It's Game Week

It's game week for the Princeton football team, and that by itself with no context or follow up at all is a fun sentence to write.

It's game week. Sounds great, right? 

The Princeton football team is at Lehigh Saturday for the first game of the 2021 season. Opening kickoff is at noon in Bethlehem.

If you want to see the Tigers on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium, then you need to wait another week. Princeton will host Stetson next Saturday, and then the Ivy League opener comes up Oct. 2 against Columbia.

Lehigh will be playing its third game, and the first two came against ranked CAA teams Villanova and Richmond. Here are three facts for you:

* Lehigh is 56-29-1 all-time against Ivy League schools
* Lehigh has won five of the last seven meetings against Princeton
* Lehigh enters the game on a nine-game losing streak

Does any of that matter now? Nope. Not in the least. Why? Because Princeton is back to playing football.

The Tigers did not get to play in the 2020 season. The last time Princeton went an entire fall without playing any varsity football was 1871, two years after the Tigers played Rutgers in the first football game.

When Princeton football last competed, it was in the 150th anniversary season. Princeton went 8-2 in 2019, on the heels of a 10-0 2018 season. Bob Surace has coached Princeton to the Ivy League title in three of the last seven seasons, and his 2021 team is the league's preseason favorite.

There's plenty of time for the league race later. For now, it'll all about the fact that there is a game to be played this weekend, and that alone brings joy to everyone associated with Princeton football, from the players to the coaches to the fans and everyone else.

Speaking of Surace, here's one thought. He enters this season with a 56-44 record in 10 seasons as Princeton, which is extraordinary considering he started out with two wins in his first 22 games. Since then? That adds up to 54-22, or a winning percentage of .710.

He is currently fifth all-time in football coaching wins at Princeton. Regardless of what happens this year, he will still be in fifth when the year ends, as he is 14 away from tying Charlie Caldwell in fourth with 70. Ahead of Caldwell are Dick Colman in third with 75, Steve Tosches in second with 78 and then Bill Roper in first with 89. Roper last coached at Princeton in 1930, so his record has stood for a very long time.  

And what about the 2021 team? There are holes to fill at quarterback and along the defensive line, but there are candidates everywhere to fill them. Beyond that, it's an incredibly deep team with a lot of returning talent.

One of the best players on the team is Jeremiah Tyler, the linebacker who was a unanimous first-team All-Ivy League selection and Bushnell Cup finalist two years ago. TB wrote a feature story about Tyler for goprincetontigers.com yesterday, and you can read it HERE.

Here's what two of his teammates said about him:

“I’d use two words to describe him,” says James Johnson, a fellow Princeton linebacker who has also been Tyler’s roommate. “Love. And positivity. He oozes both.”

“His energy radiates,” says safety Trevor Forbes, another close friend. “His positivity radiates. He is a genuine soul, an extremely loyal soul.”

In the story, TB refers to Tyler as a "magnet," someone to whom others are just naturally drawn to. It reminded him a bit of when Pete Carril used to call players "light bulbs," because when they walked onto the court, the lights went on.

The Princeton football team is filled with light bulbs. It's an entire lockerroom filled with players who work hard and believe in the culture that Surace and his staff have built. Now they get to play again.

Because there was no Ivy football last year, this year will be even more uncertain than most. Every team has two full classes of players who have never played in a game, plus two other classes of players who haven't played a game in nearly two full years. Some players took last year off, so class years are a bit murkier than they've ever been.

As TB said before, none of that matters now. He's just excited about the fact that there's a game coming up in two days. 

Lehigh has always been a great place to watch a game. It'll be a little bit more special to be there this time.