Football, And More

You know how the 25th anniversary of something is the silver anniversary and the 50th is the gold?

TigerBlog looked that list up yesterday to see what the 150th anniversary is supposed to be.

Turns out the list only goes to 60, which is the diamond anniversary. So what would make a good anniversary gift for a 150th anniversary, for, say, the Princeton football team, whose 150th anniversary of the first game ever played was yesterday?

How about a diamond (60), an emerald (55) and a sapphire (45)? That works.

You can take those three and add two rubies (40) and some china (20) to get you to the 250th anniversary. Then you can put it all together, and that's why Saturday's Princeton-Dartmouth football game is being played at Yankee Stadium.

The game is a celebration of 150th anniversary of the first football game, the one between Princeton and Rutgers, and the 250th anniversary of Dartmouth College.

Dartmouth football played its first game on Nov. 16, 1881, which according to the official record was a 1-0 win over Amherst. That, of course, was what the Live Stats said the score of the Princeton-Harvard game two weeks ago was after Princeton's first touchdown.

If you were in the Manhattan area last night, you might have noticed that the Empire State Building was lit in orange on two sides and red on two others, in recognition of Princeton and Rutgers and the anniversary of the first game.

That the 2019 Princeton-Dartmouth game would be played at Yankee Stadium was announced on March 31, 2017. TB remembers when the story was originally put up and how he thought that it seemed so far away.

Dartmouth is 24-3 since the game was announced. Princeton is 22-5. 

Princeton has won 17 straight games. Dartmouth has won 19 of 20.

Both teams are 7-0 this season, and both are highly ranked in the FCS. Given the teams, the stakes and the venue, it should be quite an event.

Kickoff is at 3:30.

The football game is huge. It's not the only major event on the Princeton Athletics calendar this weekend.

In fact, being that this is crossover season, there is no shortage of teams who will be competing. By TB's count (and he's not always good at this), there are 14 teams who will be playing between tomorrow at Sunday.

The complete schedule is HERE.

The field hockey team and both soccer teams are at Penn Saturday. A win by the field hockey team would mean a perfect 7-0 Ivy season, but the Tigers are already assured of the league's automatic NCAA tournament bid and no worse than a share of the Ivy League championship.

Princeton under head coach (and new mother) Carla Tagliente has been to the Final Four twice in three years.

The men's soccer team is still in the running for a second-straight Ivy title, but the Tigers need some help to catch Yale. The Bulldogs play Brown this weekend, and a win clinches the league title. A loss, though, opens the door for everyone, especially Princeton, who plays Yale next weekend.

The Tigers are the highest ranked Ivy team nationally, though, standing just two spots away from the top 25.

The women's volleyball team is home against Dartmouth and Harvard this weekend before finishing the regular season next weekend at Brown and Yale.

Here are the current Ivy standings in women's volleyball:
Princeton 9-1
Yale/Cornell 8-2

No other team is over .500 in the league.

Yale and Cornell play each other in Ithaca tomorrow night, so somebody has to lose that one. By the end of the weekend Princeton could have clinched an Ivy title and NCAA tournament bid - or be in third place.

There's also home women's hockey, against Harvard and Dartmouth, while the men are on the road against those teams. And there's men's basketball at San Francisco Saturday.

The women's basketball team is also on the road, though not as far away on the road. The Tigers, who opened impressively with an 80-47 win over Rider, will be in Washington, D.C., to take on George Washington.

As a subplot, the Colonials are coached by Jennifer Rizzotti, who was a three-year college teammate of Princeton head coach Carla Berube when they played at UConn.

And that's the weekend.

It's more than just a football game, even if the football game is huge.