Conventional wisdom about the West Coast offense says that when it works, it works very well, but when it doesn't work, it can get quite ugly.
The main premise of this system, used by the Penn and Villanova football teams, is that you pass the ball to set up the run instead of the other way around.
It worked spectacularly a week ago, when the Quakers scored 61 points against the University of San Diego. This past weekend at Franklin Field, the home crowd saw what happens when things don't go according to plan.
Penn had 26 plays on first downs over the course of the game. Twelve were runs, including the safety awarded to Villanova when Penn quarterback Pat McDermott ran out of the back of the end zone. Eleven were passes, or 12 if you include the failed two-point conversion in the fourth quarter. Nine of those passes, including the two-point conversion, were incomplete.
McDermott was also officially sacked once on a first down play, and he took a knee on first down to end the second quarter.
By no means was the loss all McDermott's fault, and I do not mean to construe it as such. He clearly has a lot of talent, and his mobility is a great asset to this team.
In addition, Villanova's defense did an outstanding job of hassling McDermott all night long, and also did well covering Quakers receiver Dan Castles. I highly doubt this will be the case during Ivy League play, where the skill level of the other seven teams doesn't come close to matching that of the No. 11 Wildcats.
I cannot help but wonder, though, if this game would have turned out differently had Penn run the ball more in the first half.
You can make the argument that it wouldn't have mattered, because Villanova held Sam Mathews to a measly 44 yards on 13 carries during the game. All but 10 of those yards came in the first half, and it is a lot harder to emphasize the run when you are down by 16 points and the clock is ticking away.
But many of Mathews' runs were to the outside, instead of up the middle, making it easier for the Wildcats' defensive backs and linebackers to come up and tackle him. When Mathews did run straight ahead, his gains were reasonable at the very least.
Villanova, on the other hand, had the luxury of leading the entire game, and pounded the ball at Penn's defensive line for much of the second half. Terry Butler, the Wildcats' feature back, gained 63 of his 74 rushing yards after halftime.
In the first half, Penn's run defense was impressively stingy, allowing a combined 37 yards rushing from Butler, Martin Gibson and Phil DiGiacomo. But as what happens to football teams all over the nation, a heavy dose of running can get to be too much at some point. Defenses get tired of it, and as the game drags on, a lapse here or there can make a big difference.
Villanova persisted with its running game throughout the night, and at the final whistle had accrued 73 net rushing yards. By contrast, Penn had only one net rushing yard in the second half, taking the total for the game from 75 to 76 yards.
Penn coach Al Bagnoli defended his play-calling by arguing that "the time to throw against these guys is actually on first down, before they put all their defensive backs in the game and get 105 different blitzes."
"They become really tough to protect against once they get you in their nickel package," he said. "They are a lot like us -- they'll blitz you, God knows, from every different and conceivable angle, and it becomes real tough on the quarterback and the offensive line."
That may well be the case, and I would certainly concede that Bagnoli knows more about reading defenses and planning against them than I do. But when football games are decided by such small margins as this one was, it is only natural to wonder what little things here and there could have been done differently.
"Who knows what would have happened if we had scored in the first half," Bagnoli said.
I am sure he was not the only person who said that, or something similar, over the course of this weekend.
The consolation is that this game doesn't count toward the Ivy League title standings. Nor is there a Big 5-esque round-robin tournament for football that grasps this city's attention the way college basketball does.
It is a loss to a local rival, though, and Penn's first home loss in five years. For a lot of the students in the crowd of 16,572 -- another disappointing statistic -- this probably is not what they anticipated seeing. Certainly, for those who were enjoying their first Penn football game, it was not the best way to start the year.
There is plenty of time for things to get better, and there is every reason to think that they will next week against Dartmouth. But first impressions are often the most important, and this morning they still taste a bit sour.
Jonathan Tannenwald is a junior Urban Studies major from Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is jtannenw@sas.upenn.edu.
