COLUMN: Hey Gavin: Now you've arrived

Sure, you moved your stuff in over the summer and you've been going to class for six weeks now. You've put in countless hours on the practice fields and you've already logged five games at quarterback for the Quakers. But people here, for the most part, don't care what you think of the food at Commons or whether or not the transition from Northwestern into the Wharton School has been an easy one. They care about one thing -- the success of your right arm. That's just the nature of the beast. For the first four games of the season, there's been a lot of head-scratching in the Franklin Field stands. What happened to the all-everything high school star, the signal-caller who threw for more than 2,000 yards in the Big Ten? Where's the quarterback ushered in by Penn coach Al Bagnoli as a "transfer from God" been hiding? Gavin, I'm sure you don't need me to point out that you threw for just 108 yards and zero touchdowns in a blowout loss to Villanova. Or that in a game Penn should have won against Bucknell, you suffered a mild concussion and threw a first-half interception that put the Bison in position to score a go-ahead-for-good touchdown. Or that against a winless Fordham squad you completed fewer than half of your passes. So the season-opening four-game homestand was rocky? It's all been forgotten. Now, you have arrived, four days removed from a bus from Manhattan. But it's not the coach ride, the rest stops, the time spent on the New Jersey Turnpike that I herald. It's your performance, a school record-smashing 399 yards passing and a school record-tying four touchdown passes in a 41-17 win over Columbia that righted almost everything that was out of whack in this young Penn season. All that figurative baggage from your first four games has been dropped on this journey to New York. And so I welcome you, on behalf of the entire Penn community. Admittedly, things had not been going so great. After four weeks of waiting -- waiting for the offense to gel, and for you to feel comfortable, and for the raw receiving corps to gain experience -- the coaches were a little concerned. "We all took turns talking to him [to make sure he wasn't getting down on himself]," Bagnoli said. "Even I got involved, which, usually I'm the last resort, but we just wanted to make sure the kid relaxed and had some fun." While the stone-faced Bagnoli's Penn windbreaker might be a V-neck, he's hardly a Mr. Rogers with a headset. For him to play counselor, sirens had to be going off that everything was not OK. "He's a no-aid kid, so for someone to be paying $33,000 to go to school and then to not have any fun playing football seems a little bit asinine, so we got him to relax and calm down and understand that if we're going anywhere this year we're going with him as the quarterback," Bagnoli said. Whatever it was that Bagnoli and quarterbacks coach Larry Woods and offensive coordinator Chuck Priore said, it must have worked. Saturday's performance, Gavin, was just about flawless. After intentionally throwing your first pass out of bounds, you completed 25-of-31. By halftime, you had already passed for more yards (214) than you had in your previous best game (205 against Bucknell). You shattered Mark DeRosa's old school record of 360 yards. Had either the first-quarter 20-yarder that passed through Erik Bolinder's hands or the deep third-quarter pass that hit Brandon Carson's hands been reeled in, we could be talking yardage numbers that would make even Brown's James Perry -- author of two 470-yard games -- take note. More importantly, you increased your season touchdown total by 133 percent in one game. And you threw no interceptions. I know you don't like the inevitable comparisons to Matt Rader, who steered Penn to a title last season. But just wait a second here. Also a Division I-A transfer, former Duke starter Rader, like you, is a big, dropback passer with a strong arm. But after your first four games, in which you threw three touchdown passes, five interceptions and compiled a 100.0 QB rating, there were more than a few people saying that you were no Matt Rader. Looks like you could have the last laugh though, Gavin. Through his first five games at Penn in 1997, Rader was 94-of-160 passing for 973 yards. Through Saturday, you'd completed 95-of-159 attempts for 1043 yards. Better yet, Rader's squad in '97 stood at 1-1 in the Ivy League at this stage of the season. This year, with non-league losses to 'Nova and Bucknell all but washed under the bridge, you and your teammates are undefeated in the Ivies. Welcome to Penn, Gavin.