Andrew Scurria: When is a fluke not a fluke?

Given that Penn lost in Connecticut last year on a field goal that drifted six inches too far to the right, it would have been a superbly ironic justice if Yale's botched snap in the second overtime on Saturday had ended things for The Team That McLeod Built.

It would have been a fitting conclusion if the player most responsible for the Bulldogs' rise from the ashes could do nothing to help them.

It would have made sense that the team with more to lose - and it was Penn, even though Yale came into the game 5-0 for the first time since 1981 - finally got the break it needed.

Instead, the Quakers are all but out of the title race three games into the conference season.

That Penn did just about everything right, and still came up short, calls the most basic assumptions into question.

Chief among them: that an era that has seen six Ivy titles in 13 years should be impervious to scrutiny.

Maybe the fact that Yale got that kick off was what made sense.

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It's hard to draw conclusions about a program based off a game where three overtimes were almost too few to decide things.

But listening to Yale coach Jack Siedlecki - before and after the game - the result seemed almost predictable.

When he spoke with the New Haven Register about his team's resurgence, he kept coming back to 2005, when Yale endured yet another crushing loss at Franklin Field. Its dream season ruined and its athletes in tears, Siedlecki vowed that it wouldn't happen again.

So the team regrouped the next offseason and found that toughness in the weight room - not just on the field - can turn losses into wins.

Siedlecki talked about senior Brandt Hollander, who looms larger among his teammates than he ever does in the box score.

Now, he bench-presses 450 pounds.

"That does something for him mentally that I couldn't give him if I pounded into his head all day how hard he has to play and how tough he has to be," Siedlecki said.

Viewed in this light, was Saturday's loss really another fluke, as we've become accustomed to calling all of them since 2005, another one Penn deserved to win but didn't? Or was it one team doing what teams do - finding ways to win - while another hasn't found out how?

At what point does calling it a fluke against a better team obscure what it is - a loss?

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I don't envy the difficult choices facing the highest of the high in the Penn Athletic Department as they complete their annual football season reviews in the near future.

They must weigh the past against the present, and the present against the future, all the while with a chorus of nostalgics who think that a winning tradition means that nothing should ever change - especially the leadership up top.

Whether a change in leadership or a change in how the leadership leads is the answer will depend on a lot of things, including the remaining four games this year.

The answer is not obvious - just ask Siedlecki, who after losing his fifth-straight game to Harvard two years ago has his detractors convinced that the rough times were just growing pains.

And under what circumstances could casting aside one of the most successful eras in Penn history ever make sense?

But as Steve Bilsky and Co. try to make sense of a muddied picture of Penn's football program, they had better listen to their own instincts and their own judgements when they decide just how many losses they want to excuse.

Andrew Scurria is a junior Political Science major from Wilmington, Del., and is Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is scurria@sas.upenn.edu.

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