Road Trip

Keith Elias carried the ball 736 times for the Princeton football team.

No Princeton player has ever run it more.

For every one of those that he saw - which is a lot of them - TigerBlog thought Elias was going to break it the distance. TB has never been a fan of the term "taking it to the house;" he wonders if anyone ever said it back in the early ’90s, when Elias was playing.

For that matter, what would have been the reaction had somebody randomly blurted that out as Elias was in fact running for one of his 49 career touchdowns? They would have gotten a weird look.

They also would have gotten a weird look had they said words like "blog," "smartphone" and "tweet" and if they used "text" as a verb. The world has changed quickly.

In the meantime, TB will get to the point. Of those 736 carries, he's wondering how many times Elias was tackled for a loss.

He's not 100 percent sure there's a way to check, but he'll try to look it up at some point.

He started wondering about that when he was looking up the last time current running back Collin Eaddy was tackled for a loss. In fact, Eaddy, a junior, has gone 107 straight carries without being stopped for negative yardage.

Is that a record? How does that compare?

No idea. It seems pretty impressive though, no?

Another impressive streak is the one by Tavish Rice, the senior placekicker. Rice started the 2019 season by having a touchback on all eight of his kickoff attempts against Butler. This came after he had touchbacks on his last two against Penn last year, in a game in which he went 6 for 7.

As an aside, every time TB types "touchback," it comes out "touchdown," because he's so used to typing that word instead, so he has to go back and change it.

For his junior year, Rice kicked off 76 times, with 50 touchbacks. TB watched him in practice last week, and the ball was just rocketing off his foot. 

Eaddy and Rice will put their streaks on the line tomorrow for the second game of the year and first road trip, as the Tigers head to Bucknell. The teams meet for the first time since 2011, which is the only meeting the teams have had between back-to-back games in 1995 and 1996 and the meeting tomorrow.

Kickoff in Lewisburg is 3:30.

You would think that two schools that are not that far apart and who have been playing football for a long time would have played more than 16 times, but 16 games are the extent of the history between Princeton and Bucknell. The teams first met in 1903, and seven of the 16 meetings were held by the United States got involved in World War I.

The Tigers are 1-0 on the year, having defeated Butler 49-7 in Week 1, last week on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium. Bucknell is 0-3, but the Bison have had a very challenging schedule to date - the losses are to FBS member Temple, defending NEC co-champ Sacred Heart and No. 8 Villanova.

Eaddy and Rice aren't the only ones who have streaks going. In fact, Princeton itself has a good one.

The team as a whole has won 11 straight games, which is the longest the program has had since a 17-game run in 1964 and 1965. The school record, if you're wondering, is 24 straight, from 1949-52, encompassing back-to-back perfect seasons in Dick Kazmaier's junior and senior years.

Princeton looked really good against Butler, especially considering it was the first game of the year. The key is to continue to progress and work out any issues before Week 3, which would be Week 1 of the Ivy League season, as Columbia will be on Powers Field next Saturday at 1.

The Ivy League looks pretty good from the Week 1 results. Princeton is the defending champ. Yale is the preseason favorite. Dartmouth was second last year and in the preseason poll.

At this point, though, it wouldn't be shocking to see any team beat any other team. There are two Ivy League games this weekend: Brown at Harvard tonight and Cornell at Yale tomorrow.

As for Princeton, it's what Week 2 usually is: Work out the kinks with a second-straight non-league opponent before the league season begins.

This time, it's against someone the Tigers haven't seen in awhile.

It should be fun.