Bagnoli shoulders blame for bad play

For the first time in a decade, Al Bagnoli had to spend a Saturday evening as the head coach of a football team with a three-game losing streak.

Surveying the wreckage left by the wrong end of a 29-3 rout against Harvard, the 14-year veteran of the Penn sidelines tried to figure out how to stop the Quakers' rapid slide down the Ivy League standings.

At least initially, he could not.

"There's no magic potion anybody has, there's no magic calls, you don't suddenly wave a wand," he said. "We've just got to do a better job coaching them, they've got to do a better job executing, and we've all got to dig down a little bit deeper than what we're currently doing, because we've gotten in a hole."

That being the case, Bagnoli did not hesitate to put himself in charge of digging the team out.

"I expected our kids to play better than they did, and obviously when that doesn't happen it's my fault," Bagnoli said. "We've just got to look at some of the things we're doing and go from there."

Indeed, while he did not hesitate to critique the turnovers which have plagued his team over the last three weeks, Bagnoli looked back at the years his senior class has spent at Penn and declared that not all that much has changed.

"These are the same players that won eight games last year, and ten games the year before, and won ten games the year before that," he said. "The onus comes on me -- I've just got to do a better job of getting our kids ready, putting them in a better position to make plays, and just looking at everything we're doing from top to bottom."

If there is consolation to be taken, however, it is that the teams which have beaten Penn this year have raised their games while chasing the Ivy League title. As a result, the hegemony which Penn and Harvard have held in recent years has been shattered, with Brown and Princeton now standing above the Ancient Eight's traditional powers.

"It's a fragile league, and I think both sides have gotten everybody spoiled in the last five or six years -- that they think it's destiny that every year this happens," Bagnoli said, referring to the hype given to the Penn-Harvard game in recent years. "But I know how slim the margin is between winning and losing and I know once you lose a couple I know how fragile the confidence and the momentum and the execution [can be]."

Bagnoli added that because of the restrictive recruiting rules in Ivy League football, "to have a team or dual teams dominate in that league is very unusual -- it shouldn't, on paper, happen."

Harvard coach Tim Murphy agreed with his counterpart's assessment of the Ancient Eight landscape.

"I think the thing you've found out," Murphy said, "is that all of a sudden, there's so much parity in our league that even really good teams -- and really well-coached teams, like Penn -- can't necessarily guarantee that they're going to be in the top, top tier."

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