Wenik | Penn football will fly safely with Priore at helm

S tanding at the podium for the most important — and first — press conference of his career, Penn football coach-in-waiting Ray Priore decided to take a moment to talk about ... airplanes.

“Flying in with my daughter last night from Fort Myers [Fla.], we’re coming down, the pilot says, ‘Get ready for some rough turbulence,’” Priore said. “We land, it’s smooth as can be. I said, ‘Great job, pilot.’

“He said, ‘It’s all about timing.’”

The message is clear: Ray Priore is the right man, in the right place, at the right time, to succeed the greatest coach in Quaker history in the retiring Al Bagnoli.

The legacy that Bagnoli leaves behind is tremendous — nine outright Ivy titles, 232 victories and the second-highest winning percentage in Ancient Eight history, to boot. For an external hire, it very well could have been impossible to step out of Bagnoli’s shadow.

But that’s why Bagnoli and Athletic Director Steve Bilsky planned this move two years in advance — to pare down the candidates slowly, carefully and, most importantly, internally.

And in doing so, they’ve found the perfect man for the job.

Priore has learned from Bagnoli over the past 23 years, serving for the past nine seasons in a right-hand man position as an associate head coach. They coach alike. They think alike. They even wore matching ties to the press conference.

“[Al’s] taught me so much as a mentor and a person,” Priore said.

That philosophical similarity is the best possible thing that the Penn football program can ask for, which has been a model of stability under Bagnoli while the rest of the athletic department has been experiencing plenty of change as of late.

With M. Grace Calhoun due to come on as Penn’s new AD in July, the last thing she needs is a coaching search in one of the highest-profile positions in Penn athletics.

“Sometimes you take it for granted when a program ... runs so smoothly,” Bilsky said.

But with Priore at the helm, it should be smooth operating for the Penn football program moving forward, especially from a recruiting and on-field perspective.

Specializing in California and parts of New Jersey, Priore is well-tuned to the recruiting hotbeds that form the bulk of Penn’s roster — 34 of the Red and Blue’s 120 players this season hailed from those two states alone.

“It’s helpful, because [Ray’s] been part of this thing longer than I have,” Bagnoli said of Priore’s ability to snag talent. “He gets it. There are very few potholes that he’s going to hit that he won’t know about.”

With Priore on board, there’s not going to be a mass exodus of players that refuse to play for a coach that didn’t recruit them. There’s not going to be some drastic shift to an air-raid offense.

It’s going to be business as usual, both in Bagnoli’s final campaign in 2014 and beyond.

For Penn fans, that means a safe landing.

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