1982: The season that changed Penn football

On Nov. 13, 1982, with three seconds left on the clock, kicker Dave Shulman marched onto Franklin Field to attempt a 38-yard field goal that would give Penn a share of its first Ivy League crown in 23 years.

The Quakers trailed Harvard, 21-20, despite dominating the game through the first three quarters. The field goal was their last chance at a victory they felt they deserved.

As Shulman lined up and tested the wind that whipped at 21 mph, the 34,746 fans in attendance held their breaths in anticipation.

The snap was perfect. Quarterback Gary Vura, who was the holder all season, lined it up exact, laces out. Shulman made contact.

The ball had the distance. But it sailed wide left.

Shulman had missed.

Simultaneously, the whistle blew. Referee Robert Lynch called a foul on the Crimson for roughing the kicker, allowing Shulman one extra chance at victory.

The kicker lined up again -- this time with no time on the clock and only 28-yards from the goal posts.

The ball flew through the uprights. Penn's players rejoiced, the fans stormed the field and daring students began the arduous process of tearing down the goal posts.

"It was just complete euphoria," Shulman told The Daily Pennsylvanian five years later. "It was the greatest moment of my life. I was in la-la land."

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"Everybody remembers the game against Harvard," said Jerry Berndt, who coached the Quakers from 1981-85. "But there were a lot of things that happened before that game."

In the spring of 1982, admist the longest and most torturous drought in Penn football history, then-head coach Berndt realized that if he were going to keep his sanity -- and his job -- something had to change.

In the fall of 1981, Berndt's first season as head coach of the Penn program, the Quakers carried on in the same grand tradition that they had established over the previous two decades.

The Red and Blue went 1-9, with their only win coming in the first game of the season against Cornell. For exactly two months thereafter, Penn went without a single victory.

The squad wasn't just on a losing streak, it was on an especially embarassing one.

That season, Lehigh demolished Penn, 58-0, then Delaware beat the Quakers, 40-6, and finally Harvard took its shot, too, smashing the Red and Blue, 45-7 -- and those are only three of nine losses.

In four seasons, from 1978-81, the Quakers tallied a measly four wins in 38 games.

The situation was dire. Fans stopped coming to games, Penn students couldn't name a single player on the team and the players were beyond frustration.

Knowing that he had nothing to lose, Berndt made some serious changes in the off-season.

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When Berndt approached Mike Christiani in the spring of 1982, he was determined to convince the fifth-year senior to become a captain for the next season.

But Christiani wasn't too interested in what his coach had to say.

Christiani had suffered through the worst of Penn's plight. In addition to the team's ongoing woes, Christiani was also battling issues of his own. After a remarkably successful rookie season, he was plagued by injuries the next three seasons.

Christiani was tired, sick of losing and ready to give up on a program that hadn't progressed in his five years at Penn. Most of all, he was frustrated.

Even though he was seriously considering quitting the team, he agreed to put his name on the ballot for captain.

The results that came back a few weeks later shocked Christiani.

Nearly all 120 players on the squad had voted him one of their two captains for the upcoming season.

He couldn't walk away, Christiani wouldn't let himself and Berndt had an impressive knack for convincing the senior to stick around.

Berndt and Christiani, among others, banded together to make some serious changes on Franklin Field. If they had anything to do with it, the Penn football team would snap its downward trend in the Fall of 1982.

"The first thing I did was I made up a list of rules," said Christiani, who now manages an investment firm in Avon, Conn. "We had to change our image."

Christiani's list forced the team to become more serious. They would no longer be the campus boozers or the slackers of the Ivy League. He envisioned instead a legitimate squad of collegiate athletes.

The players would be responsible for training over the summer and coming into preseason prepared.

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When the Quakers reconvened in Philadelphia the Fall of '82, there was a sense that something was different.

The team headed to the Poconos for a week of training in an environment where the players could gel and focus on football.

"We felt that we needed to get our team away and mold them a little bit," said Berndt, who is now retired. "It was a week of learning and growing together."

The Quakers built up their confidence and adopted what would become the season's philosophy -- leave it all on the field, try as hard as possible and rise to the challenge.

Then the rankings came out.

"I think it was Playboy that picked us to be the worst team in the country," Christiani said. "But we took it as a personal challenge."

Whatever their motivation, the Quakers came to the field on Sept. 18, 1982 against Dartmouth -- the reigning Ivy League champions -- completely reformed.

The Quakers, who hadn't won at the Big Green's home venue since 1974, announced their arrival with a decisive 21-0 victory.

"That game really started the whole thing off," Berndt said. "For us to beat them 21-0 and end such a huge losing streak -- that set the tone for the season."

That early momentum was solidified the next week when the Quakers edged powerhouse Lehigh, 20-17. The Red and Blue rode their winning streak for four games until they were defeated by Lafayette in mid-October.

As the wins continued to accumulate, the support on and off-campus multiplied.

"We had Sheldon Hackney -- Penn's President at the time -- behind us," Christiani said. "He believed that sports were agood way to bring the community together."

Midway through the season, the National Football League went on strike and so, for lack of anything better, the attention turned to Franklin Field. Merrill Reese, the Eagles' radio announcer, started calling Penn's games. The number of reporters in the post-game press conferences doubled.

"It was like everything came into place," Christiani said. "We just tried to keep it in perspective."

Ultimately, everything did fall into place for Penn. And it came in those waning, negligible seconds of the game against Harvard.

However, what was more emblematic of the progress that Penn had made was not the Shulman's field goal.

Instead, it was the first three quarters, in which Penn utterly dominated the Crimson.

Only 1:41 into the fourth quarter, Penn running back Steve Flacco made a one-yard run into the endzone to give the Quakers a 20-0 advantage.

Then, right before Berndt's eyes, it all started to dissolve.

A turnover led to the first Harvard touchdown of the game and then two more followed shortly thereafter.

Penn regained possession with 1:32 remaining. A valient effort between Penn quarterback Gary Vura and wide receiver Rich Syrek marched the Red and Blue down the field to the Harvard's 21-yard line.

And then Shulman walked onto the field, and Penn football would never be the same again.

Well, after Shulman went 1-for-2 on field goals in the final three seconds.

The Quakers finished the season 5-2 in the Ivy League and 7-3 overall. The drastic turnaround dumbfounded those who had doubted Penn.

"I know the coaches didn't think that it was a miracle season, as many have called it," Berndt said. "But for us to accomplish what we did was unbelievable."

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Although most Penn students don't even know of the '82 squad, the legacy that football team left behind is still a part of Franklin Field.

In a single season, the Penn football team was transformed from a winless embarassment to a dominating force.

From 1962-81, Penn football teams went 66-113-3, a dismal record to say the least.

However, from the 1982-2001, those numbers increased dramatically. In the past 19 seasons, not counting the current 2002 campaign, the Quakers have gone 127-68-2.

As head coach, Penn's Al Bagnoli alone has notched more victories, with 67, than all teams combined did from 1962-81.

But that striking difference was not just random chance, or blind luck. Those numbers increased because one courageous Penn squad was able to break through defeat and tally one of the most impressive winning seasons in Quakers' football history.

The winning tradition that so many Penn students are now lazily accostumed to was build in 1982, and has only grown more passionate in the past 20 years.

The 1982 football squad truly changed the direction of the sport on Penn's campus by making it a something to take pride in, not embarassed by.

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