Alter | It’s how you start, not how you finish

Penn’s offense continues to confound. It feels like you never quite know what you’re going to get, and it actually makes for some good entertainment.

Let’s start with the numbers. In the first half against William & Mary, the Quakers gained 119 yards. They looked bewildered as to how to move the ball against the swarming Tribe.

Besides a first-quarter touchdown on a short field, here’s how the Quakers’ first-half drives ended: punt, punt, punt, fumble, punt, fumble, end of half.

The Red and Blue returned to their locker room down, 24-7. It looked like the game might turn even uglier.

Then, Penn gained 276 yards and scored 21 points in the second half. While the Quakers were helped by a couple of William & Mary personal fouls, they looked like a different team.

What explains it? The Quakers went from ‘three yards and a cloud of Astroturf rubber’ to a high-flying offense over the course of one game.

“Just to kind of put things in context, that was the same defense that held Maryland to seven points,” coach Al Bagnoli said about the Tribe. “Lafayette scored 17. They’re a good defensive team.”

William & Mary is a good defensive team. So did they only play defense for the first half?

“Our kids had two things to do. Either they were going to fold and we were going to lose 48 to whatever, or the kids were going to fight and compete,” Bagnoli said.

He went on to call the game a “gut check” and despite being clearly frustrated, Bagnoli praised the good things his team did against a talented William & Mary side.

Quarterback Billy Ragone had a similar take.

“I thought offensively we kind of struggled in the first half to kind of get some momentum going,” he said. “In the second half we came out really high and with high energy.”

So if the Quakers decided at halftime to come out with high energy and gain more than twice as many yards in the second half than the first, shouldn’t they have been ready to go when the game started?

The “gut check, high energy” explanation is too much of a cop-out. Yes, the second half performance was admirable, and, as Bagnoli alluded to, the team certainly could have folded. But it’s hard to believe that Penn needs to be down big at halftime to get fired up.

This offense hung 28 on a good defense of scholarship athletes. This offense can move the ball down the field. They have weapons. They can play. Why shouldn’t they be able to do all of the above for 60 minutes?

Football coaches love to talk about finishing. Finishing a block, a drive, a game. It’s an important maxim, especially in the fourth quarter, when players are banged up and tired, when it’s too easy to give just that 1 percent less that might decide the outcome of the game.

The Quakers finished strong on Saturday and almost stole a win in one of the toughest games on their schedule. But they fell a touch short. The problem was not the finish, but the start.

ETHAN ALTER is a senior history major from Los Altos, Calif. He can be reached at dpsports@theDP.com.

SEE ALSO

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