COLUMN: History on the line at Harvard

Jordan Smith, Commentary This one is for history. The story of Penn football in this era, the last six years, may well hinge on three hours Saturday afternoon. Since Al Bagnoli took over the program in 1992, the Quakers have won two undefeated Ivy titles, in 1993 and 1994. Most of the key players on those teams, Miles Macik, Terrance Stokes, Jimmy McGeehan, et al? were not Bagnoli's recruits, but those of his much-reviled predecessor, Gary Steele. With the new regime's own players taking more of a role, the Quakers' Ivy records slipped to 5-2 and then to 3-4 in the following seasons. Now, Penn (4-1) stands on the threshold of another title, almost certainly to be shared with Harvard (5-0) and probably with Dartmouth (4-1), too. All Penn has to do is win on Saturday and overcome a weak Cornell squad at home in two weeks to guarantee a share. But this is a different species of championship than the Quakers' have known. Penn isn't anything like undefeated -- at 5-3 they aren't even assured a winning overall record this year. That's why this weekend is sure to be a turning point in the perception of Penn football. Win, and Bagnoli's Quakers build a bridge to those undefeated teams and become the team of the 1990s. Lose, and the stigma of not winning with their own players attaches itself to the Penn coaches. The 1997 Quakers are not the model of a championship team, unlike their early 1990s counterparts. There is a dominant running back, Jim Finn, as those other teams had Stokes. But Finn has only been moved to offense from a safety spot for five weeks. Penn could barely move on the ground for the first half of the year. As for the passing game, Penn features a quarterback who was pushed out of a Division I-A program, Matt Rader. A flock of wide receivers who flip-flopped on the depth chart with the underachieving veterans are on the receiving end of Rader's passes. The script is equally unpredictable at other spots. The young offensive line looked to be an insurmountable barrier to winning in the first four games, when Rader -- along with a defensive lineman or two -- was a regular visitor to the turf. The defense hasn't experienced the same flux as offense, but its best, most visible member has been more absent than awesome. Before the season, Penn thought Mitch Marrow was a potential Player of the Year candidate. Instead, he has spent the better part of his time recovering from a virus. Last Saturday's game against Princeton was the first of the year in which Marrow displayed the moves that make him a potential NFL draftee. The widest divergence, though, is that Penn's season has not followed a champion's pattern. Losing three of four to open the season, including a 24-7 drubbing by a Lehigh team of limited abilities, is not the usual way of arriving at a title. Fumbling away the Ivy home opener is not the way to win the championship, either. Still, Penn is where it wants to be. Two games plus two wins equals the title. If they succeed, then 1995 and 1996 become part of the road to the 1997 championship. If they fail -- and make no mistake, Harvard is a deserving home favorite -- 1997 might be the beginning of Penn's fade out of the league limelight, the end of its brief period as a power, just as its six-year run in the 1980s quickly ended. After all, 45 years of Ivy League history say Penn's proper place is the bottom half of the standings. And history is what Penn is writing Saturday.