Ivy Football teleconference quotes

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Today's Ivy Football teleconference found a lot of kind words passed Penn's way after it was announced the Quakers had been selected to finish first in the league for the 2013 season.

Check out what Penn coach Al Bagnoli and Harvard coach Tim Murphy said in-depth and in full about their respective teams' 2013 outlook, as well as what high praise Columbia coach Pete Mangurian reserved for Penn fifth-year senior QB Billy Ragone.

Al Bagnoli: We’re cautiously optimistic. We think we have enough in place to be a competitive football team. We have our share of question marks. We’ve had some injuries coming from last year that need to be overcome, so even with our returning players, we have to deal with that. And we have some young guys that we’re going to have to integrate into prominent roles. Like everybody else, we’re cautiously optimistic. We thought we had a very good offseason. We had some momentum from last season carry over and we’re excited to get going. We certainly had our fair share of issues that we’re going to have to confront and address in a positive manner.

(on Penn being projected to finish No. 1 in the league)    I think it’s normal for a defending champion, out of courtesy, to be picked number one. I think everybody’s echoing the same things, that this is going to be as competitive of a league as we’ve seen. We could realistically have multiple teams with real opportunities to win the championship, so I don’t put a tremendous amount of credence, to be honest with you. I like it better when we’re picked second or third more than when we’re picked first. I understand why we were picked first. But certainly, we’re wide open within the league. Multiple teams can all claim the ability to win the championship.

(on the return of Billy Ragone)    I think we’re fortunate [to have him back]. Any time you have fifth-year kids, they have the perspective and the maturity. And obviously he’s been such a key component of our success, that’s a great foundation to start with. Now he still has to overcome probably as much psychological trauma off of that ankle injury, but he seems to have progressed really well in the offseason with his recovery, and I think he’s looking forward to getting out on the field and getting knocked around. I think when you have an established quarterback at any level, it gives you confidence that you can learn your offense. We also have Ryan Becker back, who missed all of last year, so we actually have two kids that will give us some maturity and game experience and some pretty good depth at that position.

Ideally you want a fifth-year guy and you want him healthy. Short of that, it’s nice to have a fifth-year guy with the experiences and the leadership quality and the game awareness that Billy’s had. We know we’re going to have to take things slow, we know we’re going to have to bring him back at a different pace than we normally would considering the injury that he had. But we also think ultimately that he’s going to be fine and that we really need to do a good job preseason and in those early games of getting him comfortable, having confidence that that ankle can withstand the rigors of football and then just getting him integrated back on offense.

(on Penn's confidence level for 2013 based off of the many close games Penn won a year ago) Hopefully we have confidence and belief that what we do works. That’s always a great starting point. But I think we’ve been in an awful lot of close games and have the confidence level that we can win close games, win it in the last drive, win it in the last two minutes. And I think we leave with a little bit of momentum coming from that kind of season. Hopefully that carried over into the offseason and into spring football. So we’re approaching it with a little bit of wind behind us but we’re also approaching it in that it’s very difficult to repeat in this league. It doesn’t happen very often in that you take everybody’s best shot and that you have to work even harder than what we worked last year from both a coaching front and a player front to achieve the same results you did last year. So we certainly have challenges in front of us in how we can navigate the psychological and physical side of it will determine our fate.

(on the loss of defensive linemen Brandon Copeland, C.J. Mooney and Taylor Brown) Obviously we had a combination of some senior leadership with those three, great individual player with Brandon Copeland. So obviously that’s going to be an area of concern for us. The good news is we have good, young, talented kids that played a little bit last year, weren’t household names but we’re going to have to do a good of job of creating them because we have far less question marks on the second and third level. We have some pretty dynamic players returning in the linebacking corps and secondary so for us, it’s going to be our ability to integrate some young, talented kids and bring them up to speed, get them ready for Ivy League play by the time we hit Dartmouth.

