First of all, don't blame the Bills'
placekicker for the loss. Had his kick been good, Mahomes would have simply
marched his team down the field and won the game anyway.
Okay, with that out of the way,
TigerBlog has a longstanding policy by which he will turn this space over to
anyone who wants to write about Princeton Athletics. Today he has a first-time
taker in Duncan Yin of the Class of 1982.
TB and Yin have developed a friendship
that began with conversations after the 2021 Princeton-Harvard football game,
the one that went to five overtimes. Yin is a huge fan of all Princeton
Athletics, especially football. With the retirement last week of longtime
Crimson coach Tim Murphy, Yin asked if he could try his hand at writing
something, and so here are his thoughts:
Because of my
unhealthy emotional attachment to Princeton football, I have seen more than my
share of games against Harvard. If Jim
McKay solemnly intoning the phrase, “the thrill of victory and the agony of
defeat” reflects in any way what you want out of life, you could do a lot worse
than to every year put on your calendar attending the Princeton-Harvard
game. Crimson head coach Tim Murphy
retired last week after losing his final six Princeton games and he leaves in
his wake a trail of broken hearts and shattered spirits on both sides.
One could write a
book about the ecstasy and soul-crushing pain from the Princeton-Harvard games
since I matriculated and, if TB ever stops writing romance novels (“With You,”
$12.99 on Amazon), he will do just that.
In 2012, undefeated
and nationally ranked Harvard came into the game a two-touchdown favorite. A friend of mine who graduated from That
School Up North called to propose that we wager on the outcome of the game. If there’s one phenomenon which accurately
demonstrates the difference between Princeton and Harvard graduates, it’s that
with the latter, you never hear from them when the Tigers are the prohibitive
favorite. Radio silence. But when the Crimson are rolling and likely
to dominate, suddenly your phone starts ringing off the hook, or whatever the
cell phone equivalent is.
Because this story
does not reflect well on my friend/groomsman, I don’t want to give his name
here, but his initials are Ted Glimp.
This lifelong pal had the gall to propose that the loser of the game
further subsidize the joy of the winner by springing for cocktails and
dinner. I know that many proud and/or
stubborn Tigers might accept this bet as a matter of pride, but that is not how
I manage my financial affairs.
One good thing about
having friends who went to Harvard is that you can often out-maneuver them
strategically. I countered to Ted,
“Great idea, old chum. But that would
limit our attention and our fun that afternoon to only the football game. Why don’t we expand our mutual enjoyment by
counting the cumulative wins and losses this Saturday and finance dinner based
upon the Harvard-Princeton contests in football, field hockey, and men’s and
women’s soccer?”
I’m pretty sure Ted
did not foresee that Princeton field hockey was headed for an NCAA national
championship later that fall, nor did he likely know that the Tiger soccer
teams were both outstanding, but he was smart enough to realize he didn’t like
where this was going. But as the proud
and stubborn Harvard man he is, the wager was made.
By halftime of the
football game, Harvard was up 20-0, but unfortunately, it was not even *that*
close, if you can believe it; the Crimson had failed to capitalize on a couple
of red zone opportunities. It was a
major beatdown unfolding on the Washington Generals. With less than twelve minutes remaining in
the game, the margin had expanded to 34-10.
At that point, Princeton completed a touchdown pass to make the
scoreboard less painful to consult and Coach Surace opted to go for two points.
Now, I’m a glass
half-full man by nature, but even I turned to my friend (not Ted) at the game
and said, “Get a load of Surace! He’s
going for two, so that we can score three touchdowns and three two-point
conversions to tie. Love the optimism,
but. . . .” It turns out that my
skepticism was misplaced. I should have
instead quoted the great philosopher who once said, “So you’re telling me
there’s a chance. . . .”
For more than three
quarters, Harvard had looked like an unstoppable Napoleon marching on
Moscow. But suddenly, the Russian winter
arrived. With fury.
In the prior five
games of the 2012 season, Princeton quarterbacks had completed a total of one
touchdown pass, although incredibly, our place-kicking holder Tom Moak had
tossed for two scores in consecutive games on busted field goal attempts where
he kept his composure and threw downfield for the unexpected bonus
touchdown. On the season, Moak was 2 of
2 for 24 yards and two touchdowns. His
career passer rating of 530.8 should make Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady ashamed
of themselves.
In a span of nine
minutes against Harvard, we completed another three touchdown passes, making
the score 34-32 with 2:27 left. Coach
Surace of course chose to attempt a two-point conversion for the tie, but it
failed. That is, it failed to tie the
game, but it *succeeded* in finalizing the last piece in the puzzle to set the
stage for one of the most unbelievable endings in Coach Murphy’s storied
30-year career.
Not to get too far
ahead of ourselves, but – warning! – here’s a spoiler alert: Harvard loses this game. Murphy is by all accounts a competitor of
commendable sportsmanship, once visiting the Princeton locker room after
another agonizing nail-biter. After this
2012 contest, I watched closely as he did not venture onto the field for the
traditional handshake with Surace.
