Get lifted

When a squad loses the way the Penn football team did against Dartmouth, keeping morale up is a tough task.

After the four Ivy losses by eight points last year, the painful start to the 2007 season -- an 8-7 loss, a seven-interception game and a contest that saw six failed fourth down conversions -- isn't such a new thing for Al Bagnoli and the Penn coaching staff.

"It's always tough when you lose, it's always tough when you lose a close game and it's always tough when you lose a league game," Bagnoli said.

It's especially hard when you lose against Dartmouth, which hadn't beaten Penn since Kurt Warner was playing in the Arena Football League.

"Our spirits aren't where they should be, but I think we learned a valuable lesson," Bagnoli said. "To a limited extent, some of our kids kind of looked past them, and kind of take things for granted and obviously you can't do that. We're just not that level team where we can look past anybody."

As a result, Bagnoli's hoping that later in the week he'll see a much more inspired club. Once a team loses badly, that next week can make or break the next few -- it can mean they get fired up for revenge, or dwell on the loss too much, and crumble.

Tuesday was more of a mental walkthrough, but practices later in the week should be a better barometer for the mood his team is at.

"It's a fairly somber group, and you have to be careful," Bagnoli said. "You have no control over what happened last week, the one thing you have to look at is what's coming up. We practiced okay [Tuesday], so it's not a disaster -- but it's a concern"