Crimson rally for late win over Tigers
By Justin Feil, Assistant Sports Editor
The Princeton University football team did just about everything it had to, but still couldn’t come up with a win over Harvard on Saturday on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium.
They largely contained the Ivy League’s leading passer Chris Pizzotti. They allowed virtually no rushing game from the Crimson. They controlled the clock, and they had good leadership from both quarterbacks who played, Dan Kopolovich and Brian Anderson who returned from a shoulder injury suffered last week and played the majority of the second half.
Biggest for the Tigers was Jordan Culbreath, the junior running back who had a huge day. The 1951 Heisman Trophy winner Dick Kazmaier was honored at halftime for having his number retired, and Culbreath did his best impersonation with 118 yards and two touchdowns in the first half as the Tigers jumped to a 14-10 lead. He finished with a career-best 154 yards on 29 carries.
But Princeton, which has been outscored in the second half of every game this season and lost every game in which it has scored first, did it again in a 24-20 loss to the Crimson. Harvard scored the winning touchdown with 3:34 left in the game, and a big sack sent the Tigers backwards on their final possession before the Crimson ran out the clock with their second fourth-down conversion of the game.
With the loss, the Tigers fell to 2-4 overall, 1-2 in the Ivies, two games behind both Brown and Pennsylvania, both of whom stayed unbeaten in league play Saturday.
“We’re obviously disappointed,” said PU head coach Roger Hughes, whose team plays at Cornell next week. “I thought we played an outstanding game except when we got inside the red zone on offense. We had a number of opportunities to put this game away. We didn’t do it. And when we needed to make a big stop at the end of the game to preserve the lead or get the ball back, we weren’t able to do that. That’s basically what the game came down to.”
Princeton again got off to a strong start, and showed none of the red-zone scoring issues that had plagued it in the past. Meko McCray forced and recovered a fumble when the Tigers punted and five plays later, Culbreath burst through the middle for a 3-yard touchdown.
Harvard answered with a short field goal, but the Tigers came right back with a 12-play, 80-yard drive to make it 14-3. They mixed effectively the run and pass. Culbreath had a 21-yard run on the drive, then finished it with a 10-yard touchdown scamper through a massive hole on the right side as Harvard was caught blitzing.
“When we came out the first half,” Culbreath said, “I thought the line was doing a great job. The holes were as big as I’ve seen in a while. The stretch play was working really well — the outside run. The second half, I guess they picked up on it a little bit. They started flowing pretty hard. Still, I think the offensive line did a really good job today. We just have to make plays to win games and we didn’t do that today.”
Early in the second quarter, Harvard scored its first touchdown on a 15-yard pass from Pizzotti to Chris Lorditch. Princeton still held a 14-10 lead, and it had a chance to add to the lead before halftime.
A perfectly executed two-minute offense helped Princeton drive from its 27 with 3:09 left in the half to the Harvard 3 with 11 seconds left. After a timeout, Anderson fired into the end zone, but the pass glanced off a diving Will Thanheiser’s fingers and Harvard’s Matt Hanson intercepted the deflection.
“It didn’t change anything, but we went from having a sure three points to coming out with nothing,” Hughes said. “While it was disappointing, I guess we took out of it that we can move the ball on these guys. We had it in great position. We have to execute to win the game. We had the matchup we wanted. We had our best receiver and the pass didn’t work out.”
It got more excruciating for the Tigers in the second half. Harvard made the most of good field position with a 56-yard drive for a touchdown when Pizzotti used his legs, not his arm on a 33-yard scoring run. It gave Harvard its first lead, 17-14, less than two minutes into the second half.
But two possessions later, Princeton used 14 plays to drive the ball 73 yards before settling for a 23-yard field goal by Ben Bologna to tie the game. The Tigers had reached the Harvard 2 before Culbreath was thrown for his first loss of the game.
Princeton regained the lead, 20-17, on Bologna’s 28-yard field goal with 7:16 left in the fourth quarter. This time, the Tigers drove from their own 2. They took 16 plays and 7:44 off the clock to start the final quarter, but stalled when they reached the Harvard 11. Anderson’s third-down pass into the end zone went off Trey Peacock’s fingers.
“We didn’t execute,” Culbreath said. “It’s that simple. When we’re inside the 5, we’ve had that problem this whole year. We have to finish. I couldn’t tell you anything different that I saw. We just have to execute.”
Harvard did on the following drive to take the lead for good. Their 9-play drive ended with a 6-yard run up the middle by Gino Gordon with 3:34 left. The drive was kept alive when Pizzotti hit tight end Jason Miller on 4th-and-1 from Harvard’s own 46.
“They tried to run on fourth down previously,” said PU senior defensive end Pete Buchignani. “They hadn’t really been doing a lot with their run game at all, so we shouldn’t have been surprised.”
Princeton had plenty of time when it got the ball back and good field position after McCray’s 31-yard kick return set it up at its own 42. After one completion to Thanheiser, who recorded his third 100-yard receiving game this season with 114 yards on 8 catches, Anderson was incomplete on the next play and sacked on third down for a loss of 13. On fourth down, Matt Zimmerman caught a short pass over the middle, and tried to lateral it to Culbreath but the ball squirted away and Harvard recovered on downs.
The Crimson drove to the Princeton 25, and on 4th-and-3, Pizzotti picked up six yards to finish off the Tigers.
“While there are a lot of good things that happened on the field and I’m proud of our kids in many respects,” Hughes said, “I told them that good teams make good plays to win games and we have to do that.”