Flegenheimer | An inch forward, three steps back

Ever seen that "game of inches" speech from Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday?

Man, does that fire me up. It's pop culture Red Bull - like a '70s Springsteen track or watching the Celtics fail.

"Look at the guy next to you," Pacino sermonizes to his fictitious Dallas Sharks football team before the big game. "Look into his eyes! Now I think you're gonna see a guy who will go that inch with you. You're gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team because he knows, when it comes down to it, you're gonna do the same for him! That's a team, gentleman!"

I bring this up not because the film is criminally underrated (it is), or because Pacino is the greatest living American actor (debatable), but because of how the speech informs the latest season of Penn men's basketball.

Indeed, for all the grit and gumption displayed by some of its individual parts, the 2008-09 installment of the Red and Blue was most certainly not the kind of group Pacino was talking about, not by a mile's worth of inches.

You can point to the waning win totals and faltering fan support, sure, but the most ominous measure of this year's team has to do with another south-bound statistical trend: the decline in roster size.

Following last Tuesday's home loss to Princeton, which doomed the Quakers to their first losing Ivy season since the elder Bush administration, sophomore guard Harrison Gaines announced his decision to transfer next season.

Gaines became the third member of the Red and Blue since December to voluntarily leave the program, depriving next year's Quakers of this season's strongest penetrator and second-leading scorer, while adding yet another seasoned ringer to the Pottruck intramural circuit.

Senior Tommy McMahon, the mop-topped senior forward brought in by former coach Fran Dunphy four years back, was the first man to dash this season. His choice, though, was explainable enough, given his lengthy bout with injuries and lack of a perceptible role in Glen Miller's scheme.

Sophomore Remy Cofield cleared out his locker at the Palestra next, in late January. Like McMahon, Cofield was unable to seize a consistent role in Miller's rotation this season, but unlike McMahon, Cofield was recruited by Miller himself.

And then there's Gaines, another sophomore Miller recruit but one who, in stark contrast to Cofield, figured prominently in Penn's lineup for each of his two seasons.

Despite the emergence of freshman guard Zack Rosen, Gaines was arguably the Quakers' most dynamic player in the second half of the year, logging at least 25 minutes in each of the team's final 11 games and averaging nearly 12 points per contest during that span.

But in a statement released by his father, Harry Gaines, the second-year guard said he wanted to find a team that could "fully utilize his skill set."

Perhaps most damning was Gaines' professed need "to attend a school where [he has] confidence in the basketball team's leaders."

To be sure, at times over the past two years, it seemed as though the rebuilding effort was inching along steadily, maybe even faster than that - with a core of promising underclassmen and a handful of encouraging, if inconsistent, showings against some vastly superior programs.

But as the Quakers' brass looks back on this most recent campaign, it'll have to ask itself one key question.

To paraphrase another Pacino classic, what drove so many players to go against the family?

Matt Flegenheimer is a sophomore Economics major from New York. His e-mail address is flegenheimer@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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