Three perfectionists — Penn captains Jack Eggleston and Zack Rosen and coach Jerome Allen — sat in the press room following their hard-fought loss to No. 12 Villanova, insisting that the concept of a ‘moral victory’ is nothing but a myth.
Eggleston stared dejectedly at the box score. Rosen scratched at the tape covering his fingers. Allen’s blood boiled.
For several minutes, the three Penn leaders’ insatiable drive was on display. Moral victory, apparently, isn’t in the vocabulary of a team trying to restore an illustrious tradition of success.
“I would be selling [the players] short if [I told them], ‘Oh, it’s okay, we played hard and we fought, they’re the twelfth-ranked team in the nation [and] they play in the Big East’ — I don’t care,” Allen asserted. “I expect to win every time we step on the floor.”
And your thoughts, Zack?
“I agree 100 percent,” Rosen muttered.
“There’s no positives about a loss,” Eggleston reiterated.
Vegas favored the Wildcats by 15.5 points before the game, and surely Penn followers couldn’t have expected anything more than a respectable loss.
While the Penn fans got what they wanted — they gave the Quakers a standing ovation after the 65-53 result — the team did not.
“I’m not jumping up and down on the sidelines for show,” Allen said. “I’m not hollering at these guys, I’m not trying to motivate them just to say, ‘Just come close; keep it respectable.’”
Allen clearly puts lofty expectations on his players, attempting to inject them with the qualities that the championship teams he played on possessed.
While the coach claimed that his squad did not play with enough intensity, Penn’s effort and energy carried it through the tightly contested game. The Red and Blue accomplished almost all of the goals a heavy underdog needs to in order to pull off a major upset.
The Quakers fell short, however, because one of those goals is near-flawless execution. In that respect, they failed.
“I could count on both of my hands and both of my feet how many defensive mistakes we made,” Allen said.
The coach would need more than four limbs to count how many points Villanova senior Corey Stokes scored.
More than anything else, Stokes’ superhuman shooting performance keyed the Wildcats’ victory. Despite battling sickness the past two days, the guard shot 11-for-15 from the floor, stroked all five of Villanova’s three-pointers and scored over half his team’s points (34).
Allen’s interpretation of Stokes’ night sounded like this: “If we held on to our principles and focused, I don’t think he would have had the night that he had. As many shots that he made, I can tell you two of them — [at most] three — were contested.”
And Villanova coach Jay Wright’s?
“Thank God for Corey Stokes.”
Wright understood that Penn was a few stops — and a few Stokes misses — shy of engineering a monumental upset and lauded the way they played.
“They’ve got a great mix of veteran, experienced players that are tough, that have been in big games and are finally understanding what it takes to win,” he said.
Whereas Wright chatted with reporters following his press conference, Eggleston and Rosen stormed out of the room. What it takes to win, they are learning, is perfection.
BRIAN KOTLOFF is a junior communications major and Sports Editor-elect from Elkins Park, Pa. He can be contacted at dpsports@theDP.com.
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