Football: Strong Yale team with championship aspirations to host football team in 132nd edition of storied rivalry

These motives should make Saturday’s game hard-fought, if somewhat unbalanced. Princeton (1-7 overall, 0-5 Ivy League) will travel to the Yale Bowl to renew the most-played Ancient Eight rivalry, against Yale (6-2, 4-1). The Bulldogs are one of three teams still in contention for the Ivy League title, along with league-unbeaten Penn and fearsome rival Harvard (6-2, 4-1). Harvard and Penn will duke it out at the Quakers’ Franklin Field at the same time that Yale does its best to shut down Princeton.

A piece of bad news for the Tigers is that according to head coach Bob Surace ’90, Yale bears many similarities to Penn. Last weekend, Penn blew Princeton out of the water 52-10.

“Yale has a lot of similarities to Penn, in that they’re very balanced,” Surace said. “Penn has a number of running backs that are downhill runners and do a terrific job, and Penn also has the threat of quarterback runs. The quarterback took off and scrambled for some big yards.”

Surace’s qualification of “downhill runners,” referring to bulldozing power backs who find the hole quickly, also describes Yale tailback Alex Thomas. Thomas has put together consecutive 100-yard performances in his team’s last two games, with a career-high 140 yards on 19 runs against Columbia.

“[Thomas] is a downhill runner, and just from all the film I’ve seen, he’s one of the better running backs and really similar to a lot of the guys who played back when I played that just are physical, tough, get extra yards and make guys miss. He’s an exceptional football player,” Surace said.

While Yale’s Thomas boasts the most productive runner in Connecticut high school history, the Tigers have lost their own star running back in senior co-captain Jordan Culbreath — most likely for good this time. On Saturday, Culbreath suffered a knee injury that will, in all likelihood, end his college career. After overdcoming a battle with aplastic anemia, Culbreath will finish with a total of 1,935 rushing yards, eighth-most all- time at Princeton, if he doesn’t play in either of the remaining two games.

“He’s getting X-rayed; my guess is he won’t be available,” Surace said. “Hopefully we get good news, but I’m not counting on that based on the injury he had.”

Last weekend, Yale eked out a 27-24 win over Brown, in large part thanks to a superpowered special teams unit. The Bulldogs’ Chris Smith returned two kickoffs for touchdowns; he was the first Ivy League player to do so in a single game, as well as the first Yale player to do so over an entire career.

Yale head coach Tom Williams explained the upsides, and even the downsides, to such a feat.

“Obviously, when you have a play like that, those are big momentum swing plays, and they get everybody jacked up,” Williams said. “We felt like our return game is a dangerous, explosive unit … To have lightning strike twice in consecutive plays was a big momentum boost for our offense. Interestingly enough, I think it might have set us back offensively just because we were off the field for such a long time that our timing might’ve been a little bit off, but we’ll trade that for the points that we got.”

Ultimately, these two plays proved to be the saving grace of the game for Yale, as they counteracted the team’s high number of turnovers.

“Normally, when you lose the turnover battle, about 80 percent of the time you lose the game. We were fortunate enough to have the kickoff returns for touchdowns, and it gave us the opportunity to score some points and overcome the turnover ratio,” Williams said.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Not surprisingly, Princeton ranks third-to-last in the league in turnover margin, at minus-4. More importantly, though, Princeton will need to focus on converting within the 35-yard line, Surace said.

“The key is, we have to execute,” Surace said. “We moved the ball inside the 50-yard line and really inside the 35 a number of times [against Penn] and did not come away with points, whether we missed field goals or dropped passes or they defended us well. We’ve got to execute better once we hit that plus-35 area.”