It certainly looked good on Saturday. Penn, in a wild downpour, completely dominated Bucknell in every stage of the game, improving its record to 3-1.
Elsewhere, Harvard was beaten soundly for the second straight game, this time on the road at Cornell. Princeton lost in an unimpressive performance at home to Colgate. Yale barely put points on the board against an anemic Dartmouth team. Columbia's offense sputtered again, showing that its 2-0 start was probably a mirage.
Brown won big for the second week in a row, but the Bears' collapse against Harvard two weeks ago still rings fresh.
The Ivy League is there for the taking, and as Penn gets into the six-game stretch against the Ivies, it has a great chance to win the league crown.
However, the Quakers have not exactly played like the 2003 team that went undefeated and rolled in basically every game. In their three wins, all by large margins, there were plenty of missed opportunities and mistakes.
Against Duquesne, Pat McDermott played far from his best game, and the Quakers seemed to rely on big plays in order to win by as much as it did.
In the loss to Villanova, Penn led by as much as 24-7 but could not close out the Wildcats.
In Hanover, N.H., the Quakers could not score touchdowns on four of its six red-zone chances, settling for Derek Zoch field goals instead. And while Zoch has been much more reliable this year than he or any other Penn kicker was last year, he did miss a 32-yarder against Villanova and an extra point against Bucknell.
And despite the huge victory margin against the Bison, Penn still was not running on all cylinders Saturday.
McDermott completed less than half his passes, and threw a terrible interception deep in Quakers' territory.
Penn struggled to run the ball, with only 82 yards, and fumbled it five times, but was able to recover all of them.
Maybe some of the struggles had to do with the terrible weather, and the slippery conditions definitely made it hard to hold on to the ball.
It also did not hurt that Bucknell's offense was decimated before this season by graduation and during the season by injury.
"We wouldn't have beaten them," even if Bucknell did not have the injuries and had tried to totally change its offense around, a despondent Bison coach Tim Landis said after the game.
But after the way that Penn's defense played, it might have been nice to see the offense clicking as well as the defense did.
That's why, despite the fact that the Quakers have won by these large margins, they cannot yet be viewed as the clear-cut favorite.
Someone needs to step up and take control in the conference.
Yale, Princeton and Penn are the three teams in front of the pack, but this year seems to be wide open.
"It's hard to stay on top in this league," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said.
Luckily for him, this year he's not starting from the top.
The door is open for the Quakers, they just need to walk through it.
Josh Hirsch is a junior Urban Studies major from Roslyn, N.Y., and is senior sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jjhirsch@sas.upenn.edu.
