A Different Five-Game Sweep

Even if you've spent your whole life going to the supermarket in this country, you've clearly never seen anything quite like what's gone on in the last two weeks, or especially the last week.

TigerBlog finally needed to go back yesterday, and he figured if he went in the morning, he'd have a better chance of finding stocked shelves.

As he walked into the store, he saw a man returning to his car holding two things of toilet paper. TB said he was surprised to see toilet paper, and the man responded that there was some in the store and that they were limited to two packages each, with maybe four rolls per package.

TB didn't need any toilet paper, which is a good thing, since by the time he got into the store, it was all gone. He was able to get paper towels, which he was short on.

It's not just toilet paper that is in short supply these days. Or hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes.

There was only one package left of chicken thighs (fortunately they were boneless). There were no frozen vegetables anywhere in the store.

TB likes the veggie burgers, which is a good thing, because the regular ones were long gone, though there was box after box of the veggie kind in the freezer section.

Pasta? Nope. Tuna fish? Only the large single cans. 

It's a fascinating study really. What products move fastest and which ones just sit there. And why?

For the most part, TB was able to get what he needed. The line wasn't better. It wasn't that crowded.

He'd guess about 15 percent of the people wore masks. Some, very few, wore rubber gloves.

These are interesting times, to say the least, surreal, actually. TigerBlog did his podcast with Chris Sailer yesterday, and it was done not in the Levine Broadcast Center but instead by phone, something TB learned how to do for hopefully the short term.

The women's lacrosse team was supposed to spend the week in Florida, with a game against Jacksonville Tuesday night that obviously was not played. TB would have been at that game as well, though of course he did not go to Florida.

This week's podcast was supposed to be about that game and the game tomorrow at Brown. Instead, as you can hear by clicking HERE, the discussion was about how quickly everything moved last week, when the Tigers went from a game at Stony Brook Sunday to figuring out logistics Monday and Tuesday and then having everything shut down Wednesday.

Sailer talks a great deal in the podcast about the communication she and the rest of the Department of Athletics received from the University administration and then how she has communicated with her athletes. You can hear the sadness in her voice, but you can also hear the resilience too.

Meanwhile, back in the supermarket, TigerBlog saw someone wearing a University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt, and so he asked him if he went to Penn. They looked to be about the same age, and TB thought maybe they went to school together.

As it turned out, his son goes to Penn. TB, of course, was dressed in Princeton stuff. The man said that he had been to the football game at Penn in November, which Princeton won 28-7 and which seems like a long, long time ago.

The fact that Princeton won that game got TB to thinking how the Tigers also swept Penn in men's and women's basketball, making it a 5-0 record for Princeton in football and basketball against the Quakers.

This got TB to wondering how often this has happened in an academic year in the past, and it turns out that it's happened three times to be exact: 2019-20, 2013-14 and 1987-88.

So it doesn't really happen all that often.

Going through the scores again, by the way, reminded TB of what an incredible record Mitch Henderson has against Penn. After this year's sweep, he's now 20-8 against the Quakers, including 5-4 as a player and 15-4 as a head coach. Keep in mind, he started out 0-4 against Penn as a player, so he's 20-4 since then.

Do you remember his first win over Penn? It came in the 1996 Ivy League playoff game at Lehigh.

How many times has Penn gone 5-0 against Princeton in football and basketball? 

He didn't go back and look that up all the way to the beginning of Ivy League women's basketball, but the last time the Quakers did so was in 2004-05, and that's the only time Penn has done so this century. 

And when you saw the headline, you thought it was about the men's lacrosse team and its 5-0 start, didn't you.

Have a good weekend. Stay safe.