Wenik | Penn football's secondary is its primary problem

B rother, can you spare a dime package?

Because after No. 18 Fordham properly toasted Penn football’s secondary today, the Quakers are positively begging for something — anything — to help shore up the defense’s back four.

Rams quarterback Mike Nebrich threw for 566 passing yards against the Red and Blue — the most in program history.

All that yardage didn’t go between the twenties, though, unlike the disturbing plurality of Penn offensive possessions that ended in midrange Jimmy Gammill’s field goals.

The Rams’ drives ended in points. Sixty of them, in fact. The Red and Blue hadn’t allowed an opponent to hang more than 58 on it since it joined the Ivy League in 1956.

Coach Al Bagnoli was beside himself postgame, and rightly so after watching his team allow consecutive scoring drives that lasted all of 52 and 12 seconds, respectively, to turn a close 21-13 affair into a 35-13 rout midway through the second quarter.

“It’s certainly an area that we have to go and really look at and just try to get some answers to,” Bagnoli said. “Because right now, I’m not happy [with] the way our back end is playing.”

Granted, the final stats don’t fully reflect how the game actually played out. Rams coach Joe Moorhead left Nebrich and his other key skill position players in the game to throw the football until more than half the fourth quarter had passed, a classless decision in a nonconference game that ultimately means nothing to either team’s hopes.

Bagnoli, for his part, took the high road.

“It’s our job to coach our kids, and it’s his job to coach his kids,” he said. “I’m not sure I would have done that, but that’s not my decision ... certainly it’s not for me to comment.”

Running up the score aside, what might have been most disturbing about Penn’s defensive performance was that it came from a team that entered unafraid and played with anger and passion for all 60 minutes.

Defensive backs coach Dave Wood’s coverage schemes broke down far too many times.

Players got beaten man on man, as physical receivers like Sam Ajala were able to stiff arm and juke backs like Trevor Niemann time and time again.

“If you have breakdowns against a team like [Fordham], that’s when you get exploited,” senior cornerback Dan Wilk said. “Back to the drawing board, though. I think we’ll be fine. It’s all fixable stuff.”

In the short run, Penn’s defense probably will be fine.

Next week, the Quakers return home to face Columbia, a bye week in powder blue uniforms. The Lions have averaged barely more than 200 passing yards per game through four contests this season — and even that number is inflated by four garbage time scores from Saturday’s 61-28 drubbing at the hands of Monmouth.

But the long run will likely tell a different story. One week after Columbia, the Red and Blue will go up to the Yale Bowl and face Morgan Roberts , the Ancient Eight’s leading passer. Oh, and that Quinn Epperly guy in Princeton is pretty good, too.

So unless Bagnoli, Wood, defensive coordinator Ray Priore and the veterans in the secondary figure something out soon, there might be a lot more crooked numbers on the opponent’s side of the scoreboard the rest of the way.

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