As the Penn football team continued its Ivy League title defense with a victory at Brown last Saturday, one player continued his pursuit of an impressive school record.
With Saturday's 189-yard rushing performance, senior running back Kris Ryan replaced Terrance Stokes at No. 2 on the Quakers' all-time rushing list.
Saturday's performance gave Ryan 2,732 total yards, leaving him 405 yards shy of Bryan Keys' school record. Ryan needs to average exactly 135 yards over the last three games of the season to catch Keys.
By also rushing for a pair of touchdowns against Brown, Ryan is only six touchdowns shy of the Quakers career record for rushing touchdowns.
The Quakers defense has a shot at a national record. Last season, Alabama A&M; held its opponents to 39.7 rushing yards a game, establishing a new Division I-AA mark.
With three games remaining, the Quakers defense is on pace to break A&M;'s record. Penn is currently holding opponents to 27.2 rushing yards per game.
Penn's numbers in rushing defense have been helped considerably over the past two weeks by the amount of pressure the front seven has been applying to opposing quarterbacks.
The Quakers sacked Brown quarterback Kyle Rowley seven times for losses of 43 yards on Saturday, just a week after Penn's defense abused Yale quarterback Peter Lee for 10 sacks amounting to a total loss of 66 yards.
Because yardage lost on sacks counts against a team's rushing offense, the Quakers were able to hold Yale and Brown to negative rushing yardage.
"For the second week in a row we were able to get pressure, get some sacks, and that helps our rushing defense," defensive lineman John Galan said. "We take away yards that [the opponents] did gain by sacking them."
The Quakers coaches may or may not have found an answer to their kicking woes in the strong leg of Roman Galas.
Galas was the kickoff specialist all last year, and over the last two games he's handled all the placekicking in addition to his kickoff duties. Saturday, Galas missed a 26 yard field goal with 5:11 remaining in the first half, but it wasn't all his fault.
Long snapper John Westhoff's snap went a bit high, throwing off Galas' timing on the kick that sailed wide.
"That was a bit of a disappointment because John Westhoff is just having a tremendous year snapping," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said. "He's been right on the money the whole season.
"We've been spoiled by John -- he's had such an effective year that you think every snap's going to be perfect."
As far as whether or not Galas had a firm grasp on the placekicking duties, Bagnoli was noncommittal.
"It's a week-to-week evaluation," Bagnoli said, "and at this point, I'm not sure we have a kicker who's going to be in it for the long run."
One of the reasons Kris Ryan had such a productive day against the Bears seemed to be the use of the shotgun draw. Ryan ran for 189 yards on 41 carries. On at least 13 of those touches, Ryan stood next to quarterback Gavin Hoffman in the shotgun and took the handoff on a draw play.
While the shotgun draw is a play the Quakers have employed before, they seemed to use it with greater effectiveness against the Bears.
"When we do that, we spread the field with four receivers," Ryan said. "We're able to make the defense spread out a little bit and that gives us the opportunity to try to gash some of those things in the middle. It's something that we saw on film that we thought might work for us [against Brown], and it helped us out today."
