Men's Soccer: Tigers aim to cement best Ivy season ever

“No Princeton men’s soccer team has ever finished the Ivy League 7-0,” head coach Jim Barlow ’91 said in an e-mail. “We want to be the first.”

Indeed, the best league result a Princeton team has ever achieved is 6-1, a record the Tigers last posted in 1993 under Bob Bradley ’80, who is now head coach of the U.S. National Team. Brown’s 2007 squad was the last team to go 7-0 in the Ivy League. A victory over Yale would also give Princeton a record 12 wins in a row, eclipsing the best-ever 11-game winning streak the Tigers posted in 1927.

But there is more than just history at stake in Saturday’s game in New Haven, Conn.: A win could help Princeton get a first-round bye in the NCAA tournament and land home-field advantage in the second round. Additionally, while Princeton has secured the Ivy League’s automatic bid to the national tournament, the Tigers and the Quakers would be co-Ivy League champions if Yale wins and if Penn beats Harvard this weekend.

“We want to be the only champion,” senior midfielder Josh Walburn said. “We don’t want to share with anyone.”

Still, while the seventh-place Bulldogs (3-11-2, 1-4-1) may not look that threatening on paper, the Tigers are by no means taking a victory for granted. According to Barlow, Saturday’s game will only be Princeton’s third time this season playing on a turf field, a faster-paced surface that the team has struggled on. At Columbia they had to scrape together a come-from-behind 3-2 win after going down 2-1.

The Tigers will also look to increase defensive pressure on the Bulldogs’ offense, which features a potentially dangerous long throw-in.

“There are times in games when we back off and let them get a little too much time with the ball,” Walburn said. “We want to focus on putting them under pressure so they don’t have time to make the plays they want to make.”

Nevertheless, Princeton has a whopping statistical edge over Yale in every offensive and defensive category. The Tigers lead the Ivy League with 34 goals scored and 38 assists; Yale has just nine and seven, respectively. On the other side of the pitch, Princeton has allowed just 16 goals; Yale has allowed 24, more than any other Ancient Eight defense.

A victory would provide a fitting end to a remarkable run for Princeton, which has often looked unstoppable in rebounding from a disappointing 1-3-1 start to a No. 11 national ranking. Both Walburn and Barlow traced the team’s turnaround to the beginning of a five-game home stand on Sept. 24, when the Tigers scored three goals in the second half to beat Richmond.

“We wanted to make a point that no one would come to our field during that stretch and beat us,” Walburn said. “When we got those first two wins that weekend, that gave us a boost of confidence.”

While the Tigers have said they don’t fret over the rankings, they have also moved up to No. 20 in the ratings percentage index, or RPI, an NCAA ranking that takes into account both record and strength of schedule and plays a role in determining the seeding of the 48-team tournament. Princeton ranks ahead of both No. 21 Penn and No. 24 Brown, the two Ivy League teams likely to get at-large bids to play in the tournament. A win Saturday could propel Princeton up even higher, easing the Tigers’ schedule in the early rounds of the tournament.

“There’s a lot at stake in this game,” Barlow said. “We go into every match believing we can win. Hopefully we can keep it going.”