Game should be filled with intensity

It's homecoming.

It's Princeton.

What more could anybody associated with the Penn football team -- be it player, coach or fan -- ask for?

And while the conditions are ripe for a memorable Homecoming Saturday at Franklin Field, the quietly pumped Quakers are trying their hardest not to look ahead toward next week's showdown with Harvard and past the struggling Tigers.

Princeton, coming off a tough loss to a substandard Cornell squad in New Jersey last Saturday, almost beat the still-undefeated Crimson in Cambridge, Mass., two weeks ago.

So which Tigers team will show up? The would-be world-beaters, or the beaten?

Nobody quite knows for sure, which is why the Quakers feel they should be prepared for a fight.

"I think sometimes what happens with a young team, they don't rebound as well as you'd like from that kind of loss [to Harvard]," Penn football coach Al Bagnoli said. "I think we're going to see much more of the Princeton team that played against Harvard than we're going to see the Princeton team that played against Cornell.

"We know we've got our hands full. They're going to come in here a lot more fired up than they did last week.... If you're not careful, it ends up becoming much more of an epic confrontation than what you want."

Penn quarterback Gavin Hoffman feels that the Quakers' success this year has made them even more of a target to the Princetons of the world.

"When you're undefeated, people are always going to bring their 'A' game, and they want to come and play really well against a team that, on paper, should win the game," he said.

The fact that it's Princeton taking its shot at the Quakers might also magnify this effect.

"They always get pumped up to play us," Penn defensive tackle John Galan said. "Even in scrimmage, they're talking trash.... They're always fired up to play us."

The Tigers certainly have the talent to make a real run at the Red and Blue.

One of Princeton's standout players is kicker Taylor Northrop. In last week's 10-7 loss to the Big Red, Northrop almost made a 57-yard field goal. The eye-popping attempt, which would have been a tall order for even the best of NFL kickers, bounced off the crossbar and back into the end zone.

"They're a dangerous football team. They've proven that they're dangerous," Bagnoli said. "They can win it in the last second with the field goal kicker they have."

Princeton football coach Roger Hughes agreed that having a talent like Northrop gives him an advantage.

"I hope we can keep it to a game where a kicker can make a difference," he said.

Princeton also features a particularly mobile quarterback, David Splithoff, and the Tigers have shaped much of their offense around his ability to run.

The Penn defense, however, doesn't plan on changing a scheme that has made it among the stingiest in the nation.

"It's not going to be any different from any other week," Galan said. "We're going to do the same things we do every week, and we're not going to change our game plan just because he's a little more mobile than the quarterbacks we played in the past."

Hughes knows he'll have to solve the mystery of the Quakers' defense to have a chance to win.

"We've got to find a way to move the ball against the best defense in the country," Princeton's second-year coach said. "No other team has been able to do that."

The atmosphere in which Princeton will attempt to break the Penn defense is sure to be a wild one, as the Penn-Princeton rivalry and the presence of a Homecoming crowd should juice both the Quakers and their opponents in orange and black.

"Definitely [on] Homecoming everybody's going to be ready to play," Galan said. "We come every week ready to play. I think this week [it will be] even more so.

"We're not overlooking Princeton at all. We know that they've got some good players. They don't have a great record, but they have good players. They're going to come out fired, but just like every other week we're going to match their emotion, we're going to match their intensity and we're just going to pummel them."

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