COLUMN: Tigers need to stop their whimpering

From Michael Hasday's "Curve Ball," Fall '95 He never directly says that Penn's football success is due to unfair or immoral practices. No, he just implies it. In fact, Tosches is a veritable quote machine in the recent Sports Illustrated college football issue. In an article written by Tim Layden in the Aug. 28 issue, he is quoted as saying, among other things: "I've been in the league since '85 and I've seen a great change in what some schools are willing to do to help their athletic teams." It does not take a Princeton education to realize that he means the Red and Blue when he says "some schools," and the reporter sure figured it out. Stringing that quote together with a few other doozies by Tosches ("They're not breaking policies, they're just stretching them like they're plastic" is another original from fast-talking Stevie), along with a couple of chimes by other Ivy coaches, the reporter was able to achieve an "angle" for his story. Now, you may think that the longest streak in college football is enough of an angle, but why write about that when you can follow the lead of the Cornell Daily Sun and Columbia Spectator and raise, in the SI reporter's words, the "specter of wrongdoing." Indeed, the story is set up in the big, bold print that asks the following question: "Penn has not lost a game in two years. Question is, to achieve dominance, has it compromised the Ivy League's academic ideals?" The answer is, for the millionth time, no. The story finally gets around to that point, concluding that Penn actually could be "the model for every college that plays games." Unfortunately, most readers skim articles, but memorize headlines. And to those who do that, the Quakers seem to be grouped with the University of Miami and UNLV as win-at-all-cost programs, when nothing could be further from the truth. But that was probably what Tosches intended. Raise questions, manufacture suspicions. Anything to detract attention from the fact that Penn crushed the Tigers the last two years; that Princeton only recorded one shared Ivy championship with Keith Elias, arguably the most dominant offensive player in the league in years; that the Tigers, who went 4-3 last year in Ivy play, are no longer the team to beat. Tosches derides Penn's success as a product of the so-called "new Ivy League" where teams disregard academics, integrity, morals, etc., etc. in an all-out effort to just win, baby. Now, this is all nonsense and Tosches should know better. The Ivy League, as he should be well aware, is governed by an academic index (AI) that keeps unqualified players out of the league. So what exactly does Tosches mean when he says, "I'd like to see the playing field as level as possible on Saturday afternoon." Are the fields on an incline? Are the games rigged? Does Penn just play too hard? My guess (other than incoherency) is that he wants to draw attention to the fact that Penn, along with all the other Ivies except Harvard and Yale, is allowed to take more players who barely meet minimum qualifications than Princeton is permitted. However, instead of creating an unfair recruiting advantage for Penn over Princeton, these rules actually do what Tosches supposedly wants: make "the playing field as level as possible." Princeton has inherent recruiting advantages over Penn: a higher academic ranking ( U.S. News and World Report ranked Princeton No. 2 and Penn No. 12, last year) and the ability to walk off campus without feeling you might get shot. Therefore, the rules that allow the Quakers to admit slightly less-qualified players than the Tigers make sense if the goal is to make the system fair. One more thing Tosches omits: the system has worked. Since 1985, when the AI was instituted, Penn and Princeton have split their last 10 games. Penn's Ivy record in that time span in the Ivy League is 48-22; Princeton's is 43-27. It's hard to get more level than that. Penn's dominance is only in the last two years; the rules governing the Ivy League are a decade-old. The real secret to Penn's astounding success is not so devious or a secret at all. He even has a name. He's Al Bagnoli. A telling statistic: in the three years before Bagnoli arrived on the Penn scene, the Quakers were 9-21. The three years after, Penn went 26-3. College football is a coaches' game, and Penn is lucky enough to have one of the best coaches anywhere coaching a Division I-AA school. The situation is not unlike Princeton men's lacrosse, where coach Bill Tierney turned Ivy League doormats into a two-time national champion. The real insight of the SI article has nothing to do with academics, the index, or even Penn for that matter. Instead, the article shows how the once-proud Princeton football program has been reduced to a whining crybaby in the face of a better, smarter team. If this is what the great Penn-Princeton rivalry has come to, the Quakers should not want to take part.