Football preview | The only team that ever did it

As Harvard’s Rob Steinberg launched the ball into the air, a hush fell over the 40,000 spectators at Franklin Field. The buzz in anticipation of the second half had subsided, and a brief hesitation was all that remained.

It wasn’t quite tranquility, but rather the nervous tremor of the three-point game reverberating through the backbone of the historic stadium. Somehow even Mother Nature had conspired for the game and a wonderful spring day disguised the true date: November 10, 1984.

The ball hung in the air for a moment — a line-drive rather than pop-up — but sailed well toward the sideline. Standing back near the end zone was Tim Chambers, the Quakers’ small engine and star defensive back, who by this time held Penn’s all-time record for interceptions. He waited and waited, but the ball drifted away.

Dancing and twirling through the air, the ball found its way to an unlikely — but no-less courageous ­— target. At the 10-yard line, Steve Ortman attempted to catch the ball at his knees and watched it slip through his hands as a loud gasp swallowed the silence.

But much like the Quakers that year, the ball bounced right back up, and Ortman gently cradled it as he shifted into top gear. As he approached the 25-yard line, a Harvard tackler managed to wrap his arms around the speedy returner, but to no avail. The brief touch forced Ortman outside and he dashed down the right sideline, unscathed.

Step-by-step, stride-by-stride, the cry from the south stands grew louder, rising like a storm on the picture-perfect day. As soon as he reached the endzone, Ortman was tackled — not by anyone dressed in crimson and white, but by everyone wearing red and blue.

The Quakers jumped out to the 17-7 lead; they would leave Harvard in the dust. In fact, it would take the Ivy League another three years to catch up.

The search for number three

In Al Bagnoli’s 19 years as Penn head coach, he has dominated the Ancient Eight in every conceivable way. By all accounts, he is the most successful coach in Penn history with 97 Ivy League wins, eight outright championships and three separate back-to-back undefeated Ivy League seasons — a feat unmatched by any Ivy coach.

When Penn takes the field against Dartmouth on Oct. 1, however, Bagnoli will attempt accomplish a feat that has twice eluded him. He chases the record of one of the greatest Red and Blue squads.

Twenty-five years ago, Penn capped off the most successful five-year run by an Ivy League school with its fifth-straight title — the last three outright. But in order to know how such a juggernaut was built, one must jump back five years to 1980. That year, the Quakers finished 1-9 and began to look for a new coach. Jerry Berndt knew it was the job for him.

Jerry’s Kids

Jerry Berndt was your typical boy born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, whose fervent passion for football was matched only by his desire to one day take over as coach of Ohio State.

He began his collegiate coaching career as an assistant at Dartmouth, where he stayed for eight years before moving to DePauw. After only a year, Berndt won five more games to finish 7-2-1.

His success made him the leading candidate for the vacant Quakers’ position.

“There was no question I was going to take the job,” Berndt said. “When I went there in ’81, we weren’t very good, obviously. But the players … really bought into the program on what we wanted them to do and besides just being a football team, we believed in young men doing the right thing.”

In Berndt’s first year as coach, the Quakers saw little success, as they continued to play the role of Ivy League doormat. They finished 1-9 and even lost to Lehigh, 58-0.

Despite the losses, the coach had a knack for finding talent and a vision for his ideal player. He scoured the Philadelphia area and Northeast corridor for the brightest student-athletes to buy into his idea.

“He had a proven record and his approach was very different,” said Chambers, who had initially committed to Temple, but was drawn to the Quakers after the Owls dropped their football program.

“It wasn’t just me. [Quarterback] John McGeehan went to Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia, and Eric Rutherford was a successful wide receiver from West Catholic [in Philadelphia].”

By selling recruits on the prospect of revitalizing a once-proud Ivy power and transforming boys into men, Berndt built a pipeline of talent that would arrive year after year.

“Coach Berndt was just a great man,” said Tom Gilmore, winner of the 1985 Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League’s Most Valuable Player. “[He was] first and foremost a father figure to most of the players.”

Gilmore, who is now the head coach at Holy Cross, grew up in the Frankford area of Philadelphia and Berndt had to convince him to attend college, let alone Penn.

“He was a very straitlaced kind of guy,” Gilmore said of Berndt. “Everyone respected him and really appreciated the genuine care that he had for the players.”

Touted as one of the country’s worst, the 1982 team took on its coach’s persona and shocked the league when it defeated defending champion Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H. The Quakers continued to surprise foe after foe, winning the hearts of Philadelphia fans who were looking to support a team in the midst of the NFL lockout. Then came Harvard, in a game that would go down for the ages.

Down by three points, Penn lined up a 38-yard field goal with only seconds remaining on the clock. Even with a good snap and hold, Dave Shulman’s kick sailed wide left. It appeared as if Harvard had taken the Ivy title.

But in a remarkable turn of events, the play was called back after a roughing-the-kicker foul. Penn was given a second chance and Shulman made the Crimson pay, clinching a share of the Ivy championship for the Red and Blue.

The Quakers’ meteoric rise from worst to tied-for-first was no fluke: they held on to a share of the Ivy title the next year. In 1984, Jerry’s first recruiting class finally took their place as seniors. “Jerry’s Kids” would no longer settle for anything less than an outright title. And they needed the inspiration to do so.

A friendly face

Along with discipline and vision, Berndt needed his players’ passion and trust. Luckily for him, just the man had been hired only a few years earlier — coach Dan Staffieri.

If ever a man embodied Penn football, Staffieri was it. Affectionately known as “Coach Lake,” he played on the 1953 University of Maryland national championship team. He coached at the local high-school level before moving to Penn in 1977. When Berndt took over the program, he asked Staffieri to stay and coach the freshmen, who at the time were ineligible to play in Ivy League games.

