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Coach Al Bagnoli didn't have much to smile about on Saturday, as his offense sputtered and his team fell to Lafayette at Franklin Field.

Al Bagnoli and Frank Tavani apparently had different professors for Football 101.

They've both certainly been around long enough to form their own viewpoints on the game, but the guys at the helms of the Penn and Lafayette squads certainly have curiously divergent opinions on what constitutes a "pretty" football game.

A contest that saw just 536 total yards on offense was, in Bagnoli's eyes, "not as pretty a game as obviously you'd like."

Coach Tavani, surely you concur, especially given that your offense averaged just 3.7 yards per play and didn't score a touchdown?

"I disagree with that, I think it was a great football game," he said. "You know, I'm old school. . That was a hard-fought game. You look at two defenses that just played their butts off. So I gotta disagree."

One man's clunker is another's defensive battle. I guess an 8-7 game decided with five seconds to go will color your perception that way.

But no matter how you slice it, there was absolutely no offensive firepower to speak of from either team save for an early Quakers scoring drive.

So it seems clear that Bagnoli wasn't just pouting - the game really was plain old coyote ugly. But it was especially ugly for a Penn team in dire need of a season-opening win. Despite Joe Sandberg's early rushing touchdown, the outlook for the Quakers was never too promising.

The omens started early on. First, newbie kicker Andrew Samson clanked a 28-yard field goal off of the left upright, sending shudders through a Penn student section that very vividly remembers last season.

And after Sandberg went down with a leg injury, there was a definite feeling that the 7-3 lead Penn was clinging to was not going to be safe, even with Lafayette's inability to advance the ball downfield.

Bagnoli knew it could have been bad. But not this bad.

"We knew that we were going to have to experience our first-game difficulties, and obviously we had more than our share," Bagnoli said. "I don't know how many turnovers [we had] but it felt like at least five."

And that is exactly what the Quakers didn't need in Week One. Perhaps the two salient issues for 2007 were the special teams unit's bounceback and junior quarterback Robert Irvin's capacity to lead Bagnoli's offense.

Judging by Saturday's performance, both answers are leaning towards the negative.

The general poor execution from the Penn offense this weekend, coupled with somewhat unorthodox play-calling could make Bagnoli a blame magnet. But the old ball coach shouldn't be on the hook for this one, at least for the latter.

By allowing Samson to attempt a 43-yarder in the second quarter, Bagnoli may have instilled some confidence in the kid. And the intentional safety, while questionable at first glance, was the right call - at that stage in the game I'll trade two points for 25 or 30 yards of field position every time.

But with a notch in the loss column and Sandberg's status up in the air, the Quakers certainly won't be using Game One as a blueprint for success.

Because no matter what Frank Tavani says, that one wasn't a pretty picture.

David Bernstein is a junior Economics major from Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is davidkb@sas.upenn.edu.

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