Instead, no doubt with his heart in his hand, Murphy did not walk, he
did not stride briskly, he ran – full on sprinted – to the visitor’s locker
room. I suspect that, in his agony, it
was all he could bring himself to do. If
I were a better human being, I would have felt badly for him.
Harvard took the
ensuing kickoff and drove to one yard short of midfield, where the Crimson
faced a decision on fourth-and-one with 2:08 left. Surace had used one of our time-outs after
each play in this series, so at the conclusion of an afternoon in which Harvard
had gained 634 offensive yards (not a typo), picking up one more would have won
it. If the game had been played today,
Murphy could have simply looked down into the lower-right hand corner of the
ESPN broadcast where a bright green box would have told him,
“Fourth-and-one: Analytics say, ‘Go For
It.’”
But, kids, computers
did not exist back in 2012 and Murphy was left to consider how much confidence
he had in his offense. In the same way
that, in the frigid blizzards of December 1812, Napoleon abandoned his La Grande
Armee on the banks of the frozen River Berezina to flee back to Paris, Murphy
chose to punt.
To this day, the word
“Berezina” is used in French as a synonym for epic disaster. For example, “Le match de basket-ball entre
Harvard et Princeton a ete une catastrophe Berezina pour les Crimson, 89-58.”
Princeton took over
on our 10 with no timeouts and 1:57 to play.
Two minutes to destiny.
When Murphy announced
his retirement last week, Ted texted me that he hoped, in appointing the next
coach, Harvard would “follow the Sullivan/Amaker model.” Frank Sullivan was the Harvard basketball
coach for sixteen seasons until 2007, when he was replaced by a higher profile
and more aggressive recruiter, former Seton Hall and Michigan coach as well as
Duke star Tommy Amaker. I texted back to
Ted, “I agree. I hope that the next head
coach of Harvard football is Tommy Amaker.”
After two gains out
to the 37, quarterback Conner Michelsen was brutally sacked, like Moscow, but
the triumphant Harvard defensive end chose that moment in time to treat the
crowd to an impromptu windmill air-guitar rendition worthy of Pete Townshend. His celebratory histrionics did not impress
the referees and they assessed a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike
conduct. First down Princeton at our 45,
now 57 seconds left.
I guarantee you that,
for decades into the future, that Harvard defensive end will not call his
Princeton friends before gameday unless Harvard is heavily favored. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
After the sack,
Michelsen staggered woozily to the sideline and, suddenly, sophomore Quinn
Epperly, the more running oriented of the quarterback duo, had to strap on his
helmet. In four plays, Epperly moved us
to the Harvard 36 where it was third-and-two, 19 seconds left.
Many people can
remember exactly what they were doing when certain momentous events occur, such
as where they were when they learned that John Lennon had been shot. I can remember what every part of my body was
doing at every moment of the next play.
I was sitting with a
friend (still not Ted) on the Harvard side, even with the Crimson sideline near
the closed end of the stadium. Princeton
was driving toward the open end. Epperly
took the snap and rolled to his left, his throwing hand. He wasn’t scrambling; it was a designed play
to move the pocket to that side. His
sprint bought extra time and, on the dead run, he lofted a ball with a high arc
toward the left corner of the end zone.
Because he was running and his feet weren’t planted, he needed extra
propulsion to generate the requisite launch velocity. I can still picture the exaggerated windmill
motion his left arm made for the release.
October 20, 2012 was a great day for windmills.
Because of where I
was sitting, I didn’t even need to turn my head to follow the ball. Princeton receiver Roman Wilson was already
directly in my field of vision. It was
like a well composed classical painting.
Van Gogh put Epperly in the foreground and Wilson in the background of a
masterpiece.
I could see that
Wilson had a step on Harvard safety Chris Splinter. Although the pass had just left Epperly’s
hand, I recalled enough high school geometry to tell immediately that, as
today’s football analysts are fond of saying but had never before been said in
2012, with Splinter slightly behind him, a well thrown ball would give Wilson
leverage against his defender. Analysts
today love “leverage.”
Suddenly, the moment
became whole to me. All the years of
painful close losses to Harvard – 1997, 1998, the double-overtime Berezina in
2003 – all that suffering was up in the air with that spinning football.
In public, I’m
normally a man who watches his sports stoically. No physical manifestation of events on the
field. Win or lose, I think that a poker
face is the way to present yourself.
Mama taught me not to cry in the presence of Harvard fans. But at that moment, my legs – without
provocation from my brain – began to lift my torso off the aluminum bench at
Princeton Stadium.
As the pass began its
gravitationally induced journey downward, now my arms joined my body in
involuntary upward movement. It was a
symphony of counterbalancing downward and upward motion.
By the time the ball
settled gracefully into the beautiful outstretched hands of one Roman D.
Wilson, I was fully standing. Wilson
thrust the football skyward to signal what he and the Tigers had just
accomplished, but my arms were already there, reaching up toward the benevolent
and generous gods who had just delivered this moment forever into my life.
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