Tigers ruled Ivy League in 1995

Before the first snap of the football team's 2005 campaign, plans had already been made to introduce the current Tigers to the members of Princeton's 1995 Ivy League champion squad.

With their 30-13 victory over Penn on Saturday — which kept them in contention for the Ivy League crown — this year's Tigers ensured that they and their celebrated forerunners would have something very exciting to chat about.

After all, no Princeton team has fresher memories of what it feels like to win a league title than the 1995 squad, which finished with an Ivy record of 5-1-1 and was the last Tiger team to win the league.

For those accomplishments, the 1995 team will be honored at a Princeton Football Association banquet this Friday and with an on-field halftime ceremony during the Tigers' homecoming game against Yale the next day.

But it might be more appropriate, historically speaking, for the festivities to be rescheduled for Princeton's season-ending contest against Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H.

It was in those exact same circumstances, after all, that the Tigers of 10 years ago found themselves on the last weekend of the 1995 season, needing a tie against the Big Green to secure the Ivy League championship.

"It was cold," Steve Tosches, the Princeton head coach at the time, said, "and there was a point where it was snowing so hard in that football game that it was a whiteout. You couldn't even see Dartmouth's bench on the other side of the field."

Down 10-7 in the fourth quarter of that game, the Tigers began the final drive of their season. An 18-yard scramble by quarterback Brock Harvey '96 left Princeton at the one-foot line, with just seconds remaining on the clock.

"I was thinking, 'Go for the touchdown!' " offensive lineman John Nied '96 said. "But I guess the coaches knew better than me and they had thought it out more."

Because the NCAA would not adopt an overtime format for football games until the following year — and because second-place Penn and Cornell had already suffered two losses to the Tigers' one — Tosches and his staff knew a field goal would be enough to secure the school's first outright title in 31 years.

Kicker Alexander Sierk '99, a freshman who would graduate as Princeton's all-time leader in field goals made, came on and booted an 18-yarder through the snow and the uprights to give the Tigers the tie and the title.

Those three points cemented the legacy of a team that fed off the competitive drive of its close-knit defensive unit and, above all, linebacker and team captain David Patterson '96.

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"We were really lucky to have a guy like David Patterson as our captain," defensive lineman Darrell Oliveira '96 says. "I think, even during our freshman year, we started to consider him the captain of our class."

As the Ivy League Player of the Year for the 1995 season, Patterson was given the Asa S. Bushnell Cup. Patterson became just the sixth Princeton player and fourth defensive player to receive the honor, awarded to him on the strength of his league-leading 129 tackles — a single-season total second in Ivy League history only to his own 130 tackles the year before.

In addition to Patterson, the defense featured cornerback Damani Leech '98, who as a sophomore that season posted eight interceptions, the second-best single-season total in league history. Both Patterson and Leech were named third-team Division I-AA All-Americans.

"I remember our defense being extremely fast," Leech, now the Associate Director of Baseball and Football for the NCAA, said. "We were a really tight bunch. We challenged each other and didn't slack off."

Oliveira first noticed that camaraderie, crucial to the team's on-field performance, during the unique off-season that preceded the 1995 campaign.

"We had a bunch of seniors and juniors who had internships in the area," Oliveira said, "close enough that we could get together and practice every day. We started to realize we had a pretty good team."

Tosches, for his part, traces the roots of the team's success back to the 1994 season, when the Tigers went a surprising 7-3 despite the graduation of Keith Elias '94, Princeton's all-time leading rusher and an NFL draftee.

"There was a lot of talk, after Elias left, that the program would take a step back and wouldn't be as powerful," Tosches said. "[The 1994 season] was the foundation for the team in 1995 to come in with confidence and sincere determination."

And in 1995, the Tigers capitalized on that positive attitude, giving Tosches at least a share of the league title for the third time in what would be a 13-year tenure at Princeton.

Unfortunately for Tosches and the Tigers, the collapse that many had predicted did come the following year, as Princeton finished a disappointing 3-7 overall. Unable to guide the team back into title contention, Tosches was replaced in 2000 by current head coach Roger Hughes, who has faced similar problems.

"What's most striking about [the 1995 championship]," Leech said, "is that it was midway through my career at Princeton and that, after that, the program really just went downward and hasn't gotten back to that level since."

If the Tigers of today can maintain their winning ways for two more games, Leech and his teammates will get a chance, come Saturday afternoon, to meet the team that finally restores Tiger football to the way they remember it.