Opening Kickoff

The opening kickoff of the 2022 Princeton football season is a few hours away.

The Tigers, coming off another Ivy League championship a year ago, will be on a plane today to Florida in advance of tomorrow's 1:00 game at Stetson.

This is the start of a 10-games, 10-weeks run that will see Princeton chase a fifth Ivy championship under head coach Bob Surace, who has won the title in 2013, 2016, 2018 and 2021. Surace also was the All-Ivy League center on Princeton's 1989 Ivy champ.

Before the games begin, there is THIS FEATURE STORY written by TigerBlog's colleague Warren Croxton on Princeton's Nasir Cook and his Nashville Youth Initiative. It's a very inspiring story.

There is also this video that is very much worth your three minutes. It's a day in the life of Tigers Uche Ndukwe and Andrei Iosivas. 

A Day in the Life of a Tiger!

Follow @AndreiIosivas and @undukwe49 through their day at @Princeton! #Juice24 🍊🥤 pic.twitter.com/2npERC1fRc

— Princeton Football (@PrincetonFTBL) September 14, 2022

Those types of videos are among TigerBlog's favorite kinds of content, especially in football. It's a sport where the players are wearing helmets and head-to-toe padding, and it's hard to necessarily see the individual person and personality underneath all that. To have a video like the one of Ndukwe and Iosivas gives you a window into who they are.

Ndukwe and Iosivas are two of Princeton's football captains for the year. The Tigers have seven in all, with those two plus tight end Carson Bobo, wide receiver Dylan Classi, offensive lineman Henry Byrd, linebacker Matthew Jester and defensive back Michael Ruttlen Jr.

Princeton was picked to finish third in the league, behind co-No. 1s Harvard and Dartmouth. This, of course, means nothing once the games start.

In all the years that TB has been watching Ivy League football, he's always felt like last week was the toughest, when pretty much everyone else is playing and there is still one more week to go until you do. This week has always been a fun one, with nearly a month of preseason, not to mention all of the off-season work and conditioning, now over and the promise of the new year here.

Every team in the league is 0-0, and every team in the league should be thinking this could be the year. Certainly Ivy football history is filled with unheralded teams who have made a serious run and even won the championship.

One team that isn't 0-0 is Stetson, who is 2-0 after wins over Concordia (Michigan) and Louisiana Christian. This is the Hatters final non-league game, and the schedule for them will now feature eight Pioneer League games. Stetson's first football coach, you might recall, was former Princeton head coach Roger Hughes. 

Princeton defeated Stetson 62-0 last year on a day when two Hatters quarterbacks combined to throw for 173 yards in the loss. That total is less than half of what the team's new QB has averaged for the first two weeks.

Brody Meitz, who redshirted a year ago as a freshman, has thrown for 794 yards and four touchdowns while completing 60 percent of his passes in the two games to date. He comes into the game against Princeton as the reigning PFL Offensive Player of the Week after throwing for 444 yards and three touchdowns last week. In that game against Louisiana Christian, he completed 25 of 44, and his 25 completions went to 10 different receivers. 

According to his bio on the Stetson website, Meitz is a pre-med major who would like to be an orthopedic surgeon. The 25 completions he had last week are also five times more than all of Princeton's quarterbacks combined entering this season.

Blake Stenstrom completed five passes a year ago while backing up Cole Smith. In fact, who is second on the team right now in career completions? That would be Classi, the wide receiver.

Breaking in a new quarterback is not new for Princeton's offense. It happened in 2019 with Kevin Davidson and last year with Cole Smith, and both had very big seasons.

The quarterback question will be answered soon enough. So will all of the other questions about this team, which graduated a lot of familiar faces. There is plenty of experience still on the team, and the great depth that Surace and his staff have put together makes the competition for all of the spots intense.

And now it's time for the opening kickoff. Princeton and Stetson, tomorrow at 1.

It'll be mid-November before you know it.