Puck Drop And Kickoff

Welcome to Crossover Season.

To celebrate, TigerBlog wore a sweatshirt and shorts yesterday. It was that kind of weather, Crossover weather. 

What makes today the official start date for Crossover Season? Well, there are two games tonight that are a dead giveaway: Princeton at Robert Morris in women's hockey and Brown at Princeton in football. 

Yup. Winter sports are here. Fall sports are in full swing. 

The women's hockey regular season that starts tonight will run until Feb. 14-15, when Union and RPI are at Baker Rink. After that will be the ECAC playoffs and hopefully the NCAA tournament.

The end of the regular season four months away. By then, it'll be a different Crossover Season, with "spring" sports about to begin as well. 

Princeton starts out the season ranked 14th in the country in women's hockey. The Tigers lead the all-time series with Robert Morris 4-0, including a two-game sweep to start last season. 

It won't be long before women's hockey is joined by the rest of the winter teams. The men's hockey team will host Waterloo next Saturday, and the men's and women's basketball seasons will start the first week of November. 

For tonight, you have women's hockey and football.

The football game kicks off on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium at 7. If you can't be there, you can see the game on ESPNU and ESPN+.

Princeton comes into the game at 1-3 overall and 0-1 in the Ivy League. There are now six games remaining on the schedule, all of which will be league games. 

Brown is 2-2 and 1-0 in the league after it defeated Harvard in its first Ivy game, rallying from 28-10 down in the second half with the final three TDs of the game to win 31-28. The last of those three touchdowns came on a 27-yard pass from Jake Wilcox to Mark Mahoney with 21 seconds to play. 

Were it not for what happened last week with Dartmouth and Yale, that could have been the biggest comeback of the year in Ivy football. 

Brown is the top team in the Ivy League in passing offense, with 255.5 yards per game through the air. Princeton, at 183.0 passing yards allowed per game, is the top passing defense in the league and the only team in the league allowing fewer than 200 per game. 

Princeton is also the Ivy leader in total sacks. 

Wilcox, by the way, is the only Ivy quarterback so far to throw for more than 1,000 yards, with 1,017, nearly 100 yards more than anyone else. It's not shocking, given who his head coach is.

Brown is coached, as you probably know, by James Perry, himself a former Bears QB. Among the other items on his resume, he is still the No. 2 passer in Ivy history, threw the first touchdown pass in Princeton Stadium history and was Bob Surace's first offensive coordinator at Princeton. 

As such, it'll always be special when Surace and Perry face each other from opposite sidelines. Next weekend will see the first meeting between Surace and another former OC, Andrew Aurich, who is in his first year as the Harvard head coach. 

Tonight's game is the second straight for Princeton against a team nicknamed "Bears," after a 34-7 loss last week at the seventh-ranked Mercer Bears. There were positives in that game, of course — the 117 rushing yards for Ethan Clark, the Ivy Rookie of the Week performance by AJ Pigford among them. 

What Princeton needs to do is dial back the turnovers, with 12 in four games. Doing so would presumably help the time of possession, which is currently at 25:35 per game, and help keep the defense off the field. 

Each week is its own opportunity in football. The one that Princeton has tonight is a big one, with a chance to take the lessons of the first four weeks and move forward.

Powers Field at Princeton Stadium looks beautiful under the lights. It'll be a perfect night in Princeton for football. 

Be there. Tune in. Whichever works for you. 

It should be a great night of football.