Um

Remember TigerBlog's quiz from last week? 

Well, there was a mistake in it that loyal reader Stuart Schulman pointed out in an X repost:

“14) Bill Carmody, who went to Union, is the only non-Princeton grad to be the men's basketball team head coach since 1961.”

Um….

— Stuart Schulman (@StuartMSchulman) August 8, 2025

It took TB a few seconds to realize what the "um" was all about. Then it hit him: Um, Pete Carril went to Lafayette, not Princeton.

What's incredible is that only Stuart pointed it out. Not even Gary Walters, who played for Carril at Reading High School and whose connection to Carril was as strong as anyone's, pointed it out. 

It dawned on TigerBlog that the reason that he made the mistake originally was that Carril was so affiliated with Princeton that the idea that he went to a different college faded to the back. That's sort of like TB, by the way, who often forgets he went to a different college as well.

Anyway, thanks to Stuart for the heads up. It's a Top 10 all-time TB mistake, he'd have to say. 

Meanwhile, since TB last spoke to you, all sorts of wild things have happened in the world of sports. There has been, for instance:

* a 70-yard field goal in an NFL preseason game
* the first woman to umpire in the Major Leagues
* a torn Achilles suffered by a Hall of Famer baseball player at an Old-Timers Game
* a broken collarbone suffered by a 19-year old champion NASCAR driver

Oh, and there was also a game between two teams where both won. 

Um, what? 

This past weekend was the final weekend of the Premier Lacrosse League regular season, with three of the six playoff spots still up for grabs. The Philadelphia Waterdogs went into their game against the New York Atlas knowing that they'd clinch a spot in the playoffs with a win or a loss by one or two goals, since goal differential is a tiebreaker. 

As it turned out, the game became the highest scoring in the history of the league, as the Atlas won 20-19. Both teams were happy and playoff bound (the Atlas had already clinched the top seed in the East).

In fact, the Atlas had the ball with the shot clock off and a one-goal lead. In any other game, the defense would have pressed out, left the goal open and done everything it could to cause a turnover. This time, the Waterdogs sat back and let time run out. 

A similar situation would be a basketball team that is down by one while the other team had possession with the shot clock off and simply allowed the team that was ahead to dribble out the clock. 

The Waterdogs, by the way, are coached by Princeton Hall of Fame head coach Bill Tierney and feature Tiger alums Zach Currier and Michael Sowers. Currier once again led all non-face-off shortsticks in groundballs in the league, while Sowers tied for the league lead in assists with 23 and became the eight player in PLL history to reach at least 40 points in a season (he had 18 goals for 41 points).

The conference semifinals will be held on the 23rd in Minneapolis, with the Waterdogs against the Whipsnakes in the East and the Chaos and Redwoods in the West. Denver has the Western by into the conference finals the following weekend in Philadelphia and then the final Sept. 14 at the Red Bull Arena in Harrison.

The PLL continues to play a rotating schedule, with one site each weekend that hosts four games. Each of the eight league teams gets one "home" weekend, which isn't exactly a huge advantage in that during that weekend it has to play twice, on consecutive days. 

Each team also gets a weekend off. 

How do the home teams do? In the 16 games they played, they went 5-11 overall. No team swept its two games. Three teams went 0-2, including the Cannons this weekend, who needed one win to get into the Eastern playoffs (and got a four-goal effort from Princeton's Coulter Mackesy in a one-goal loss Friday night; Mackesy finished his rookie season with 15 goals and five assists for 20 points). 

The home teams went 2-6 on Day 2, by the way. Isn't playing at home supposed to be an advantage? 

Um, isn't that right?