Players Of The Week

So say part of your job is to decide which players to nominate for player of the week each week.

And say that you have two players whose weeks were 1) record-setting and 2) completely intertwined in essentially every way. And the rules said you couldn't nominate both.

Then what would you do?

Well, that's where TigerBlog was yesterday.

You had Kevin Davidson, who threw an Ivy League-record seven touchdown passes against Bucknell Saturday. And you had Andrew Griffin, who tied the Ivy League record by catching four of them.

There was more, too. Davidson was 29 for 37 for 381 yards and no interceptions. Griffin caught nine passes for 200 yards. Both were big-time, dominant performances.

On top of that, neither would have set any of those records without the other. Griffin had to get open and catch the ball, but doing so without having Davidson deliver the ball would have been worthless. To TB, they were both equally impressive.

So now what?

In the end, TigerBlog nominated Davidson for Ivy Player of the Week and then successfully advocated with his Office of Athletic Communications colleagues to have Griffin be the goprincetontigers.com Athlete of the Week.

James Stagg, a freshman defensive lineman with a very bright future, was the Ivy Rookie of the Week after a sack and an interception that he returned to the two.

Griffin was so good against Bucknell that it almost became an oversight that Andrei Iosivas, who didn't catch a pass at all last year as a freshman, caught two more touchdown passes, giving him back-to-back two touchdown games to start his sophomore year.

Or that Princeton's wide receivers have caught 10 touchdown passes in two weeks, which leaves them - Griffin, Iosivas, Dylan Classi and Jacob Birmelin - more than halfway to the 18 that current NFL players Stephen Carlson and Jesper Horsted caught a year ago. Griffin, by the way, has already matched the five that Carlson had a year ago - and Carlson is third all-time at Princeton in career touchdown receptions.

The Tigers open their Ivy League season Saturday at home against Columbia (kickoff at 1). TB will have more on that later in the week.

While the subject is Players of the Week, Princeton also had the Ivy League field hockey Player of the Week, junior Clara Roth, who won for the second time this year.

Roth had two goals in a 4-3 overtime loss to No. 4 Maryland and then came back with two goals and two assists in a 4-0 win over Dartmouth in the Ivy opener in Hanover Saturday.

Princeton has scored 20 goals this season in eight games (seven against ranked teams), and Roth has either scored (five) or assisted (seven) on 12 of them.

When TB looked up where Roth was from, he learned that she's from a town in Germany called Schweitzingen, which sits about six miles southwest of Heidelberg and dates back to the eighth century. He considered logging on to Wikipedia to add Roth to the town's list of notable people.

And why not? She deserves to be listed.

She was the 2018 Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year after leading the team in goals (13) and points (34) while the season ended in the Final Four. She was first-team All-Mid Atlantic Region and third-team All-America, after earning honorable mention All-Ivy and second-team all-region as a freshman.

She's currently tied for 11th in career assists at Princeton, and she's on the cusp of being listed in all-time leaders in goals and points.  

Roth and the Tigers play another ranked opponent tonight, as they travel to No. 12 Delaware. Like Princeton, Delaware has won an NCAA field hockey national championship this decade.

It's also the start of a very busy week for Princeton, who hosts Yale Friday at 5 in the second Ivy game. Speaking of second, that game will be followed by a trip Sunday to second-ranked Duke.

After that, it's a run of five Ivy opponents and unranked Boston University for the rest of the regular season.

And hey, TB just realized it's October 1st. That means, among other things, that the fall season is going to reach its peak, right around the time that the foliage does as well.