Parisa Bastani: Semester-end malaise should be Penn's wake-up call

The holidays are right around the corner, and the Penn basketball team certainly looked like it started the winter vacation early in its loss to Fordham on Saturday.

Perhaps the Quakers have been pulling too many all-nighters as the semester winds down, but the sharp Rams squad left no room for error and easily exploited Penn's lackadaisical play.

"I thought we lacked focus and energy, and it would be bad enough if we just lacked one, but we lacked both." Penn coach Glen Miller said. "We played like we were in the middle of exams."

The loss is alarming for several reasons, one of them being that this is the second straight year that Penn has fallen to Fordham - and in a remarkably similar fashion.

This win would have been critical to the Quakers' confidence going into their Ivy League schedule, as their next four games before conference play feature marquee opponents Seton Hall and North Carolina.

But how can the team expect to take a power-conference foe by surprise if it can't beat a Fordham team that it knew would present plenty of problems?

The Quakers' lack of spunk permeated the team's ability on both ends of the court, and should serve as a wake-up call.

At least one of the three seniors needs to step up and demand the ball, an initiative that neither Ibrahim Jaaber, nor Mark Zoller nor Stephen Danley undertook to jump-start the Quakers once they got sluggish in the second half.

"The leadership just wasn't there, and that's something I guess we have to work on with us three seniors," Zoller said. "We try to come out mentally focused, but I guess some days you have it, some days you don't."

Brian Grandieri would usually pick up the slack, but on Saturday the junior couldn't come up with the clutch play.

And while a win over Fordham was not a foregone conclusion, the reality is that the Rams were nowhere near the most threatening of Penn's non-conference opponents.

So while 'tis the season of study sessions and coffee-binging, these student-athletes are going to have to prove they can handle the pressures of a tough non-conference and exam schedule.

Maybe getting the semester over with will boost the Quakers' spirits before they host the well-equipped Illinois-Chicago team on the first day of winter break.

The team can at least try to end on a high note before the holidays, and what better present could they ask for than successful outings against formidable opponents after what Miller lamented as the team's "worst performance of the year."

'Tis the season for studying, coffee, and just maybe, redemption.

Parisa Bastani is a junior Biological Basis of Behavior major from Basking Ridge, N.J. Her e-mail address is pbastani@sas.upenn.edu.

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