`Brutal' road games kill Penn's chances

The Penn football team's road to what could have been a perfect Ivy season was, well, one with a heck of a lot of road.

The Quakers have traveled 2,072 miles, round trip, to play their Ivy road games this season -- tying them with Cornell for the most in the Ancient Eight.

Meanwhile, Harvard, the team that beat Penn on Saturday in a clash of Ivy unbeatens, will finish fourth in the league with 1,368 miles after its sojourn to Yale this week.

And don't think the 704-mile discrepancy hasn't gone unnoticed by the Quakers.

"I don't want to demean what Harvard's done," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said. "But our road schedule has been brutal."

Indeed it has been. Penn has had to travel round-trip to Dartmouth (716 miles), Columbia (190) Brown (548) and Harvard (618).

The Crimson, meanwhile, had just a three-road-game Ivy schedule this year, heading to Cornell (662), Columbia (432) and Yale (274).

"The road gods have not been kind to us," Bagnoli said. "We've been at Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard. The odds of surviving all three aren't great."

But it's not like Penn hasn't had to post that sort of mileage before. In the Quakers' last undefeated season, 1994, they played at Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton and Cornell, travelling 1,824 miles.

Still, three drives of five-plus hours and a not-so-short trek to Columbia didn't exactly help, as Bagnoli pointed out while discussing the Penn-Harvard matchup last week:

"The only advantage I see is that it's their home game and we have to take that six-hour ride up to Boston," Bagnoli said.

Penn, however, hopes the traveling works in its favor this weekend. The Quakers host Cornell, while Harvard heads to New Haven, Conn., to face Yale -- the team that has travelled the least in Ivy games this season (772 miles). A Penn win and a Harvard loss would give the Red and Blue a share of the Ivy title.

But the Crimson don't believe any sort of road weariness -- or post-big-win letdown, for that matter, will affect anything.

"It's Harvard-Yale and we haven't beaten Yale since I've been here," Harvard quarterback Neil Rose said.

Yale has come out on top in each of the last three installments of The Game, including last year, by a 34-24 margin.

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