Over the last few days, a bunch of people have mentioned to me how much they are looking forward to this coming basketball season.
For most of them, though, their reasons for optimism had nothing to do with what will actually happen in the Palestra.
Instead, they were focused on basketball because they had lost interest in football.
It's certainly not fun to root for a football team on a three-game losing streak -- and if you're an Eagles fan as well, the last few weeks have been even worse.
Nonetheless, Penn fans are downright spoiled in comparison to those in the rest of the Philadelphia region.
I did some research yesterday on the records of all of Philly's major professional and collegiate teams over the last 10 years -- which, coincidentally, is about how long it's been since the Quakers last lost three straight on the gridiron.
Compared to the city's four major professional teams -- the Eagles, Flyers, 76ers and Phillies -- the minor-league Phantoms ice hockey team, the six Division I basketball teams and the three Division I-A or I-AA football teams in the area, Penn football easily has the highest winning percentage since 1996.
Officially, Al Bagnoli's men have won 68.4 percent of their games in that time. Unofficially, it's 74.7 percent, but Penn had to forfeit five wins in 1997 due to the use of a player who was later declared ineligible.
Were it not for those forfeitures, the Quakers would have been the only football team in the city to have finished every season with a .500 or better record.
There's no question that a big reason for those gaudy numbers is the lack of quality opponents in Ivy League football. Many of the nonconference games that Penn has played have also been against clearly worse teams, but there is still at least one game each year against a regional powerhouse like Lehigh or Villanova.
And a truly disturbing number of the fans who do come -- often arriving late -- end up leaving early -- particularly at the end of the third quarter, as if to say that they came to attend a toast-throwing contest instead of a football game.
Unfortunately, despite the Athletic Department's marketing efforts, that problem has yet to be overcome.
It is even harder to get people to come to Franklin Field on Saturday afternoons who don't go to Penn. I would like to think, though, that the Penn football team's dominance in recent years would be the perfect elixir for this city which so deeply yearns for a winner to cheer on.
Indeed, the Penn football team has achieved the kind of success that the teams down on South Broad Street could only dream of.
But the local college teams have not had Penn's success either.
Saint Joseph's basketball team has a 64.5 percent winning percentage in the last 10 years, Temple 62.6, Villanova 58.9, Drexel 57.8 and La Salle 43.3.
On the gridiron, Villanova's football team leads the other Philadelphia schools at 62.7 percent, while Temple has only won 29 percent of its football games in the last decade.
Yes, the Penn men's basketball team begins its season against Siena on Monday night.
But before that, an impressively decorated Quakers senior class will run out of the Franklin Field tunnel on Saturday for the last time. During their four years in Red and Blue, they have won two Ivy League championships, played a role in the longest winning streak in Ivy League history and lost only three times on their home turf.
Those accomplishments should not be taken for granted, and the men who made them happen deserve a better send-off than the one that seems to await them from their fellow students.
Jonathan Tannenwald is a senior Urban Studies major from Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is jtannenw@sas.upenn.edu.
