Al Bagnoli said Saturday that he doesn't operate an NFL franchise, so he cannot solve his kicking woes by just cutting the ineffective junior Derek Zoch and signing a free agent. That much is true, but I also think that if Al Bagnoli coached an NFL team, he might not be coaching it much longer.
I don't believe in firing coaches just because they've been in one place for a long time, as Bagnoli has been at Penn since 1992. But at the same time, coaches should not earn a lifetime contract by winning a few league titles, as Bagnoli has as well.
Right now, Penn's football team is in bad shape. After an overtime loss Saturday, which had almost an identical ending to the previous week's loss to Yale, Penn is sitting at 2-2 in the Ivy League and 4-3 overall.
Even if the Quakers win out - which based on who Penn is playing doesn't look very likely - they will have 10 losses in three years and seven Ivy defeats. The 20-10 record would mark Penn's worst three-year stretch since 1998-2000, when Penn still won two Ivy titles. The seven conference losses is the worst three-year run in Bagnoli's tenure, excluding the tainted 1997 season, in which Penn forfeited five games after a player was deemed ineligible.
Three years ago, Penn was 10-0 and ran away with the Ivy League championship. The following year, the Quakers were undefeated in conference play until they lost the next-to-last game of the year to eventual champ Harvard, which routed Penn 31-10 at Franklin Field.
After that season, Bagnoli said that he was actually proud of how well his team did after losing a number of players from the great 2003 team to graduation.
In 2005, Penn started well, but lost its last four games, likely affected deeply by the suicide of then-senior running back Kyle Ambrogi in October.
This year's team does not seem as if it will be much of an improvement, and, if so, it will be three straight years without an Ivy League title in Philadelphia. That would tie for the longest losing streak in Bagnoli's career, although the previous three-year stretch included that weird 1997 season.
At the same time, the atmosphere around the football team continues to get worse. Attendance has been plummeting - this year's homecoming crowd of 11,177 was barely 50 percent of last year's.
The homecoming festivities on Locust Walk before the game seemed to be well attended, but apparently there was little effort made to get people to Franklin Field by the noon kickoff. And, as usual, the crowd thinned out after the third-quarter toast throwing, despite the fact that the outcome of the game was far from decided.
I definitely do not believe in making drastic changes to a team because of three years without a title, even as a Yankees fan. But, right now, the Penn football program is going in the wrong direction.
Bagnoli blamed himself for the loss Saturday, not wanting to put any responsibility on his players. He is right to blame himself for this reason: They're his players that he brought in, and the Quakers just do not seem to have enough dynamic players to get the job done. If he can't motivate or train them to be able to make even a few of the many plays Penn couldn't make on Saturday or the week before, maybe he needs to take a look at who he recruits.
On media day before this season, Bagnoli said that he felt bad for his seniors last year because they wouldn't be back for another year, but that he was pretty sure he wasn't going to get fired, so he didn't feel bad for himself.
If Bagnoli doesn't turn the Quakers ship around soon, maybe next year he won't be making that type of remark.
Whether or not a coaching change is the answer, something needs to change to put the Quakers back at the top of the Ivy League.
Josh Hirsch is a senior urban studies major from Roslyn, N.Y., and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is jjhirsch@sas.upenn.edu.
