Penn football picked to defend Ivy football crown

Few expected Penn to win the Ivy League throughout most of its cardiac 2012 campaign, but it did.

Now it’s expected that the Quakers will do something that no Ivy has ever done — win four league championships in a five-year span.

The Ivy League Preseason Media Poll released Tuesday revealed that Penn is the favorite to win the 2013 conference title, with the Quakers collecting 11 of 17 first-place votes. Harvard was projected to finish second with five first-place votes, marking the fifth consecutive year Penn and Harvard claimed the top two positions.

“I think it’s normal for a defending champion, out of courtesy, to be picked number one,” Penn coach Al Bagnoli said during Tuesday’s Ivy Football teleconference. “We could realistically have multiple teams with real opportunities to win the championship, so I don’t put a tremendous amount of credence [in the media poll], to be honest with you. I like it better when we’re picked second or third more than when we’re picked first.”

Still, Bagnoli admitted he at least understood why Penn was picked first, an understanding that comes from the Quakers returning 20 starters from last season’s championship team, including eight 2012 All-Ivy selections.

The star of the teleconference, though, was Penn fifth-year senior quarterback Billy Ragone.

“[Ragone] seems to have started about 50 games,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “He may not have the numbers that some of the other really outstanding quarterbacks in our league have, but he’s as good as anybody. I guarantee you he’s as good as anybody.”

“That guy wins games,” Columbia coach Pete Mangurian said of Ragone when asked about his team’s quarterback competition. Mangurian made it clear that all he wanted his next starting quarterback to be was a winner, and for him, Ragone is the standard.

But while other Ivy coaches want quarterbacks who can win like Ragone, Bagnoli just wants Ragone to be himself after the latter continues to move on from the dislocated ankle and fractured fibula he suffered during Penn’s Ivy title-clinching win over Harvard on Nov. 10.

“I just think with any injury, whether you’re talking about an ankle, you’re talking about a knee or you’re talking about a shoulder, there’s a little bit of a psychological component that people have to overcome,” Bagnoli said after forecasting “psychological trauma” that Ragone has had to fight through. “I know he’ll want to do everything 100 percent right away, but we anticipate him being 100 percent physically and we’re working on the psychological part of it as we go through, [to] make sure he’s 100 percent psychologically as well.”

In the meantime, Bagnoli feels very fortunate to have another fifth-year senior quarterback in Ryan Becker, who is also coming off a season-ending injury after tearing his ACL last summer. Becker is 64-for-113 in completions for his career with two touchdowns and four interceptions, seeing the majority of his career action in 2010.

“Ryan gives us tremendous confidence that we don’t have to rush Billy Ragone back,” Bagnoli said. “We can take our time with Billy, we can be sensitive to the injury. We can kind of dictate our own time frame of when to use Billy and when not to use Billy. And we feel very comfortable that Ryan can run the offense.”

Bagnoli feels slightly less comfortable with his defensive line, which loses three-time All-Ivy stalwart Brandon Copeland, C.J. Mooney and Taylor Brown for 2013.

“Obviously we had a combination of some senior leadership with those three, [a] great individual player with Brandon Copeland,” Bagnoli said. “So obviously that’s going to be an area of concern for us. The good news is we have good, young, talented kids that played a little bit last year, weren’t household names but we’re going to have to do a good of job of creating them.”

No school has lost more big names than Harvard, which graduated five first-team All-Ivies from 2012 on the offensive side alone. Murphy recognizes how great the Crimson’s missed opportunity was last season, but Penn’s upset of Harvard wasn’t the hiccup he lingered over Tuesday.

“I’ve said very bluntly that it’s probably the best Harvard team that we’ve had that didn’t win a championship,” Murphy said. “It came down to the last play in one of our last couple games and we just didn’t get it done. And that’s a credit to Princeton. We gave up 24 points in the last 12 minutes of a game that we had thoroughly dominated to that point.”

Having been on the positive side of that unpredictability a year ago, Bagnoli described himself as “cautiously optimistic” for the upcoming season. But it’s clear that Penn is considered the cream of the Ivy crop — for now.

2013 IVY LEAGUE FOOTBALL PRESEASON MEDIA POLL
PREDICTED ORDER OF FINISH

Rank School Points
1. PENN (11) 129
2. Harvard (5) 121
3. Brown (1) 88
4. Dartmouth 76
5. Princeton 73
6. Cornell 57
7. Yale 46
8. Columbia 22

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.