a fondness for those days, though. There was a real sense of accomplishment from putting that kind of time into something and then being pleased with the final product.

The yearbook is the latest evolution of the game program. It's also one of the last things that still gets printed. It's taking awhile, but it's been something that's been fun to do. 

But you'll have to excuse TB now, though. He has to get back to it.

Unfortunately, he won't be able to write today.