For Openers

Here's a quick trivia question for you: Who was the last Princeton quarterback to start the season-opener two straight times? 

The answer is Chad Kanoff, who was the starting quarterback for the 2016 opener against Lafayette and the 2017 opener against San Diego. For that matter, he also started the 2015 opener, also against Lafayette.

If it's a trick question, it's because John Lovett, who wasn't technically the starting quarterback in any game in 2016, won the Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year, something Kanoff won in 2017 and then Lovett won again in 2018, when the Tigers went 10-0.

Lovett was the clear starter in 2018. In 2019, Kevin Davidson was the starter. In 2021, it was Cole Smith, whose graduation meant that Princeton would have its fifth different starting quarterback in five years as the 2022 season kicked off.

This time around, it was junior Blake Stenstrom who was the opening day starter. For the first time since Kanoff in 2016, Princeton's starting quarterback was not a senior.

Stenstrom was, like the Princeton team as a whole, very steady in a 39-14 win at Stetson Saturday. In some ways, it was what a coaching staff might consider to be a perfect opener: a win, with some big contributions by some new faces, as well as enough that still needs to be worked on to get everyone's attention come film time.

A year ago, in Week 2, Princeton defeated Stetson 63-0. If those were the only numbers floating around your head before the game started, then you probably wondered what was going on when Stetson took leads of 7-0 and 14-7. What was going on was the presence of Stetson's rookie quarterback Brady Meitz, who had thrown for nearly 800 yards in the first two Hatter games, both wins.

From TigerBlog's perspective, this was much better than a 63-0 romp. Meitz threw two long TD passes in the first 17 minutes, and TB was interested to see how the Tigers would react to a little adversity early on.

The answer was: really well.

To that point, Stetson had 178 yards of offense and two touchdowns in three possessions. Going forward, Stetson had no points and 65 more yards. 

Princeton scored the final 32 points of the day, including a safety in the second quarter that built a 22-14 lead at the break. The safety, by the way, meant that Princeton's defense outscored Stetson's offense 2-0 after the second touchdown.

Something else that any coaching staff loves to see is a win in which it's pretty difficult to pick out who the top player for the day was. In this case, Princeton got contributions from all over the place, from some who have made them before and others who are in new roles.

Take the wide receiver position, for instance. The leading receiver, not shockingly, was Andrei Iosivas, who caught six passes for 87 yards and two touchdowns. Jo Jo Hawkins, who had one career reception prior to this season, also caught six, for 70 yards.

Stenstrom, for his part, was 23 for 33 for 256 yards and the two TDs to Iosivas. The fact that the team has a new starting quarterback again and yet has been so successful through the years is a testament to a coaching staff that knows how to prepare those in the program to be successful and the team-first culture that exists with the Tigers.

The game against Stetsopn gave Princeton a chance to blend the new and the old together. It gave the team a chance to travel, flying by charter to Florida. It gave the team an opening day win.

Up next is the home opener against Lehigh, this coming Saturday at 3. The Mountain Hawks are 1-2, having beaten Georgetown and lost to Villanova and Richmond.

After that is the Ivy opener, at Columbia. Has anything been learned about the league after one week of games? Well, the Ivy teams did go 7-1. In other words, no week will be easy.

Princeton is 1-0. It learned quite a lot about itself in the game in Florida — including that there is much left to learn. 

All in all, you couldn't ask for more on opening day.