Tough To Be Perfect

Kevin Davidson tried to connect with Dylan Classi. Yale's Dathan Hickey got to Classi around the same time as the ball to knock it away, incomplete, and that should have been the end of it.

Instead, the ball, just before hitting the ground, instead hit Hickey's foot and popped straight up in the air. And that still would have been the end of it, had a diving, fully extended Kyle Ellis not corralled the ball, again, just before it hit the ground.

On a day when it didn't need any luck, Yale nevertheless got some on that play. And then got a little more after the game on Powers Field ended.

That came in the form of the stunning final score from Hanover: Cornell 20, Dartmouth 17. Couple that with the Bulldogs' 51-14 win over Princeton, and you suddenly have a highly contested Ivy League race heading into the final weekend of the season.

Dartmouth and Yale are now 5-1 each, followed by 4-2 Princeton. The schedule next weekend has Princeton at Penn, Dartmouth at Brown and Harvard at Yale.

For Princeton to get a share of the league title, it would need a win over Penn and then losses by both Dartmouth and Yale.

For TigerBlog, there was one big thing that the last two weeks have really made clear. It's really, really tough to go unbeaten in the Ivy League.

The first year of official Ivy League football was 1956, making this the 64th season of Ivy football. In all those years, only 14 times has a team had a perfect season, league and non-league games included:

Princeton 2018
Harvard 2014
Harvard 2004
Penn 2003
Harvard 2001
Dartmouth 1996
Penn 1994
Penn 1993
Penn 1986
Dartmouth 1970
Dartmouth 1965
Princeton 1964
Dartmouth 1962
Yale 1960

Only once has a team put together back-to-back perfect seasons, and that was the Quakers in 1993 and 1994.

The longest stretch without a perfect season was 16 years, from Dartmouth in 1970 to Penn in 1986. The current era hasn't been quite like that, but it is a rarity.

Harvard (twice) and Penn (once) were perfect three times in a four year stretch to start this century. In the 15 seasons since, it's only happened twice - Harvard in 2014 and Princeton last year.

Dartmouth came into the weekend 8-0. Cornell came in 2-6. Does that sound familiar? That was the same scenario in 1995, when Princeton was 8-0 and Yale was 2-6 - and Yale won that game at Palmer Stadium.

Princeton and Yale came into the weekend with one loss each, both to Dartmouth, Princeton's a week ago at Yankee Stadium. The Tigers and Bulldogs renewed their rivalry for the 142nd time, and this one was all Yale.

Cornell, meanwhile, was keeping it close against Dartmouth, though Dartmouth seemed to have the lead throughout. By the time TB got back to the press box after Princeton's postgame interviews, and he checked the score one more time. This time it was 20-17 Big Red.

And apparently, the Big Red was in victory formation. Then it was over. TB could tell this not only by the app on his phone but by the massive cheers coming from the Yale tunnel and Yale fans, who also had figured out that Cornell had given the Bulldogs the win over Dartmouth that they needed.

And, also with that, there would be no perfect Ivy League team in 2019. It's not quite a 1972 Miami Dolphins thing, where the alums of that team open champagne to celebrate once every NFL team has lost a game, but Princeton remains the most recent Ivy League team to have a 10-0 season.

Of course, that was one year ago.

Princeton in 2018 was one of the most dominant teams the Ivy League has ever seen. Putting together back-to-back seasons like that was not going to be easy. Hey, Princeton had gone 54 years without a perfect record prior to a year ago.

Being perfect isn't easy.

It's apparent in 2019, when a 2-6 team can take down an 8-0 team in Week 9, just like in 1995.

It also makes you appreciate it all the more when you have one.