Penn faces tough road

Football visits Brown It is Parents' Weekend and Homecoming combined into a single day in Providence tomorrow. The largest crowd of the season is expected to be on hand to watch Brown play. The Bears are poised to show they can live up to their lofty preseason expectations. Excitement abounds. The defending Ivy champions are coming to town. "They're going to be all fired up," Penn wide receiver Miles Macik said. "They have every reason to be excited about this game. They're a dangerous team and they could explode at any time." Sound familiar? This is the same daunting task the Quakers have and will continue to face on each of their road contests this season. This time it is Brown attempting to spoil Penn's run for perfection. Last time it was Dartmouth. Next time it will be Princeton. Finally, it will be Cornell. And while the Quakers are well aware of the importance of tomorrow's game, when the two teams take the field at Brown Stadium at 1 p.m., the Bears will see it as their biggest game of the year. Under new coach Mark Whipple, Brown (3-2, 0-2 Ivy League) headed into the season believing it had a legitimate chance to compete for the Ivy title. But after dropping its first two Ivy contests, the Bears have fallen out of the league race. Senior quarterback Trevor Yankoff has been converted to wide receiver and sophomore Jason McCullough is in at signal caller. Injuries and mental lapses have plagued the team. Although Brown returned 22 starters from last season, inexperience has killed the team in Ivy play. "We've got a lot of guys who have played football, but we're just really young," Whipple said after Princeton blew open a close game for a 31-10 win over the Bears two weeks ago. "We have a really young football team mentally." This mental factor is what Penn (4-0, 2-0) hopes to exploit. The Quakers pummeled Brown 34-9 a season ago, and have established a winning mental attitude. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the final goal-line stand in Penn's win over Dartmouth. The whole team just seemed to know someway, somehow the Big Green was not going to score. It is this kind of attitude the Bears have lacked so far under Whipple. While it did notch an impressive win over Rhode Island, Brown appeared to quickly lose confidence in its loss to Princeton two weeks ago. After a Tiger big play, the Bears simply folded and gave in to Princeton. A quick start by the Quaker attack could help neutralize the crowd and shatter Brown's belief in itself. Penn is going to have to put the ball in the end zone to accomplish this goal. After settling for four field goals against Columbia, the Quaker coaching staff has performed an in-depth analysis of the offense's Red Zone struggles. "You look at three different aspects," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said. "You look at personnel and make sure you have the right people in there. You look at practice habits. You look at play selection. We're making sure we're doing everything we can." Brown plans to deny the Quakers the end zone by using a lot of different schemes defensively. The Bears like to blitz, stunt and mix up their coverages. Sometimes the defensive linemen go after the quarterback, while other times they drop back into coverages. Sometimes they bring the safety all the way up to the line, and sometimes they drop him back to help the cornerbacks. If this sounds at all familiar, it should be. It is almost exactly what Penn does on defense. "There's a tremendous amount of familiarity between us and them," Bagnoli said. "A lot of things are going to make this game unusual and a lot of that has to do with the familiarity -- especially defensively. We're going to be carbon copies of each other for the most part." Except on offense, where Brown's major rushing threat, sophomore Marquis Jesse, is doubtful for tomorrow's game. Jesse had surgery before the Princeton game for a hernia and was expected to be out three to four weeks. Regardless of Jesse's status, the Bears are capable of putting points on the scoreboard. The offense features several athletic players who the Quakers must contain to be successful. "They're a very good offensive team," Penn linebacker Kevin DeLuca said. "When they put things together, we can't let them get rolling. If they get rolling, they're difficult to stop."