After promising start, football sputters to .500

On a crisp afternoon in late October, the sea of orange and black-clad homecoming fans watching the football team battle Harvard at Princeton Stadium had reason to cheer.

The 4-1 Tigers had jumped to 14-3 first quarter lead against the defending-Ivy champion Crimson. Princeton's offense was clicking, its defense forcing turnovers. The painful 2-8 season of the previous fall seemed but a distant memory. Finally, it seemed, the Tigers' claws were back.

But two hours and 36 unanswered points later, Harvard drove home with an emphatic 39-14 victory and Princeton had begun a devastating four-game slide in which the Tigers would repeatedly find new ways to lose. By the time Princeton picked up its next victory — beating Dartmouth in the season finale to end the year 5-5 (3-4 Ivy League) — the once-promising fall had been replaced by another winter of discontent.

It wasn't supposed to happen again, not this year, not with the Tigers' offensive skill-positions manned by experienced seniors and their defense boosted by the return of three former All-Ivy performers who had been forced to take a year off from Princeton. This season, head coach Rogers Hughes' fifth at the helm, was supposed to be the one in which everything clicked. Instead, by the end, there were whispers that Hughes was on thin ice.

Things started well enough, as the Tigers trounced Lafayette, 35-18, under the lights at home. Senior quarterback Matt Verbit turned in a pleasingly efficient performance, going 18-26 for 227 yards and two touchdowns. Meanwhile, junior Greg Fields picked up 230 total yards on a dazzling combination of reverses, receptions and returns.

But the victory was not without a painfully Pyhrric element — just before halftime, in the process of making his seventh catch of the game, senior wide receiver Clint Wu tore his ACL, an injury from which he would never fully recover.

Even without Wu, Princeton kept rolling the next week on the team's first-ever trip to the West Coast. Facing the University of San Diego, the Tigers' defense forced three first quarter turnovers — returning two for touchdowns — to ignite a 21-0 lead. Princeton barely hung on for a 24-17 victory, but to the hundreds of alums who had descended on the city and celebrated through a weekend of swanky events, the trip couldn't have turned out better.

Princeton's next game would prove to be its most exciting of the season. Trailing Columbia 20-17, the Tigers perfectly executed their two-minute drill — thanks in large part to a pair of acrobatic catches by junior Jay McCareins — to force overtime. After Columbia scored a quick touchdown, McCareins flew around the left side to block the extra point, his second blocked kick of the day. When Verbit pounded the pigskin across the goal line on Princeton's ensuing possession, the Tigers left New York with a 27-26 win.

It was Princeton who would be burned the following Saturday, however, blowing a 12-point lead against Colgate in Hamilton, N.Y., and falling 29-26. All-American running back Jamaal Branch scorched the Tigers for 179 yards on the ground, including a 76-yard momentum-swinging scamper just before halftime.

Princeton did a much better job containing Brown's dangerous Nick Hartigan the following weekend, holding him to just 66 yards en route to a 24-14 victory. It was the Tigers' senior running backs, Jon Veach and Branden Benson, who wore down the Bear defense in the fourth quarter, with Benson bulling his way to the go-ahead touchdown on fourth-and-goal.

And so it was that the Tigers sat tied atop the Ivy standings when Harvard came to town. Princeton's defense was primarily responsible for the early 14-3 lead, forcing two turnovers that gave the Tigers offense excellent field position.

But that defense would be flattened by the Crimson juggernaut over the final three quarters, as the All-Ivy duo of quarterback Matt Fitzgerald and wide receiver Brian Edwards repeatedly hooked up, while running back Clifton Dawson rushed for 201 yards, including an 80-yard fourth-quarter touchdown that drove the final nail into Princeton's coffin.

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It appeared the Tigers' confidence was severely wounded by the loss, as they played one of their sloppiest games of the season in Ithaca, N.Y., the next week. After staking Cornell a 21-7 lead, Princeton rallied with two second half touchdowns — but when junior Derek Javarone's extra point attempt on the second of those scores was blocked, the Tigers were stuck with a 21-20 loss.

Javarone would play the role of goat the following Saturday against Penn, too, pushing a 41-yard field goal wide right with 23 seconds left to allow the Quakers to escape with a 16-14 upset victory. In truth, though, Princeton shouldn't have needed any last-second heroics. The Tigers dominated the field position and time of possession battles in the first half, but scored just six points thanks to a 0-for-7 third-down conversion rate. It was a familiar Achilles' heel — Princeton went 0-for-13 on third down against Harvard two weeks prior.

The Tigers' offense sputtered again the next weekend on a miserably cold day in New Haven, Conn. Unable to pick up yardage on the ground or through the air, Princeton managed just three field goals, while the Elis' Robert Carr pounded out 160 yards and two touchdowns on 32 carries to lead his team to a 21-9 win.

The Tigers' offense wasn't much better in their season finale against Dartmouth, but the defense — led by All-Ivy senior linebacker Zak Keasey's dominating 22-tackle, two-sack performance — paved the way to 17-10 win that allowed Princeton to finish the season .500 overall and in a three-way tie for fourth in the league.

In truth, the game swung on a fluke play with just over five minutes left in the fourth quarter. With the game knotted at 10, Javarone's 42-yard field goal attempt was swatted down, into the arms of sophomore holder Colin McDonough. McDonough managed to shovel the pigskin to junior defensive end James Williams, who rumbled into the end zone.

It was an undeniably strange ending to a season in which the Tigers had their share of both lucky and unlucky breaks. Princeton was clearly a better team in 2004 than in 2003 — but still not quite good enough to make luck irrelevant.