Princeton Hosts Yale For 105th Meeting

Saturday, March 23

Princeton, N.J.

3:00 PM

Princeton University

Yale

Luc Anderson and the Tigers host Yale Saturday at 3.

Photo by: Shelley M. Szwast

March 21, 2019 | Men's Lacrosse

PRINCETON VS. YALE

Sherrerd Field at Class of 1952 Stadium • Princeton, N.J.
Saturday, March 23, 2019 • 3 pm
Series history Princeton leads 74-28-2
Last year Yale defeated Princeton 16-8 • March 24, 2018

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Princeton vs. Yale
Five Storylines

Face-offs
When Princeton plays Yale, the first storyline is always face-offs. In the last 19 meetings between the teams, Yale has won the face-off edge 18 times. Added all together, Yale has won 279 of the last 413 face-offs between the teams, for a .676 percentage.

A year ago, Yale won 20 of 26 face-offs, which led to a 51-20 edge in shots and a 16-8 Bulldog win. The year before that, it was 26 for 33, with the shots edge 47-29 in a 16-13 Yale win.

And all of that was before the No. 1 face-off man in NCAA history transferred from Albany to Yale. TD Ierlan has won 103 of 134 this year, for an NCAA-best .769. His career record is 785 for 1,044, and a .752 percentage that is far ahead of the next-best, the .714 that Denver's Trevor Baptiste put up.

Princeton's two main face-off men have been Jack-Henry Vara and Philip Thompson, who have combined to go 74 for 137 (.540) after combining to go 38 for 92 all of last year (.413).

On the other hand
Princeton is an outstanding ground ball team, and in fact the Tigers average just two fewer ground balls per game than Yale, who is fourth in the country and first in the Ivy League.

In addition, Princeton has shot 21 for 49 against Yale the last two years combined. That's a .429 team shooting percentage in those two games. Against every other opponent the last two years, Princeton is a .354 shooting team, which is very good, but it's not near .429.

Princeton turns the ball over fewer times than any team in the Ivy League, which is one way to maximize possessions. The Tigers are also third in the league, and 22^nd in Division I, in causing turnovers.

Series history
Princeton and Yale meet for the 104^th time, and the Tigers have a 74-28-2 edge. Princeton has not played any team other than it has Yale; the meeting with Rutgers two weeks ago was the 97^th in that series.

Princeton and Yale first met on Oct. 14, 1882, and the teams met three times in the 1882-83 season, with scores of 2-1, 2-0 and 3-0, all Princeton wins. The teams met six times in the 1880s and have met at least one every year since 1923 other than 1943-46. They've met four times in Ivy League tournament games and once in the NCAA tournament.

Before the last two years, Princeton and Yale had played seven straight one-goal regular-season games, as well as a one-goal game in the 2015 Ivy tournament final.

NCAA champs
Yale's 2018 NCAA championship was the 10^th all-time for the Ivy League. Princeton has won six of the other nine, while Cornell won three in the 1970s.

Princeton remains the most recent team to win three straight NCAA titles, which the Tigers did from 1996-98.

The Tigers will be honoring their 1994 NCAA championship team at halftime of the Yale game, and the 1994 team will also be honored for its 25 anniversary at the 2019 NCAA championship game.

Sowers vs. Yale
Michael Sowers leads all active Division I players with 5.88 career points per game. Sowers has a .47 point per game lead over the second-place person on the list Patrick Spencer.

Of players in Division I history with at least 160 career points, Sowers ranks sixth all-time in points per game. No Division I player since 1981 has averaged more points per game for his career than Sowers currently does.

Sowers averages 6.13 points per game against all other opponents and 2.0 points per game against Yale. He's had his two lowest-scoring career games in his two games against Yale, with two points in each game (1G, 3A total).

Sowers has exactly 200 points for his career. It took him 34 games to reach 200 career points, or 15 fewer games than the next fastest, Kevin Lowe.

Other notes

* Chris Brown has scored at least one goal in all 19 games of his career. No other Princeton player who played since freshman eligibility ever started his career with a streak longer than 15 straight games. If Brown gets one point in the game against Yale (point, not necessarily goal), he'd become the seventh active Division I player with at least one point in every game of his career, with a minimum of 20 games played.

* Jake Stevens ranks third in the Ivy League in ground balls per game, behind only TD Ierlan and Penn face-off man Kyle Gallagher. Stevens is a Canadian who attended Culver Military Academy, the same as Zach Currier did before him; Stevens has 32 ground balls in six games, which is exactly twice what Currier had his entire freshman year. Stevens also had his first two career goals against Penn.

* George Baughan and Andrew Song rank 1-2 on the team in caused turnovers and are tied for second on the team with 19 ground balls each. Baughan and Song were also 1-2 on the team in caused turnovers a year ago, when both were freshmen.

* Erik Peters made 15 saves in his first career start in last week's loss at Penn.

* Princeton plays Tuesday night at home against Denver in a game that marks the return of Hall-of-Fame coach Bill Tierney, who won 238 games as Tiger head coach from 1988-2009.