The agony of overtime defeat — again

Last week the football team considered itself two plays from being 4-1 in the Ivy League. Now the Tigers (2-7 overall, 2-4 Ivy League) are three plays away from being 5-1 after losing Saturday to Yale, 27-24, in double overtime.

"Take one play away," junior running back Jon Veach said. "Take one play away in Columbia, Harvard and Yale, and we have one loss in the league. We're not far off."

There were a few "one plays" in this one.

Both teams scored a touchdown in the first overtime, but Yale was only able to score a field goal on its second possession.

If Princeton found the endzone, it would win the game. The first play of its second possession, though, would be another that kept the Tigers one play away.

Junior quarterback Matt Verbit zinged the ball to junior wide receiver B.J. Szymanski on a quick slant on the left side of the field. Szymanski turned upfield for a gain of at least fifteen yards. But as he turned up, the corner who he had just blown by, James Beck, swung at the ball in Szymanski's outstretched arm and knocked it away. A swarm of white jerseys fell on the pigskin, and Bryant Dieffenbacher came up with it — his second fumble recovery of the game. Game over. Yale wins, 27-24.

"I turned downfield, and I thought, 'Oh crap, that's a 15-yard completion,'" Dieffenbacher said. "Then the ball popped out, and I just jumped on it."

There was more than one play that decided the outcome of this game, however, and there were several plays to point to that could have been the "one play. " Another obvious "one play" came with Princeton ahead, 17-10. After a great pooch punt forced Yale to start at its own eight-yard line with one minute, three seconds left in the game, the Elis drove 70 yards to the Princeton 22 with seven seconds to go. Then came one of those plays. Yale wide receiver Chandler Henley was matched up one-on-one with freshman cornerback Tim Strickland on the left side of the field. Yale quarterback Alvin Cowan threw a perfect fade ball to the endzone. Henley turned back and rose up over Strickland, who never looked back for the ball. Henley snagged it five yards deep in the endzone with no time left on the clock.

"He put it up there, and I saw the ball in the air," Henley said. "I just went up, and it stuck there."

Just one drive earlier, Princeton had a chance to ice it without all these dramatics and traumatics.

The Tigers were running off the clock on a drive that had started with 7:49 left in the game. With just over a minute left, Princeton was faced with a fourth-and-one at the Yale 23-yard line. Since the Tigers' kickers have been anything but consistent this year, especially from some distance, head coach Roger Hughes called a timeout and elected to go for it.

At the snap of the ball, everyone on the Princeton offense flowed to the left side of the field. Verbit faked a handoff to Veach and then turned his back and rolled right on a naked bootleg, easily getting the first down on a gutsy call.

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Princeton would have been able to run off almost all of the rest of the clock, and the game would have been over there. But a little piece of yellow cloth on the field meant that Princeton had committed holding on the play — one of its eight penalties on the day — and Hughes elected to call for the pooch punt on fourth-and-11 after the penalty.

"We had it," Veach said. "Penalties are going to happen. Guys were just trying as hard as they can to seal their blocks off. I don't think there was an emotional drop because we were confident that we could stop Yale. We'd stopped them all game."

The Yale side of the field saw that play much differently.

"It was a huge emotional swing for us to go from fourth-and-short to 10 yards farther back," Dieffen-bacher said. "It was a great feeling."

There were numerous other plays in the game that could have been the "one play" to bring Princeton's third victory home, including a fade pass that scored Yale's first touchdown and a Veach fumble on the very next drive that seemed to put momentum squarely on the Eli sideline. But Princeton head coach Roger Hughes refused to attribute it to one play.

"We didn't make the plays on both sides of the ball to knock Yale out," he said. "No one play wins or loses a game for us. There are a number of plays along the way that obviously dictate the outcome or put you in a position where one play at the end appears to lose the game."