Following Up

So TigerBlog has a few follow ups from yesterday's story about the 1922 football team photo.

First, the 1922 Princeton football team started its season with games against Johns Hopkins, Virginia and Colgate. Weirdly, those were three of the first four teams Princeton played in men's lacrosse a year ago.

Second, the 1922 team played eight games, winning all eight, but only two of those eight games were decided by more than 10 points. Those were the 30-0 win over Johns Hopkins and 26-0 win over Maryland. Of the other six games, Princeton won four by seven points or fewer.

Nearly 100 years later, the 21-18 win at Chicago, then the No. 1 team in the country, is the game that leaps out when the subject of the "Team Of Destiny" comes up. The season ended with a 3-0 victory over Yale, though, in a game that featured not one - as in the win over Chicago - but two goal line stands by the Tigers.

The Yale game ended when Princeton was up 3-0 and faced with a fourth down on its own 13. Yale's best hope at that point was for a punt and a fair catch, which would then be followed by a free kick. This is perhaps the rarest and most obscure rule in football, but a team that calls for a fair catch is entitled to a free kick from the spot of the fair catch. If the free kick goes through the uprights, it's a field goal, for three points.

Back in the early days of football, it was a very common play. In the 1922 Princeton-Yale game, the Tigers didn't risk the punt and instead had the punter run around behind the line while the final seconds ticked off. 

Third, Don Griffin made one of the stops on that goal line stand. As TB wrote yesterday, Griffin would go on to start the Alumni Association. In fact, in one of the most amazing things TB has ever heard, Don Griffin knew at least one member of ever class going all the way back to 1858.

Today, the University annually awards the Donald Griffin Management Award in his honor.

Fourth, the captain of the 1922 team was Melville Dickenson. It would be 27 years later that Melville Dickenson Jr. would win the Roper Trophy as the outstanding Princeton senior male athlete after playing football, hockey and lacrosse for the Tigers.

To all of that, TigerBlog learned yesterday that there is actually a connection between the 1922 team and the 2018 undefeated Princeton team. It includes the Griffin family, for that matter. 

Don Griffin was one of the key members of that 1922 Team of Destiny. His son Jim, Class of 1956, was a soccer and baseball player for the Tigers. Jim's wife Barbara, who would be Don's daughter-in-law, hired John Lovett - the two-time Bushnell Cup winner as Princeton's quarterback - to work on her family farm bailing hay.

TigerBlog has never bailed hay. It sounds sort of strenuous, of course, and it's not hard to imagine that Lovett was very good at it.

So, to sum up, you have the daughter-in-law of an important member of the 1922 team who hired the quarterback of the 2018 team to bail hay. 

Princeton Athletics has dozens of those sorts of random connections. Having the opportunity to see these connections is one of the best things about being here.

For instance, the latest "First 50" podcast is being released today. The guests on the podcast with Mollie Marcoux Samaan are Deborah Saint-Phard, Class of 1987 and a former Olympic shot putter, and Tiana Wooldridge, Class of 2015 and a three-time All-Ivy League women's volleyball player. 

Both are doctors today. Woolridge, who is doing her residency in pediatrics, mentioned one of her mentors on the call. 

What did Saint-Phard say?

"That's my cousin," she said. 

Of course. Just another random Princeton connection.

Before the recording of the podcast, Saint-Phard and Woolridge didn't know each other. For that matter, they hadn't even heard of each other.

After? It was like they were old friends. 

That's what Princeton Athletics can do.