Football: Dixon to record 1st career start

As the NFL moves toward an 18-game season, injuries are the biggest concern for players and fans alike. Only five weeks into Ivy League football season, many teams in the conference find their depth charts shot by an unusually injury-ridden year.

On Saturday, the football team will take part in the 103rd contest against historic league rival Harvard at Princeton Stadium. Though Harvard (3-2 overall, 1-1 Ivy League) is considered a favorite to win the Ivy League title, the Crimson suffered an upset to Lehigh last weekend, allowing 21 points in the second half to lose 21-19. Princeton (1-4, 0-2) played a similar game against Brown, riding a 13-0 lead into the locker room at the half only to give up 17 points later.

Princeton lost not only the game, but its quarterback as well: Junior Tommy Wornham was sidelined with a shoulder injury, and senior Andrew Dixon took his place under center. Dixon, who completed seven of 18 passes for 83 yards last weekend, will start on Saturday.

“Dixon’s going to be the starter,” head coach Bob Surace ’90 said. “The good thing is, the offense doesn’t change much.”

Though Surace wasn’t laughing when Wornham was injured, he later made light of the situation.

“I told him when he came back out in the second quarter, ‘It’s your left shoulder, you can throw with your right one’ — and obviously he wasn’t cleared for play, I was joking with him — but Tommy is a tough guy, and if he’ s able to play he will play,” Surace said. “It’s just the nature of his personality. As soon as he gets cleared, he will be out there.”

Harvard, too, has been forced to make changes at quarterback. The team’s second-string quarterback, senior Andrew Hatch, won the starting job during the preseason after senior starter Collier Winters was taken out with a hip injury. Hatch, however, was no typical second-stringer: He left Harvard after his freshman year and, in 2008, he briefly started for football powerhouse Louisiana State University. In the season-opening 34-6 victory against Holy Cross, Hatch completed 20 of 25 passes for 276 yards.

Then, Hatch took suffered a concussion after a bad helmet-to-helmet hit in the Brown game in late September and passed the torch to the untried Colton Chapple.

Chapple has learned quickly, winning two of his first three games. Harvard head coach Tim Murphy said he is happy with Chapple’s improvement.

“I thought Colton Chapple — a sophomore who just a month ago was a kid who had only JV snaps and was a third-team quarterback — did a great job executing on offense and taking care of the football,” Murphy said.

Murphy, however, still lamented the sheer number of injuries that have hit Harvard’s depth chart. “We lost our top two receivers for the year, top two quarterbacks, top four corners, our leading tackler, a linebacker, but those are the things that are going to happen in games. That’s the adversity you face — you really can’t even talk about it, you just suck it up and move on and give someone else a chance.”

The Crimson hasn’t yet lost its most imposing threat, running back Gino Gordon. Gordon has rushed for 507 yards on 71 carries this season. In Chapple’s first start against Lafayette, Gordon took charge and led the Crimson’s running attack to its highest rushing total since 2008. According to Surace, Gordon poses a one-of-a-kind challenge. “Specifically, with their ground attack, we have to do a great job with responsibilities in tackling,” Surace said. “[Gordon] is ... a hard runner, and he’s very consistent. It seems like every week, his production is very high ... He does have a unique ability to make guys miss.”

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In describing why Princeton will be a challenge, Murphy focused on the Tigers’ diversity on offense.

“To use their wide receivers and running backs as an example, you have to account for those guys on every play because they really have the diversity of talent on the offensive side of the ball — every one of them is a weapon. You can’t double anybody; you can’t try to defend just the pass or just the run,” Murphy said.

Unfortunately for Princeton, one of those offensive weapons was injured last week along with Wornham: senior running back and co-captain Jordan Culbreath sat out the second half.

“We lost Tommy, Jordan and [senior fullback] Matt Zimmerman all within about a one-minute span of the game to different injuries, and we didn’t do a great job overcoming that,” Surace said.