Poison ivy

Lafayette tore through the Patriot League last season, going 5-1 and making the I-AA playoffs and yet did not finish the season with a winning record.

How is that? The Ivy League happened.

The Leopards played against the top four teams in the Ivies in succession -- Penn, at Princeton, Yale, at Harvard -- and didn't win one game. And it's not as if Lafayette is a bad team -- the currently No. 25 Leopards were ranked last year before the 21-11 loss to the Quakers, 22 to be exact.

"Obviously we're playing the best of what the Ivy has to offer," Lafayette coach Frank Tavani said. "And they're good football teams, we're not embarrassed ... we were playing the four teams vying for a piece of the championship.

"Three of them we had our chances and just came up short, and against Harvard I think we kind of just quit out there, and I've probably never been more infuriated than that effort. They're flat out good football teams and we just haven't found a way to win."

Tavani is confident in his team's abilities, but knows that if it wants to end its five-game losing streak against Ivy League teams it must improve.

"We'll certainly have to play better than the first two games even though we're sitting here at 2-0, they're nowhere near the challenge or the caliber a team that we know Penn is," Tavani said. "We're certainly going to play better offensively than we did against Georgetown. We didn't get a consistent run game going and that's always a big part of our package."

Lafayette has started its 2007 season with a 49-10 win over Marist and a 28-7 victory against Georgetown.