You probably did not come to Penn for the football. That's understandable. After all, I've been told we have a few good academic programs here and that is the name of the game.
But while you are here, it would certainly be worth your while to take part in one of our university's great traditions: Ivy League football.
And now is as good a time as any to watch the Quakers. Not only is Penn in the thick of another Ivy title run, but it is riding an 18-game league win streak, something no other team has done in the 50-year history of the Ancient Eight. But where is the excitement in Philadelphia?
Last weekend in Connecticut it was easy to see how much more football is valued at a school like Yale. As the .500 Elis took on Penn, a crowd of 17,737 looked on. Students sit together in groups from their residential colleges bearing their respective flags.
They have to take a bus from the central campus to the Yale Bowl, which is some distance from downtown New Haven, Conn. But they show up.
Their team has been eliminated from Ivy title contention. But they show up.
Their team has not been as competitive as Penn or Harvard of late, and has only won the Ancient Eight title once in the last 15 years. But they show up.
Yale led all of Division I-AA in attendance last season, thanks in large part to the 55,000 who took in the Harvard-Yale game. While that one game inflated the average attendance dramatically, the other four games on the home slate were also better attended than those here at Franklin Field. That's one thing a traditional rivalry will do for a program.
Yale has done a number of things to preserve the traditional college football atmosphere, and Penn should take note.
No canned music: the band -- the Yale Precision Marching Band -- is the only non-football entertainment at the Yale Bowl, and that is the way college football is meant to be.
No cheesy video highlights: there is a right and wrong way to use a video screen, and showing off one's adeptness with lightning bolt effects mixed with snippets from last year's Penn-Princeton game is not it.
Fans should participate: Penn fans at the Palestra are a large part of what makes basketball games exciting, but the experience at Franklin Field is quite different. While it is interesting to listen to the people sitting in the row behind you try to figure out the game, the question, "Are we the guys in blue?" is something I never want to hear again.
Fans should stay until the end: it has been tempting in the past to hit the exits immediately after throwing your toast after the third quarter, when the Quakers have a commanding lead. Those days of Pac-10-like blowouts, however, are gone. Yale fans last week stayed until the final snap, even as Penn ran out the clock with a 10-point lead.
And while Yale has maintained the traditional atmosphere, it also maintains part of Ivy League football allure simply because of the history that comes with the program.
The tradition and the history, however, can only be carried on through the fans. And in that department, Penn falls short.
Many other much less storied I-AA programs across the country have much greater followings than Penn does. Delaware and Montana are two of the top programs each season; they have each recently won national championships. They routinely sell out games, and fans travel great distances to see them.
Tickets are hard to come by for regular season games at these schools, which carry much less weight than the playoff contests. By contrast, every Ivy League game is important, since the Ancient Eight title -- the highest achievement any team can hope for, since playoffs are off limits --is often out of reach with just one loss.
At Montana, the 23,000-seat Washington-Grizzly Stadium is packed every Saturday, and has been described by visiting teams as one of the toughest places to play because of the crowds. Students there do not need to be coerced into attending games, rather they have to fight for the opportunity to buy tickets.
Griz fans also hit the road to see their team. Last season, the team opened the season at Maine. Half of the fans in attendance, more than 6,000, made the trip from Montana to Bangor just for the game.
That is the kind of following teams get when football becomes the thing to do on Saturdays, rather than simply something to occupy the time. The tradition and the success are worth taking part in.
And playing for a national championship doesn't hurt.
Jeff Shafer is a junior Marketing and Management concentrator from Columbia Falls, Mont., and sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jshafer@wharton.upenn.edu.
