Institutional Knowledge: An ode to normalcy

But the happy circumstance of my birthplace and rearing has also given me a front-row seat to an important stretch in the history of Old Nassau athletics. The last two decades have granted Princeton sports considerable highs and lows and have helped define a new era for the athletic program, wherein national championships are within the reach of some teams and league titles in the grasp of just about all of the rest of them. I’ve been frequenting Tiger sporting events for years — I still have a puck I caught at a hockey game in 1999, signed by Dave Stathos ’02, and I dragged high school friends to interminable basketball games when the men’s team was in the Joe Scott ’87 doldrums (my friends quickly wised up and stopped coming). All of which is to say that Princeton’s have always been my teams of choice and that I’ve always known I look great in orange. And luckily, this year’s iteration of the football team gives me — and you — another reason to put the stripes back on. We should be clear: The team will not be great, but it will not be awful. It has the potential to rebound from last year’s disappointments, but it could also find itself back in the Ivy League cellar. Because of the team’s fundamental simplicity and unambiguous earnestness, though, watching this ride will be worth it.

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The first season of Princeton football for which most seniors were alive represented an off-year for the program. I was barely six months old when the Tigers kicked off their 1990 campaign, looking to defend the share of the Ivy League title they had won the previous year by finishing 6-1 in league play. They had lost only to eventual co-champion Yale in a 14-7 decision at home. That was the senior season of current head coach Bob Surace ’90 (the previous year’s captain had been Jason Garrett ’89, now head coach of the Dallas Cowboys), and things seemed to be looking up for the program.

But the 1990 team finished just 2-5 in the Ancient Eight before rebounding to take second with a 5-2 mark the next year. The 1992 squad shared the championship at 6-1 and no Tiger team finished lower than third until the 1996 season (2-5, sixth place). Over the next 10 years, the teams were middling, winning the league only in 2006 and finishing 4-6 three years in a row after that. Then came last year’s debacle, in which the team found its niche: normalcy.

Last year was, without a doubt, fairly remarkable. The team’s one victory was cinematic — a double-overtime win over Lafayette in the home opener to punctuate the comeback of the team’s star running back, who seemingly ran past his life-threatening illness and into the end zone. Classic Hollywood. But make no mistake: The season was historically bad. With a new coach, copious injuries and cripplingly bad luck, the nation’s oldest football program finished with its worst mark ever. For only the second time in 55 years, it failed to win a game in the Ivy League. Never before had the team’s overall win percentage dipped to .100. The squad was outscored by 169 points and lost both blowouts and heartbreakers.

So yes, the team was bad. But — and this is the crucial point — it was unambiguously bad. There were no allegations of giving up, no excuses offered up by the first-year coach. And in the moments when the team was good, it was great to watch: The emotion from the heroic Culbreath and surprise demolition man Jon Olofsson ’11 in the bowels of Princeton Stadium after the Lafayette game was both palpable and contagious.

In neither case, win or lose, did questions remain about the team or its commitment. There were no “what if”s lingering after the losses, and the expected slate of “if only”s was noticeably absent. What we have on our hands in Princeton Stadium is exactly what we should want: the kind of relatable, no-nonsense, "win when we should, lose when we should" team that asks nothing of the student body other than a few hours on Saturday.

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But the team’s situation became clearer to me late one Saturday night (Sunday morning, really) in July, when I found myself in a friend’s living room in New York, arguing with a pair of Clemson and Auburn football fans, each of whom brushed off my entreaties of, “Who were 'the Tigers' first?” and “What school has the most national football championships of all time?” (Princeton[1], Princeton[2]).

It didn’t surprise me that ACC and SEC fans ignored Princeton football with such vigor (“No one cares!” they insisted) — the teams play in different subdivisions of Division I, after all, and Auburn[3] won last year’s national championship. But the conversation was still intensely frustrating, and it reminded me quite clearly of some of the on-campus rhetoric back in Princeton.

I need not belabor the point that the football team doesn’t get much support. Surely there are Saturdays when Princeton Stadium has its fair share of undergraduates in the seats, but I have also been in the press box for perfectly exciting contests in which the visiting school’s band outnumbers the black and orange fans. The argument can be, and has been, made that the stadium simply feels emptier than it is at times — the student body could fit in the stands five times over with plenty of room, and legions of alumni do return for game days — but the respect for the team doesn’t compare to that of our rivals and to bigger schools. Witness “The Game” in Cambridge or New Haven and you’ll see a different animal altogether.

It may be useless to focus on the idea that the team deserves more respect, but it is worth reiterating that the team deserves watching precisely because it is not all that notable at the moment. Accordingly, legendary creative writing professor John McPhee told The Paris Review last year that he decided to be a writer while watching the team from the sideline as a child[4] — one imagines this is not just because the press box looked warm, as he explained, but because there was something comforting about the experience at large. And he barely mentioned the on-field actions of the players themselves.

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And, of course, a Princeton game is a straightforward one, for children and The New Yorker[5] writers like McPhee alike, as well as for students who have problem sets to finish and don’t have time for emotional involvement with a team. Trick plays are often treated as necessary evils here, and emerging stars are not treated out of proportion to their talent. Storylines for the ages have surrounded the team in recent years (see: Culbreath), and others may surface this year (see: Cody). But again, the team’s wins tend to feel good, and the losses tend to feel bad — there is little ambiguity, and when something remarkable happens, everyone watching from the stands or reading this paper the next morning knows it’s remarkable. Such is Tiger football: What you see is what you get.

And really, what more can one ask for from a Princeton football team, in an age where many students would rather spend their time in the library or tailgating than in the stands? Gone are the F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 days of caravans leading up to the stadium and national heroes being made at the Yale game. What will take the field against Lehigh on Saturday is a group of honest workers that is not expected to win but will make the most of its time on the field. All it asks of us is a little patience and a little pride.

[1] And besides, Auburn’s secondary color is navy blue, and Clemson’s is purple. Real tigers aren’t blue or purple.

[2] 28, thank you very much. Never mind the rumor that the historian chosen to retroactively assign early-era titles was a Princeton grad.

[3] Let’s call them Tigers1. Clemson can be Tigers2.

[5] Ditto

Gabriel Debenedetti is a senior Politics major from Princeton, N.J. He is a former sports editor and editor-in-chief of the ‘Prince.'

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