Wild Kingdom

Another day, another picture of a reptile.

Welcome to TigerBlog's Wild Kingdom. If, by the way, you're in TB's age, then you know 1) there used to be a show called "Wild Kingdom" and 2) who was the sponsor of that show. 

Anyway, this guy was sent to TB by his friend Todd, who also said that such a turtle can live to be 35 years old and never go more than a few hundred yards from where they hatched. TB then suggested that Todd put the turtle in the car, drive him to the other side of the neighborhood and give him a crazy adventure that most turtles never get to experience. 

That's how they do it at TB's Wild Kingdom.

It was Todd, by the way, who pointed out that the snake who slithered by yesterday was a "garter" snake, and not a "garden" snake. TB is glad that after all these years, he finally has that cleared up.

Segueing from reptiles to mammals, it'll be the Tigers and Bears this weekend in soccer. 

The women's game will be on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium, with kickoff at 1. The men's game will be in Providence, with kickoff at 6.

Both teams will head into their big weekend games with the momentum of having won their Ivy League openers last weekend and then shutting out a non-league opponent in midweek. 

In the case of the men, that meant a 2-0 win over Harvard was followed by a 1-0 win over a previously unbeaten Monmouth team. For the women, it meant back-to-back 3-0 wins, first at Cornell and then at home against Lafayette. 

The Princeton men are No. 60 in the RPI rankings, while Brown is No. 99. In all five Ivy teams are in the Top 100, led by Cornell at 26 and then Penn at 30, Yale at 49, Princeton at 60, Dartmouth at 71 and then Brown at 99.

Who is No. 1, by the way? That would be Pitt, followed by Marshall, Stanford, Hofstra and Providence. That's RPI, not any coaches' rankings, and that's not the five TB would have guessed.

On the women's side, you have a top five of ... wait, let TB think about it. He'd guess North Carolina, Stanford, Florida State, UCLA and Texas A&M. Now let him look ... 

... and he got one correct. The top five is North Carolina, Michigan State, Arkansas, Wake Forest and Mississippi State. 

Princeton is the top rated Ivy school at No. 58. There are five, with Yale at 64, Brown at 73, Harvard at 78 and Dartmouth at 91.

If you add that together, you come away with 10 of the 16 Ivy League soccer teams ranked in the RPI top 100. That's impressive.

It also means that no Ivy game is a gimme and no Ivy team is a pushover. It makes each game its own challenge.

Mathematically what it means is that, on both sides, at least one team currently ranked in the top 100 will not be making it into the Ivy tournament, since only the top four make it. In fact, TB will go as far as to say that he'd guess that come Ivy tournament time, there will be at least one team among the eight in the two tournaments that is not currently in the top 100.

Princeton's men are now the No. 3 scoring defense team in the league. Brown's men are the No. 2 scoring offense team. That means nothing when that game starts. 

Princeton's women are the top scoring defense in the league, having allowed just five goals. Brown is second, having allowed eight. Princeton has scored 14 goals for the year, with six having come in the last two games after scoring eight in the first seven. 

Again, none of that matters in Ivy soccer. It's a league of great balance and depth. Every game is big.  

Oh, and it was "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." Extra credit if you remember that Marlon Perkins was the host. 

TB thinks it aired after NFL football on Sundays when he was a kid. He could be wrong about that. 

And tomorrow on TB's Wild Kingdom, it'll be a special Big Cats edition, with a look at Saturday's Tigers-Lions football game.