After his team clinched a share of the Ivy League title Saturday, Penn coach Al Bagnoli took time to reflect on the directions this season could have taken following the loss of Owen Thomas last spring.
“You can play the best football you’re capable of playing in honor of him,” he said, “or you can dwell on it for too long and maybe stumble.”
On Saturday, his players gave yet another resounding display of the former.
Just as he did a year ago, Bagnoli spent much of the press conference following his team’s 34-14 win lauding his players’ ability to overcome adversity.
Yet the sentiment carried more gravity this year.
For the 2009 team, the difficulties were primarily football-related: injuries, early-season struggles and a quarterback carousel.
This year’s Quakers played under circumstances few college teams have.
“Given all the adversity they’ve had to overcome, it’s got to be one of the more satisfying things that we’ve done,” Bagnoli said.
At the start of the season, however, it looked as though his team could have been headed down the alternate path.
In their season opener, the Quakers struggled for a close victory against a Lafayette team whose record now sits at 2-8 . Two weeks later, they squeaked out an overtime win over Ivy underdog Dartmouth.
It’s tough to play with targets on your backs, coach Al Bagnoli reiterated numerous times early in the year. And the off-the-field hardships made the start of an already grueling season even more demanding.
But Penn has now won its six League games by an average score of 30-15 after pounding preseason favorite Harvard on Saturday.
That victory left Crimson coach Tim Murphy in admiration, as many coaches have been after facing off against the Quakers.
“Penn’s a tremendous football team,” Murphy said. “[They’ve] gotten better and better every week. Today, they were completely in sync on special teams, defensively and offensively and made us look bad.”
This season has played out in stark contrast to last, when four of Penn’s seven conference games were decided by single digits. It would be easy to say that the difference is due to improved health and the development of several young players, but the stimulus behind the Quakers’ success runs deeper than that.
“To our kids’ credit, I thought they did a really good job of really honoring Owen, devoting the season to Owen,” Bagnoli explained. “Really he was front and center in everything we were trying to do.”
The Quakers need a victory over seventh-place Cornell this weekend to mark the third time an Ancient Eight team has completed two consecutive perfect Ivy seasons (the other two occasions also occurred at Penn under Bagnoli).
But for players and coaches, that will be a mere footnote when looking back on the 2010-11 season — a year with few challenges on the field and an immeasurable one off it.
“Owen’s been in everyone’s thoughts every day, every minute, every second throughout the whole year. Especially today, it kind of culminated,” junior linebacker Erik Rask said Saturday. “This is what we set out to do.”
BRIAN KOTLOFF is a junior communications major from Elkins Park, Pa. He can be contacted at dpsports@theDP.com.
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