“You need a friendly face … to tell you that it’s going to be okay,” said Chambers, the 1984 Bushnell Cup winner. “I remember going to the locker room the first time and spending time with him just sitting down and him saying, ‘Everything is going to be okay. I know what you’re going through.’”

“In a lot of ways, he was the spiritual glue of the program,” Chambers added.

Staffieri would prove to be not only a freshman mentor and guide, but also an inspiration for the entire program. He was a man whose positivity could not be spoiled nor diminished, and whose friendly face and pick-me-up attitudes proved the yin to Berndt’s yang.

“He was the team motivator who was loved by anyone I know who wore the Red and Blue at the University of Pennsylvania,” said Rich Comizio, a star running back and the 1986 Bushnell Cup winner. “He was indefatigable motivation and [his] always-positive thinking kept us going.”

But after two years of sharing the title, Staffieri knew Penn had to take the Ivy title as its own. He would project his motto freely to anyone who would listen: “We Will Share No More in ’84.”

The Quakers responded and lost only one game during the 1984 season.

Game after game, Penn beat teams in the trenches and in the field, clinching the championship with a 38-7 demolition of Harvard. The ’84 team would field three future Bushnell Cup winners and even a future All-American in offensive tackle Marty Peterson.

By year’s end, Penn had claimed its first outright title since 1959, but by no means were the Quakers finished.

Losing the way

Exactly a year later, Penn was once again facing Harvard in mid-November for a chance to do something unheard of — win the title outright in Boston.

However, it wasn’t meant to be as Penn was utterly dominated for three quarters in its only Ivy loss in a three-year span.

“Winners remember the losses, and losers remember the wins,” said Gilmore, who was well-known for his hard-nosed play and phenomenal technique.

“That’s the one thing [I remember well] and it’s a very painful memory for me,” he said. “Harvard’s the only team that knocked us off in my years at Penn in a varsity football game.”

Devastated and injured, the Quakers limped into their season finale against lowly Dartmouth without many of their stars. The team rallied around Staffieri’s mantra that year, “Keep it alive in ’85,” and the Quakers’ defense stepped up. Gilmore forced a fumble that led to a score, and linebacker Jeff Fortna burst through the Big Green line to record a safety and break a 7-7 tie.

The win — coupled with Harvard’s shocking defeat at the hands of Yale — gave Penn an unprecedented fourth-straight title and back-to-back outright championships. Still, the Quakers had yet to face their toughest challenge.

Early the next year, Berndt unexpectedly left Penn to take the head coach and athletic director positions at Rice.

“It was a very difficult decision,” Berndt lamented. “We had such a great program going. I probably should have stayed there. I loved the players. All the players felt like a son to me.”

Without its coach, Penn had to move on and Ed Zubrow, who Berndt had hired as defensive line coach, inherited a program that would dominate for one more year.

Running through the competition

Speed. Power. Deception. These were three different horses, three different running backs, for every type of situation Zubrow encountered.

Comizio was the feature trying to avoid the contact, but bowling over defenders in his way. Chris Flynn was the freak athlete and All-Ivy lacrosse standout who provided the misdirection and trickery with awesome speed. Last was Jim Bruni, the least heralded of three, but the change in gears that kept defenses honest.

“When I went and [played] with the New York Giants, Phil Simms would give me a hard time about the number of yards I threw my senior year,” 1985-86 starting quarterback Jim Crocicchia said. “And I said, ‘I had a running game.’”

The year 1986 brought a new set of challenges and a new set of questions. How would Penn cope without the coach that had resurrected the program, and could Penn do the unthinkable and win an unprecedented third-straight title?

The Quakers answered those questions quickly and decisively, as they continued to run right through their foes. In his last year, Comizio racked up nearly 1,104 yards and broke Penn’s all-time rushing mark. Not to be outdone, Flynn racked up nearly 1,620 all-purpose yards.

Even a mid-season visit to the Midshipmen in Annapolis couldn’t cool Penn’s offense as Crocicchia’s go-ahead touchdown pass to Brent Novolselsky with 2:33 left in the fourth quarter secured the Quakers’ first win against a Division I-A opponent in 22 years.

“When we lined up against them in the first half, I think I said in the huddle, ‘We’re just going to play football,” Crocicchia said. “Our guys absolutely performed like they were expecting to perform. Everyone stepped up and it was a phenomenal win.”

The maturity and success of years past carried the Red and Blue up to the last game against Dartmouth.

Both teams entered the contest undefeated in Ivy play and were playing only a few days after a blizzard had moved through the area. The frigid atmosphere extended beyond the field where, in a ploy to disrupt the Quakers’ running attack, Dartmouth didn’t plow the field until hours before the game.

With frost covering the stadium, none of the running backs could grip the frozen ground. Then, with just a four-point Penn lead, Flynn made one of his patented runs, bouncing off two would-be tacklers and sealing the third straight championship.

Reminiscing on memories past

On a clear and warm April day in 2010, Staffieri passed away. His presence is still felt among the team members, and this year’s is one of the last squads to have met his radiant joy. No doubt, his words of encouragement — “Fight, Fight, Fight” — will be fresh in the minds of seniors resonating the way they did way back in 1986.

As Penn prepares for its opener, it will have to coalesce and become stronger than ever. The Quakers will be hunted like no other team has been hunted before.

“How many people can say they won a championship every year they played in college?” Gilmore said. “It just left such fond memories. Looking back, I take a lot of pride that coaches, all my teammates and myself were able to enjoy that kind of success.”

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