The story of Saturday's football game was, yet again, the Penn defense. The Quakers came into the game allowing just 49.0 yards per game, good for tops in division I-AA, and conceded just 50 against the Elis.
What's scary is the fact that the Red and Blue could have excelled without Sam Mathews, Joe Sandberg, and even backup quarterback Bryan Walker on Saturday. All they needed on offense was kicker Derek Zoch's 37-yard field goal.
Yale's final scoring and yardage totals present an inaccurate picture of what took place on a soggy Franklin Field. Penn's defense in the fourth quarter was not the starting squad that had thoroughly dominated the Elis until that point, but was rather the backup squad. The visitors scored all 21 of their points and accrued most of their yardage on a Penn team that had already called it a day, content to run out the clock with little risk of significant injury and let the Elis salvage some pride at the same time.
The Quakers held Yale to a dismal negative-16 yards rushing, 35 yards passing, and just two first downs in the first three quarters, for a total of 19 yards of offense. If coach Al Bagnoli had not given the starters the last quarter off, the Bulldogs most likely would not have reached the end zone.
"When we play, we go out as a group," said Ric San Doval, a team captain and the rock of the Red and Blue defense at linebacker. "As far as rushing goes, it's seven guys up front, and you really can't pay too much attention to one guy because there is a swarm of other guys that are going to get in there and make tackles. We distribute the tackles pretty well across the front seven. It's something that we take pride in, and it's something that we really wanted to change coming into the season."
Yale came into this weekend running the ball at a fairly effective clip of 116 yards per game, led by their impressive freshman tailback, Mike McLeod. The Elis knew what the Quakers had done to lesser Ivy opponents on the defensive side of the ball, but their game plan was to establish a steady ground game.
"We thought we were going to run the ball," Yale coach Jack Siedlecki said. "It was our game plan: we thought we had to run the ball to be effective, and we wanted to throw off of some of that two tight end stuff. We didn't execute it, they dominated us up front, and we could not run our offense."
The stifling run defense is no new fixture in Penn football. The Quakers finished both the 2001 and 2002 seasons in the same position as they are now -- ranked first in the country in rushing defense. It's something Bagnoli and defensive coordinator, Ray Priore, have preached all along.
"We try to use somewhat of a baseball analogy," Bagnoli said. "I think you've got to be really strong in the middle ... We're pretty strong up the middle, so I think when you have that scenario, you're able to do some things. When our kids play hard, we're pretty physical, we have fairly good speed, and today I think it was a combination of all those things."
San Doval knows the coaching staff has its defensive personnel with their heads in the right place.
"Hats off to the defensive coaching staff," he said. "They do a great job, week to week, just really scheming."
It's interesting that the backbone of the Red and Blue this year should be its rushing defense, since the strength of its main Ivy adversaries is moving the ball on the ground. While Yale has a solid rushing game, Brown and Harvard both make their living on the ground. The Bears and Crimson possess the top two rushers in the league, respectively, in Nick Hartigan (157.67 ypg) and Clifton Dawson (123.83 ypg).
If the Penn defense can extend its current string of domination to those matchups, the league title is as good as won. The question is, will the best running teams in the Ancient Eight do what the others could not, and run all over the Quakers' physical front seven? Bagnoli is not much of a prognosticator, at least not for now.
"We'll worry about Brown, and we'll worry about that situation when the time comes," he said.
When it does come time to do so, the Red and Blue defense will yet again find itself in the spotlight. It's been there all season.
"We knew we had something special coming into this season, it was a matter of just harnessing it all together and going there and playing as a unit," San Doval said.
