FOOTBALL NOTEBOOK: No news in football camp, much to Bagnoli's delight

This week, the latest news coming out of the Penn football camp as the Quakers prepare for Saturday's season opener against Dartmouth is, simply put, no news. For the Red and Blue, which has spent the off-season adjusting to a new signal caller (senior Steve Teodecki) and two weeks ago witnessed co-captain Tim Gage go down with a broken foot, the fact that the Penn football program is having a quiet week is music to coach Al Bagnoli's ears. "Right now we are just looking forward to Saturday, and I think our kids will be ready to play," Bagnoli said. "One of the problems that this league has is that we are at least one week behind every other major college. "The game itself this weekend will revolve around the same old things -- how well we protect the ball, penalties, field position, the kicking game." · The defensive end position, which is dealing with the graduation of last year's team sacks leade,r Tom McGarrity, who recorded 12 quarterback takedowns, will be filled by Tim Foster and Doug Zinser to help pick up where sack king McGarrity left off. With Foster and Zinser set to start this weekend up at Dartmouth's Memorial Field, Bagnoli plans to play three other defensive ends off his bench. Senior Roger Beckwith and a pair of sophomores, Justin Gallagher and Joseph Boswell, will see playing time, according to Bagnoli. "While it will be hard to replace McGarrity this season, the five guys we have now are all capable of doing a solid job," Bagnoli said. · If Penn is going to win the Ivy League this year, the Quakers will have to deal with a rough away schedule this fall. In the Ivy League, where a road trip can be an eight-hour drive to Hanover, N.H., or a trek through the backwoods of Ithaca, N.Y., away trips can be taxing on a traveling team. Bagnoli warned of the unpredictability of Ivy away games, citing the Quakers' surprise loss to Columbia on the road as a good example. With that in mind, the 1996 fall schedule has Penn playing its three toughest Ivy foes -- Dartmouth, Princeton and Cornell -- all on the road. While Bagnoli recognizes that home-field advantage is key, he doesn't think this year's schedule will be a deciding factor in Penn's overall performance. "If you just based our schedule on whether we played at home or away, then, by that rational, last year we should have won it all, and the year before that we should have lost it all," Bagnoli said.