Game Week

TigerBlog tuned into the Colorado-Colorado State football game Saturday evening for one reason: Ross Tucker was broadcasting the game.

Tucker, as you know, was a Princeton offensive lineman who played for nearly a decade in the NFL. He was on the field blocking for Emmitt Smith when he broke the NFL's career record for rushing yards. 

Since retiring, Tucker has become a great football color commentator. You can hear him all over the college football world, as well as on NFL games, with none other than Tom McCarthy, who also has Princeton connections.

Anyway, at one point during the broadcast Saturday, it was mentioned that Colorado State's placekicker Jordan Noyes is the second-oldest player in Division I football. How old is he? How about 32.

The only player older than Noyes — who is married with three children and who is from England originally — is Luke Larsen of East Carolina, who was born 15 days before Noyes. Larsen is a punter from Australia.

Oh, and TB also thinks he heard Tucker and his partner mention that back in 1918, Colorado tried to poison the Colorado State dog. TB assumed that Deion Sanders was in on it.  

If you're wondering, Colorado won the game fairly easily.

Meanwhile, here are six words that will make any Princeton fan smile: It's Game Week for Tiger Football. 

Or is that seven words?

The 2024 Ivy League football season kicks off this weekend with eight non-league games, including Princeton at Lehigh. That game has a noon start time in Bethlehem.

The Mountain Hawks will bring a 2-1 record into the game, with a loss to Army followed by wins over Wagner and LIU. 

The other games this weekend: Stetson at Harvard, Lafayette at Columbia, Fordham at Dartmouth, Brown at Georgetown, Cornell at Colgate, Yale at Holy Cross and Penn at Delaware.

The Bob Surace coaching tree now has a few new branches as head men, both in the league and out of it. 

Former offensive coordinator Mike Willis is now the head coach at Marist, which is 0-2 with losses to Georgetown and Lafayette. If it makes Willis feel any better, Surace was 1-9 in each of his first two seasons and then 0-2 to start his third, leaving him at 2-20 after 22 games.

In the 108 games since then, Surace has a record of 76-32, with four Ivy League titles mixed in. His winning percentage in his first 22 games was .091; in the 108 since, it's .704.

Some things take time to build.

The Stetson-Harvard game will mark the head coaching debut of another former Tiger offensive coordinator, Andrew Aurich, who has taken over for longtime coach Tim Murphy. Yet another former Surace OC is Brown head coach James Perry, who is 12-28 in his first four seasons with the Bears. The 2023 season was his best to date, with a 5-5 overall record and 3-4 Ivy record, including his first win over his former mentor with a 28-27 overtime victory over Princeton.

Brown will be the second team of Bears that Princeton faces in consecutive weeks this season. The Tigers will in Macon, Ga., to take on the Mercer Bears in Week 4 and then host Perry's Bears six days later on a Friday night.

The home opener will be in Week 2, when Howard comes to Powers Field at Princeton Stadium. Like Mercer, Princeton has never before played Howard. 

Football is a sport where you practice much more than you play. In other such sports, much of the time you're preparing for a season is spent actually playing. In football, that's not the case. 

There is so much preparation that goes into getting ready to put a team on the field for those 10 Saturdays. By the time the season opener rolls around, you're completely ready to go.

During the weeks before the first game, the opening kickoff can seem like it's so far in the future that you can barely see it. 

During the week before the game, it becomes much more real. You're not just practicing. You're gameplannig, getting ready for a specific opponent. 

It's an exciting week for any football team. 

For Princeton, that mean's Lehigh, this Saturday in Bethlehem.