Parisa Bastani: Don't pat backs for too long

It's official. The first 'W' is finally in the books for the Quakers.

Penn's offense finally came together against Georgetown, converting on red-zone opportunities and snatching points turned down in games one through three.

"It's something we needed to experience again," senior quarterback Bryan Walker said of the win. "We feel like we're moving the ball, we feel like things are going well."

After watching the Quakers score three touchdowns in the team's first three possessions, it's hard to disagree.

But while a victory was, as Penn coach Al Bagnoli put it, "much better than the alternative," it doesn't necessarily translate into success for the rest of the Ivy League schedule.

So before deciding that Penn's season has taken a turn for the better, there are a few facts to consider.

Senior running back Joe Sandberg likely won't be able to gain 117 rushing yards on 13 carries against Ivy League opponents that have been beating the same Patriot League teams that sent Georgetown to 0-5.

The quarterbacks coming up on the Quakers' schedule are much more developed than the Hoyas' Matt Bassuener and Robert Lane, who combined to go 3-for-6 in the first half for a total of 20 passing yards.

When Penn comes face-to face with quarterbacks that can pass, and a team that hasn't just been clobbered 45-7 at its own homecoming by Cornell, the result won't be so pretty.

A second straight game of over 400 total yards of offense is a giant step in the right direction for Penn, especially given its dismal season start of ekeing out just 224 yards of offense against Lafayette and 293 against Villanova.

"I thought we did a better job running the football," Bagnoli said after the win. "Mixing up the pass and run, keeping people a little bit off balance and just kind of running the kind of offense I had envisioned us running."

(So maybe adding the one-dimensional Hoyas to the schedule wasn't a bad move. Georgetown certainly proved to be at least as difficult of an adversary as Bucknell, the school it replaced on the Quakers' schedule this year.)

Maybe Bagnoli is right, and this win will prove to be just the baby step the Quakers needed to jump start the season as the team heads into the meat of its Ivy League schedule. But if there's anything to be learned from last year, it's that the optimism that follows a win shouldn't bleed into the next Saturday.

Parisa Bastani is a senior Biological Basis of Behavior major from Basking Ridge, N.J. Her e-mail address is pbastani@sas.upenn.edu.

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