PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Phil Estes was pissed. The Penn football team had just put a 27-14 hurtin' on his Brown squad, and now, at the press conference in a room underneath Brown Stadium, nobody had anything to ask him.
After a short statement, the gist of which was, "We played pretty well, but not well enough," Estes opened the floor for questions, and nobody said peep. After that, Estes stormed out of the conference room, muttering, "No questions at my own press conference."
You can't really blame Estes. This was the first Penn-Brown game during his four-year tenure where the margin of victory was more than a single touchdown. It was also the second-lowest point total the Bears have achieved during Estes' reign. Furthermore, Brown had minus-26 rushing yards -- marking the second time in as many weeks that the Quakers forced their opponent into negative yardage.
Given all that, Estes' tantrum shouldn't have come as much of a surprise.
"[The Bears] tried to run the ball at first, and they're not getting any yards and they're down a couple points," Penn defensive lineman John Galan said. "Their coaches start getting frustrated, start getting a little nervous that if 'we don't start moving the ball down the field, we're going to get blown out.'"
So, when you consider that the Quakers defense has made a habit of frustrating opposing coaches all season, the only question is, "Why didn't a coach snap sooner?"
After Penn's 37-0 blanking of Lafayette to open the season, I wrote in this space, "If holding Lafayette scoreless is the equivalent of, say, holding Brown to 20, Penn's in business."
It's five weeks later, and business is very good. The Quakers are giving up an astonishing 27.2 rushing yards per game -- first in the nation, and more than 40 yards better than the second-ranked team.
The Quakers defense has been stellar --ÿno opponent has scored more than 20 points in a game, and if you were making a B-movie about the front seven, it'd be called something like Where Running Backs Go to Die. They've been standing up to the good teams and beating up on the bad ones.
But Saturday was the litmus test. For the last three years, the Penn-Brown game has been a shootout -- you could bank on it. The way to win those contests was to just keep scoring and hope that your team had the ball at the end of the game. Defense was nothing if not an afterthought.
Given this, how could anyone in the know think that the Quakers would hold the Bears -- who entered the game boasting the country's third-ranked offense -- to under three touchdowns? It just wasn't feasible.
Sure enough, on its first possession, Brown used four plays and went 60 yards in 44 seconds to score the game's first touchdown. The fireworks were on, right? Not exactly.
The Quakers sacked quarterback Kyle Rowley seven times and picked him off twice, as they allowed the Bears only one more score on the day.
But the real gem in this game is the line on Bears running back Michael Malan, who, two weeks ago, had his second consecutive 200-yard rushing game. The Quakers held this machine to four yards on nine carries.
Do we really need to play the rest of the Ivy League season? If you can't run the ball, you can't win. Quakers opponents can't run the ball. I think you see where we're going.
