The Rearview Mirror

The sooner the Princeton football team put Hanover into its rearview mirror, the better.

TigerBlog is speaking figuratively, by the way. The Tigers need to put Friday night's 31-7 loss to Dartmouth behind them as quickly as possibly, hopefully already by now.

There's a lot left to play for this season, even with the hopes of a second perfect record in three seasons now gone. There is still an Ivy League championship on the line, and Princeton can assume that it needs to win its final two games to get a piece of that.

The loss to Dartmouth left Princeton and the Big Green even at 4-1 in the league standings. TB was right when he said this Friday: It seems like Dartmouth always saves its best for Princeton.

Isn't that the case? No offense to Columbia, which is a very, very good team in its own right, but TB had seven different people text him during the Princeton-Dartmouth game asking where the team that lost 19-0 to the Lions was?

Right from the start Friday, it just didn't seem like this was going to be Princeton's night, and that was before Collin Eaddy's leg injury that saw him leave the field on a cart. It was a tough moment for the Tiger senior, who has been such a warrior for the program during his time here. 

It was also a tender moment, as you could see the Princeton – and Dartmouth – players come over to Eaddy to wish him the best. Ultimately, it was really brutal to see Eaddy leave the field like that. He's much more than a really good running back with a nose for the end zone. He's one of those athletes whom others are just drawn to, one of those players you see as an undergraduate and have absolutely no doubt he's headed towards extraordinary things in life. TB's heart sank for him as Eaddy left the field.

Eaddy tweeted yesterday that his surgery was a success. He's a total class act, and as TB said in an email to him, he's been an incredible representative of Princeton Athletics Since Day 1.

The score was 7-0 at the time Eaddy got hurt. It soon was 17-0, and even when Princeton began to try to right the ship, it became a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward situation. In many ways, it was like the Yankee Stadium game two years earlier, when Dartmouth controlled the feel of the game from beginning to end.

Unlike two years ago, though, there is a major difference after Dartmouth's Week 8 win. Princeton is still tied for first place in the league, and as former men's basketball coach John Thompson III always said, the goal is to be in first place at the end of each weekend.

This is not a standard Ivy League football race. This one is much more wide open than usual, and so results can vary from week to week. Princeton can beat Columbia 24-7. Columbia can beat Dartmouth 19-0. Dartmouth can beat Princeton 31-7. You don't find that in most years. 

So what's next? 

Yale made it a three-way tie at 4-1 atop the league with a 63-38 shootout win over Brown Saturday. Princeton and Yale meet on Powers Field Saturday, followed by a trip to Penn to end the season for the Tigers the following Saturday, while Yale obviously ends its season with Harvard, who defeated Columbia to get to 3-2 in the league. As for Dartmouth, the Big Green end the season with games against Cornell and Brown.

It'll be good for Princeton to be back home for the first time in three weeks, and it'll be good for Princeton to be able to play on a Saturday again after back-to-back trips for Friday games at Cornell and then Dartmouth. There's also the matter of getting an extra day of rest between the game at Dartmouth and kickoff against the Bulldogs.

If you recall, Princeton two years ago followed up the loss to Dartmouth with another loss against Yale before finishing strong at Penn. The lesson from that 2019 Yale game is that turning the page after games like Friday night isn't always easy. 

In this case, it's mandatory.