(on the return of fifth-year senior running back Brandon Colavita) We’re very fortunate this year with having a fair amount of fifth-year kids coming back. Obviously having Colavita back for a fifth year will certainly help our running game. He’s been a second-team all-league performer and he gives you a tough physical presence. I think he’s normally a very good tackle-to-tackle runner, very durable, competitive and tough. So I think that would be a pretty good starting point for us in our run game. Ryan gives us tremendous confidence that we don’t have to rush Billy Ragone back. We can take our time with Billy, we can be sensitive to the injury. We can kind of dictate our own time frame of when to use Billy and when not to use Billy. And we feel very comfortable that Ryan can run the offense, has been productive in the past and will give us a very seasoned approach so we don’t have to change the offense a whole heck of a lot.

[Billy’s] cleared, he’s been doing everything. I don’t think it’s as much physical. I just think with any injury, whether you’re talking about ankle, you’re talking about a knee or you’re talking about a shoulder, there’s a little bit of a psychological component that people have to overcome. Billy’s really a tough kid, and I think that’s one of the underrated things about him that people just don’t recognize. He’s very, very tough, a physical kid. He’ll be fine. We just have to be smart with him. I know he’ll want to do everything 100 percent right away, but we anticipate him being 100 percent physically and we’re working on the psychological part of it as we go through, [to] make sure he’s 100 percent psychologically as well.

Tim Murphy:

It’s gonna be an interesting year for Harvard football. We feel like we have the potential to be a very solid football team, but we have quite a few question marks on offense. On one hand, we had probably the most explosive offense we’ve ever had here, the highest-scoring offense in Ivy League history, but lose five unbelievable players who are practically irreplaceable. Defensively, we lost some depth but we have some quality leadership experience coming back at all three levels. We have an outstanding kicking specialist coming back in David Mothander. This is a team where there’s still a lot of question marks we have to answer.

We’ve had an unbelievable run with quarterbacks and I think we’ve done a pretty solid job of evaluating, recruiting and developing quarterbacks, right back to [Neil] Rose, [Ryan] Fitzpatrick, Chris Pizzotti, Collier [Winters]. But Colton’s a special player, and he wasn’t a special player in terms of mechanics, he wasn’t a special player, you know, a pro type of athlete. But he was one of the best at putting the ball where no one could catch it but our guy, great improvisational skills, tremendous leader and tremendous decision-maker. Replacing him is going to be very challenging. If you look around the league, we’re probably the only team in the league that has that question mark at quarterback. And of course, he had a great supporting cast. He had a tremendous running back in Treavor Scales, the best h-back we’ve ever had and Kyle Juszczyk, an outstanding offensive line with senior all-Ivy guys like John Collins and Jack Holuba.

But those guys have availability. The question is, do they have the improvisational skills, do they have the leadership skills, are they decision-makers. That’s to be determined. We do know they have ability, have the things to execute our system, but the quarterback question never gets answered until you really get in the fire.

I look at [the quarterback competition] as Conner Hempel number one, and Mike Pruneau a very close number two for the simple reason that Mike wasn’t quite full go in the spring so he got second-team reps, didn’t have any live reps. So Conner’s number one, Mike’s number two. They’re both junior years of eligibility. They’re kind of carbon copies of each other. They’re both 6-foot-3, about 212 pounds. Good athletes, can make all the throws. But a lot of guys can say that. We’ve gotta figure out the rest of it.

(on Harvard being picked second) Other than maybe the one you pick as number one, I think whether you’re two through four, it really doesn’t matter. I think the media in general has pretty much gotten into a groove to putting Harvard or Penn number one or number two. I think if I’m not mistaken we’ve been number one or number two in the league at the end of the year 12 straight years. That’s great, we take pride in that. But I think there’s more parity, more competition, more outstanding quarterbacks that can be difference-makers in the league. So whether you’re two or whether you’re three, four or five, I don’t see a lot of difference in those teams right now.

