EASTON, Pa. - Penn football coach Al Bagnoli is no stranger to special-teams disasters: His team fell victim to several of them last year.
He must have felt an ironic satisfaction, then, to see his team force two of those miscues in key situations on Saturday.
With Penn leading 14-3 at the beginning of the second half, Lafayette drove 60 yards to the Penn 5.
After two runs for zero yards and an incomplete pass, Lafayette's Rick Ziska lined up for a 22-yard field goal that would bring the Leopards within a possession of tying the game.
However, as the ball was snapped, senior captain Scotty Williams darted around Lafayette's blockers and just got his fingertips to the ball. Williams's touch was just heavy enough to disturb the flight of the ball and send it wide left.
"Definitely it was a good push," Williams said. "I was just trying to run up there and get a little piece of it."
With the outcome of the game nearly decided, Penn blocked another field goal, more authoritatively this time. Lafayette was down 21-11 with less than two minutes to go when Ziska lined up for another try, this time from 27 yards out.
There was no doubt about this one: Senior J.J. Stanton led a stampede of several Quakers into the backfield, sealing the game.
"Our wing broke down on us the first time, and the second time they just purged right through," Lafayette coach Frank Tavani concluded.
Penn ended up winning by more than a couple of field goals, but the blocks had a real impact on the game.
If the Leopards had hit the first field goal to make it 14-6, their next touchdown could have made it 14-14.
Then, perhaps, Lafayette would not have attempted the bizarre fake punt that gave Penn excellent field position and that led to Joe Sandberg's decisive touchdown run.
"I'm certainly really not pleased with our field-goal unit," Tavani said. "We needed those to field goals badly, and there's just no excuse for that.
"That is probably as big an aggravation as I'm going to deal with looking at the film."
Contrast those fruitless trips to the red zone with Penn's output: a perfect two touchdowns in two opportunities.
"That's basically the key to the game," Bagnoli said. "We got in the red zone - we scored touchdowns. They got in the red zone; they hit a field goal; they got a field goal blocked.
"There's not a hell of a lot separating the two teams."
The stats support Bagnoli's assertion. Lafayette had 416 total yards, compared to 369 for Penn. The Leopards held the ball for 31:23, a few minutes more than Penn's 28:37.
And if the Quakers are to reclaim the Ivy League title, they may find themselves needing to win a few more games in which there isn't a hell of a lot between them and their opponents.
