For two straight weeks, seriously motivated teams have gone into games against Penn and jumped out to early leads, weathered storms and put the Quakers away.
Meanwhile, Penn has looked lost, out of rhythm and lackadaisical.
And just like that, the dream of a perfect Ivy League season gave way to the possibility of not even finishing in the top half of the standings.
Saturday's 30-13 loss to Princeton proves the sobering truth -- at least for Penn fans -- that the loss to Brown last week was not a fluke.
"I got to look at everything from top to bottom," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said, rightfully taking the blame for the slow starts and uninspired play that have characterized the last two weeks.
"Right now I think we are really lacking some type of identity," added the coach, who is now 0-for-2 in getting his 100th win as Penn head coach.
These are pretty striking comments considering what types of things were being said two weeks ago:
Things like "For the first three quarters it was about as well as we have played from top to bottom in a long time," after the Yale game, and "Our kids were on a mission," after the Columbia game.
Earlier in the year, Penn beat up on teams it should have beaten up on, and lost a heartbreaker to Villanova that in hindsight, was very telling.
Conversely, last year's team came from behind to beat Bucknell, Brown, Princeton and Cornell. They nearly did the same with Villanova, and won relatively tight games against Columbia and Yale.
The 2005 Quakers, on the other hand, have not won a single game in which they have trailed.
Bagnoli correctly pointed out that last year's comebacks were all from more reasonable deficits than those that Penn found itself in the last two weeks.
But at the same time, last year's team -- other than the blowout loss to Harvard -- did not let itself get down by 14 or 21 points.
After Kyle Ambrogi's suicide almost a month ago, the Quakers played angry and blew out Columbia and Yale.
However, at the press conference in New York, senior linebacker Ric San Doval revealed an interesting insight into how Penn would play the rest of the year.
He said that playing in Ambrogi's memory and honor would be the single biggest motivation the rest of the season.
The Quakers' identity changed that week, and it absolutely should have. Penn went from a team dedicated to avenging one loss last year and winning the Ivy League title to winning each game for Kyle Ambrogi.
But against good teams like Brown and Princeton, that motivation may not be good enough to win.
Suddenly, they got behind, and anger and emotion were not enough to carry them through the game.
When they got behind, the Quakers just seemed unsure of how to proceed from there.
Penn found another gear for the Columbia game. But their focus had been taken off of football. If they want to get back to winning games, they may need to refocus again.
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.
