Nothing corny about PU’s success

Football team posts best record in 10 years

By: Justin Feil
   Roger Hughes admits he sounds pretty corny a lot of the times that he addresses his Princeton University football team.
   This year, many of the Tiger head coach’s corny talks soaked in, and the result was a 7-3 season, the best season in 10 years of Princeton football.
   The corniness comes from all angles. It started in the preseason when he held aloft a football and a mirror, beginning his talk with the proclamation that football isn’t so tough to break down — if you’re on offense, hold onto the football; if you’re on defense, get the football. Then he held up the mirror and told his players that the person they saw in the mirror would control the Tigers’ destiny.
   He stuck to the analogy that the football season was like a 10-round fight, and trying to compartmentalize the 10-game schedule so the players never looked more than the next game ahead and never looked behind.
   And he played a numbers game with the seniors that he needed to lead this team. Hughes asked them to grade their own work ethic on a scale of one to 10. Most gave answers of eight.
   Hughes asked them to grade their teammates and most gave answers just below the marks they gave themselves. Hughes questioned how players that worked hard only 80 percent of the time and allowed their teammates to get away with working harder for even less time expected to win. It led to a new level of work ethic and of accountability.
   "That hit them in the face," Hughes said. "They saw what we’re saying. That’s what stimulated the culture. If you want it, if it’s not lip service, that underlying tone has to be continued. It’s hard for someone to put everything on the line in case they fail. They want an excuse. This group put everything on the line."
   The corny talks never stopped. They just kept coming, win or lose, until the Tigers had won more than all but six other teams in the last 38 years of Princeton football history. They fell one win shy of the Ivy League title, but never stopped believing it was possible this year and in the future.
   "I would like to say all my corn is gone," Hughes said. "But it’s really just different ways to say the same thing. Our message hasn’t changed. There’s a different emphasis on details. The nice thing is they had gotten some success. We were able to look and say, this is what cost us this game. The kids got a greater sense of what value each thing has."
   After going 5-5 in 2004, in a season that could have been a seven-win year were it not for some tough late breaks against the Tigers, Princeton turned it around by focusing on some of the little things and making the big plays at the end of games. There were other small changes. Hughes took over the play-calling. Assistant coach Dave Rackovan headed up the special teams. The Tigers’ offseason conditioning was changed somewhat and the practice schedule differed as Princeton emphasized the special teams more than in the past.
   Everything started with the seniors, the Class of 2006 that had enjoyed as much success as any class in the last 10 years already with five- and six-win seasons behind it.
   "I met with number of successful coaches on campus before the season," Hughes said, listing, "Bill Tierney, Julie Shackford, Jeff Kampersal, Guy Gadowsky. And I asked them, I asked coaches like Julie Shackford, what’s the difference in their championship teams? She emphasized senior leadership. They all talked about senior leadership. We started as a coaching staff building all that. We told them they’re responsible for all parts of the team. We wanted to make sure all of them were involved."
   On top of that, the Tigers focused on those little things that had cost them close games in 2004. They focused on the little things that make all the difference in a league with so much parity, particularly this year as three teams entered the final week with a chance to win the Ivy League title.
   "We worked hard at developing that culture," Hughes said. "If you look at the things we worked on — the turnover ratio, third-down efficiency, red-zone defense, red-zone offense, and we made a concerted effort on special teams, all those things we emphasized made the difference in games.
   "We were plus for the first time in our tenure here. Defensively, we didn’t allow points in the red zone. If you look at the best correlations, scoring defense is always up there."
   Princeton led the Ivy League in scoring defense at just 16.3 points per game. The Tigers were aided in that department by a season-ending 30-0 shutout of Dartmouth. The Tigers were tied for No. 2 in the Ivy League in turnover margin at plus-five. Brown, the Ivy champion and leader in turnover margin, was plus-10. Princeton ranked No. 1 in red-zone offense, scoring on 86 percent of its possessions inside an opponent’s 20-yard line. Princeton ranked No. 1 in red-zone defense with opponents scoring less than 60 percent of the time though they had the ball just 20 yards from the goal line. The Tigers were third in third-down conversions and second in stopping them. Princeton was second in punt returns and No. 1 in punting average as well as No. 1 in field goals.
   "We’ve been known as having a good defense. But we hadn’t been able to finish like this year," Hughes said. "We always ended up giving up late points. We shut those down two ways, first by stopping teams, and then against Lafayette, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Penn, we were able to hang on to the ball for long drives. So we were able to shut them down and we were able to run clock.
   "What I noticed, even if you take each game and dissect it, there were points in the game, we had a chance to fold our tent. Lafayette when they had that (kick) return, but we came back with a 17-play drive. Every time adversity happened, we responded. If you take it outside the (individual) games, every time we had a bad game, we were able to come back and have a good game after that."
   The Tigers never lost back-to-back Ivy games all year, even after a late loss to Yale damaged severely their chances at the Ivy crown. By then, they had fought too hard to give up in their final game.
   They had finished off narrow wins over Lafayette and San Diego to start the season. They followed those wins with a lopsided win over Columbia before suffering losses to Colgate and Brown. But they ended a nine-year losing streak at Harvard the next week, knocked off Cornell the following week and erased another nine-year losing streak against Penn the next week. After a loss to Yale, Princeton ended its season with a thumping of Dartmouth.
   "Success makes you slow to learn and quick to forget," Hughes said. "In games we lost, we had bad turnover margins. In games we lost, we didn’t get that game-ending drive. In games we won, we still have to stay focused. Making sure we’re great tacklers was something that helped. It’s the subtle things. We worked hard in tackling and pursuing the ball. The reason the defense was better was it tackled better. In games we struggled, like Brown, we didn’t tackle as well as we could and guys got extra yards.
   "If you look at our league, there’s only one other league more regulated and that’s the NFL. The parity is so close, every little thing can mean the difference. We put a little extra effort into fundamentals this year. Talking to pro coaches, how much they work on fundamentals, we tried to do more of it. The players saw if we work hard and pay attention to detail, this is where we can get to. We can’t back off at this point."
   Hughes and the Tigers are taking until Monday to enjoy their seven-win season before taking aim at an Ivy title for 2006. The Tigers drew plenty of honors as tight end Jon Dekker, cornerback Jay McCareins, linebacker Justin Stull and punter Colin McDonough were named first-team All-Ivy players Monday. Linemen Ben Brielmaier and Paul Lyons along with linebacker Abi Fadeyi and placekicker Derek Javarone were named to the second team. Safety Tim Strickland and another offensive lineman Dave Szelingowski were honorable mentions. All but McDonough and Strickland are part of the senior class that helped the Tigers raise the bar for future teams.
   "The seniors get a lot of credit because they set the culture of work ethic and accountability," Hughes said. "They established it and then we had some underclassmen fill in the gaps."
   All of them bought into the Tigers’ ways to produce the best team in 10 years, a measuring stick for the future.