(on attitude of team after coming up short of Ivy title in 2012) I’ve said very bluntly that it’s probably the best Harvard team that we’ve had that didn’t win a championship. It came down to the last play in one of our last couple games and we just didn’t get it done. And that’s a credit to Princeton. We gave up 24 points in the last 12 minutes of a game that we had thoroughly dominated to that point. Really, really Harvard-like. But I think if you coach long enough, even with great kids, once in a while things happen where you just kind of scratch your head. But the bottom line is it was a great group of kids and we fell just short of our goal. I’m really proud of those kids. I hope and think it makes the kids hungrier. But we’ve always had such great and coachable kids that I’m not sure at this point in terms of the offseason or spring football that we noticed anything dramatically different from    many teams in the past because we’ve had consistently good-character, highly motivated guys. I think we’re really going to have to keep building. Like anything else, it’s what you do in the very biggest of games. What are those games? Sure it’s against traditional rivals, sure it’s against teams like Penn but these days, everybody’s a good team and everybody can be a good game. Coach Archer alluded to, it’s going to be like bowl games. Everybody’s good enough to beat you if you’re not thoroughly prepared, healthy and ready to play.

Last year we scored a lot of points and we had a few sort of shootouts, games where we were pretty explosive. But I think our defense right now is the strength of our team, both in terms of leadership, experience and maybe in terms of personnel. Josh Boyd has been to date a tremendous football player and captain for Harvard. He’s an inner-city Boston kid, and he could do it all. Leadership comes very naturally to him, he leads by example but he’s not afraid to be vocal, not afraid to hold everybody accountable to his very high standards. He’s arguably one of the two or three toughest and most physical players of the league. He loves the game, he loves Harvard. We haven’t played a game yet but he’s a great offseason captain, and we certainly expect very big things from him.

My impressions [of Penn] are just similar to the past. Regardless of where they are, they find a way to be extremely tough, extremely physical, and extremely competitive. Whether they’re at the top or somewhere slightly behind that, they just get it done. I think it’s a tribute to coach Bagnoli and his staff and the individuals that they continue to recruit. They have their system, they know it inside out, they know what works for them. They know how to attack people, offensively, defensively and in the kicking game. And you just know they’re going to be a factor in the race, and this year’s no different, certainly. They’re coming off of a tremendous run with a great senior class last year, another great senior class this year, so to pick them first makes a lot of sense. They’ve got a quarterback that seems to have started about 50 games. He may not have the numbers that some of the other really outstanding quarterbacks   in our league have, but he’s as good as anybody. I guarantee you he’s as good as anybody.

(on the loss of first-team All-Ivy offensive linemen Jack Holuba and John Collins) I think that [the offensive line] might be a position where we can make the transition a little bit easier than replacing guys like Colton Chapple, Treavor Scales, Kyle Juszczyk. We feel good about our line guys, both quality and depth. We’re probably going to be young at the tackle position but we’ve got some really, we think, talented guys. Cole Toner is a 6-foot-7, 290-pound sophomore who was a good basketball player from Indiana. We think he’s going to be a terrific player along the lines of James Williams, Kevin Murphy, those guys. Adam Redmond will be a sophomore as well, 6-foot-6, 285, athletic, tough. You always start with your tackles and your center, and I’m really enthusiastic about those guys. The center position is probably in more of a transition. I think guys like Dave Leopard, is gonna be the leading guy, a senior. We’ve also got a couple of other guys are going to give him great competition. We may move  a guy from offensive tackle because we feel so good about those young kids, to compete for the center job. But offensive line may be less of a concern than finding those playmakers that we had so many of last year.

Pete Mangurian

(evaluating QB position after graduating 2012 starter Sean Brackett)  You have to have good players around you, we all understand that. The bottom line when you’re evaluating quarterbacks is winning games. That’s what it’s all about. All you gotta do is look at the Penn team from a year ago. That guy wins games. You’ve got to be able to win football games. In my history, that’s how you evaluate quarterbacks.