Game Week

The inarguable highlight of the weekend in college football came in Piscataway, where A.J. Surace threw the first two touchdown passes of his career for Rutgers. 

As for the rest ,TigerBlog was watching a college football game Saturday when heard the announcer say essentially this: 

"The transfer from someplace on the carry, and the transfer from another place on the tackle."

Which game was it? All of them. Who won? The casual fan like TigerBlog didn't really care. 

Hey, that's where the sport is right now on the Power 4 level. There are graphics of quarterbacks who are on their third teams. One team (TB thinks it was Virginia) has nine transfers in its secondary alone. What happened to the guys they recruited at those positions? 

Rob Hegner is the public address announcer for Princeton field hockey. He is also a West Virginia graduate. He mentioned the other day that his alma mater had 70 transfers on the roster. 

How can anyone be a fan of such a team in this day and age? And yet you look at the crowds on TV, and they're the same as always.  

It is amazing. Nobody seems to care about anything other than winning games, and they don't care who does the winning for them. 

It's like the time when Pete Carril was asked about playing an opponent in one of those old holiday tournaments, and his response was essentially that they had a lot of big guys. When it was pointed out to him that Princeton also had some big guys, Carril, without flinching, responded: 

"Yeah, but I didn't go down to the docks to get them."

 TB hopes it's worth it to them. For him? He'll continue to root for the Surace Family. 

It's Game Week for Ivy League football. After the long grind of training camps, Game Week is here. 

Those are great words for the players on all eight teams. For Princeton, Game Week No. 1 for the 2025 season means a home game against San Diego this coming Saturday at noon.

The Ivy season actually kicks off Friday night, when Columbia is at Lafayette. The rest of the games Saturday are: Georgetown at Brown, Holy Cross at Yale, New Hampshire at Dartmouth, Penn at Stonehill, Harvard at Stetson and Cornell at Albany. 

This year, of course, will be unlike any other in Ivy League football history. The big news in the off-season was that the Ivy champion for the first time will be headed to the FCS playoffs. 

That alone will be fascinating. You know what else is fascinating? 

Princeton announced its four football captains last week, and two of them are quarterbacks. This is not an unprecedented situation; the 2017 Tiger football captains were quarterbacks John Lovett and Chad Kanoff (along with defensive lineman Kurt Holuba). 

Lovett, if you recall, missed that entire year due to an injury. It worked out well for him after that, as he came back the next year to quarterback the Tigers to a perfect 10-0 2018 season and then won a Super Bowl ring with the Kansas City Chiefs before injuries derailed a promising NFL career. 

There are four captains for this season. The two non-quarterbacks are Nasir Hill and Marco Scarano, both of whom were second-team All-Ivy League defensive selections a year ago. The two quarterbacks are Blaine Hipa and Kai Colon.  

As for the first opponent, San Diego is 1-2 on the season. The win came over No. 24 Southern Utah 30-27 in overtime.

The Toreros have given up 41 points in each of their two losses, with a 41-17 opening day loss to Cal Poly and then a 41-7 loss to No. 4 Montana State this past Saturday. The game against Montana State was the first road game for the season for San Diego, who now flies across the country to come to Powers Field at Princeton Stadium. 

Kickoff is at noon. Or, if you look on San Diego's website, kickoff is at 9 am. 

Is this the only cross-country flight of the year for the Toreros? Nope. TB wouldn't have asked if it was. San Diego in fact has upcoming games at Marist (coached by former Tiger offensive coordinator Mike Willis), Davidson (North Carolina), Valpo (Indiana) and Stetson (Florida). 

That's a lot of air miles. That has to be more than some NFL teams this year, no?  

Anyway, Game Week is here.  

It'll be way better than anything you'll see on TV.