Shoe Filling

TigerBlog's thoughts as kickoff neared for the Princeton-Butler game Saturday were actually on someone who wasn't even in the stadium.

And that was news.

No, he's not talking about two-time Bushnell Cup-winning quarterback John Lovett, or graduated wide receivers Jesper Horsted and Stephen Carlson. They weren't in the stadium either, or if they were, TB didn't see them.

Those three are in the NFL now, and they left some gigantic shoes to fill. TigerBlog could relate to the players who had to fill them, since he was doing something similar.

For the first time in 17 years, Craig Sachson was not the Princeton communications football contact for a game. TB was, for Game 1 of his second go-round in the position.

Craig left the University in April, ending a long run in college athletics in which he did so much for so many teams and really thousands of athletes. He loved all of his teams and all of his coaches, and he did as much as he can to treat them equally.

Still, there was something a little more special for him about Princeton Football. Perhaps it's the quantity of work involved. Perhaps it's the number of players. Or, in his case, perhaps it was from not missing a single game for 17 seasons, a total of 170 straight Princeton football games that he worked.

For almost all of that time, TB was the Princeton Stadium PA announcer, a role he has relinquished to Spenser Smith, who did one women's lacrosse game last year and who works for the Trenton Thunder minor league baseball team. Spenser was tremendous behind the mic for the his first Princeton football game, leading TB to joke that everyone would like the new PA guy more than the old one and the old communications guy more than the new one.

As Saturday late afternoon rolled around, here it was, for the first time since the 2001 season, a Princeton football game without Craig Sachson - a season-opener that Princeton won 49-7 over Butler.

It was a bit different not to have him there.

And it's why TB could relate at least a little to the players who were stepping in for the NFL guys, at least on some level.

It's not easy when there have been such established presences in a role that is now your responsibility. Everyone is so used to the old guys, how they operated, what they did, what they meant to the program. And now they're just not there anymore, moved on to a different challenge - in the case of the players professional football, and in the case of Craig, biomedical informatics.

For Week 1, things seemed to go well for all the newbies.

TigerBlog thought he wrote a good story, which was aided by the fact that the real newbies had such a dynamic game.

It started with Kevin Davidson, the 6-4 225-pound quarterback who started one game a year ago, when Lovett was hurt against Brown. Davidson has spent three years learning from Lovett and Chad Kanoff, and he was clearly ready for the start of his senior year.

By halftime Davidson had thrown for 318 yards, completing 16 of 18, with a pair of touchdowns, and led the Tigers on six straight TD drives. He'd throw only three more passes in the second half, completing two, making the final line 18 for 21 for 341.

It's not just that he was completing passes. It's that he was throwing perfect passes. And it's not just that he was throwing perfect passes, he was throwing all kinds of perfect passes, to basically every area of the field.

And beyond all of that, he was doing so to a new generation of receivers, and they looked as good as he did.

As big a question mark as was left by Lovett's graduation, at least there was the knowledge that Davidson had throw for 300 yards in a start last year. It was the loss of Horsted and Carlson at wide receiver, at least to TigerBlog, that was a bigger unknown.

Horsted and Carlson rank 1-3 on Princeton's career touchdown receptions list, with 44 between them. a year ago they combined for 123 catches, 1,730 yards and 18 touchdowns.

In their place were four players - Andrew Griffin, Jacob Birmelin, Andrei Iosivas and Dylan Classi. That group last year combined for 17 catches, 185 yards and one touchdown.

And that didn't matter at all Saturday night.

All four of them made big plays. All four of them played with great confidence.

By halftime, they had zoomed past last year's combined receiving yardage total. For the night they caught nine passes for 257 yards, with three of them touchdowns - two from the 6-4 Iosivas, who was the Ivy League indoor heptathlon champ a year ago. That's pronounced "YO-see-vosh," by the way.

The contributions were well-spread between the four. One of the Iosivas TD receptions came on a pass from Classi, who also made a great catch on a 44-yard pass to set up another touchdown. Griffin had his first career TD reception, and Birmelin led the group with 87 yards.

Princeton was completely dominant in the first half, in all phases. Tavish Rice was 7 for 7 on extra points and had eight touchbacks in eight kickoff attempts.

With this one over, Princeton plays its first road game this coming Saturday, at Bucknell. Then it's the Ivy opener against Columbia at home. The league this year looks pretty strong, at least through one week's results.

TB has been trying to find the right balance of talking about last year's unbeaten season and the players who graduated with the idea that this is a new year and a new team with a new identity.

In Week 1, the ones who weren't here anymore were a big part of the story.

A bigger part was how impressive their replacements were.