Tigers lose one late once again
By Justin Feil, Assistant Sports Editor
Jordan Culbreath and the Princeton University football team were left with another empty feeling.
They did just about all they could, but still didn’t beat Harvard, which celebrated a 24-20 comeback win at Powers Field at Princeton Stadium on Saturday.
”It’s not a good feeling,” said Culbreath, though he rushed for a career-high 154 yards and both of Princeton’s touchdowns. “The last how ever many games, we’ve had the lead at the halftime, and for some reason, I couldn’t tell you what it is, we come out and we blow it. I feel like I’m saying the same thing after every game. We can’t finish the games. That’s a problem we’re going to have to address — closing that door.
”We have to be able to score more often in the second half. We were driving the ball down the field pretty easily in the first half. I don’t know what it is second half. We’ve always had this problem that we’ve got to fix it.”
Princeton, which has been outscored in the second half of every game this season and lost every game in which it has scored first, continued both disconcerting streaks on Saturday despite having momentum and a statistical edge for most of the game. Harvard scored the winning touchdown with 3:34 left in the game, only minutes after Princeton had driven from its own 2-yard line but dropped a pass in the end zone and had to settle for a second Ben Bologna field goal.
A big sack sent the Tigers backwards on their next possession and they never made a stop to get the ball back. The Crimson then ran out the clock with their second fourth-down conversion of the game. Their other one came on their game-winning drive.
”You take a 99-yard drive to the end zone, and drop a pass in the end zone, that’s the game,” said Princeton head coach Roger Hughes after his team slipped to 2-4 overall, 1-2 in the Ivy League. “Clearly, while there are a lot of good things that happened on the field and I’m proud of our kids in many respects, I told them that good teams make good plays to win games and we have to do that.”
The Tigers made the plays to jump out to a 14-3 lead in the first quarter. But the Crimson cut it to 14-10 in second quarter and the Tigers missed a chance to re-up their lead when Brian Anderson’s final pass before halftime was off the fingertips of Will Thanheiser and intercepted by Harvard in the end zone.
”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.”
Culbreath ended the first half with 118 yards rushing. He scored on runs of 1 and 10 yards. He didn’t score in the second half, but still proved effective in running the ball.
”He was a warrior,” Hughes said. “I can think of only one run of all the runs he had where he maybe missed a read a little bit and still ended up making five or six on the run. Again, I think it’s a credit to our offensive line. I thought we did a good job of handling them up front. I think Matt Zimmerman had a very good day blocking. We had a few wrinkles in that tried to slow down the aggressiveness of their linebackers. I think it was effective.”
The Tigers’ rotation of Anderson, their regular starting quarterback who was knocked out of last week’s game against Brown with a shoulder injury, and Dan Kopolovich worked well. Hughes stuck with rotating the two — Anderson to pass more, Kopolovich for the option run more often — until midway through the third quarter when he went with Anderson for the remainder of the game.
”I thought it was pretty effective,” Hughes said. “Regardless of who was in there, they have confidence in either kid. In the second half, I just got the feeling that Brian caught fire a little bit. It wasn’t that Dan did anything wrong, it was just that Brian got a little hot hand and we decided to stick with it.”
Anderson finished 12-for-24 for 147 yards. Thanheiser led Princeton receivers with eight catches for 114 yards, the third time he has gone over 100 yards this year. The Tigers held the Ivy’s leading passer, Chris Pizzotti, under his 300-yard average, but Pizzotti still passed for one score and ran 33 yards for another. The Crimson got three touchdowns and a field goal; the Tigers had to kick two field goals after their two touchdowns.
”We’re obviously disappointed,” said Hughes, whose team plays at Cornell on Saturday. “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.”

