At no point during Brown’s 27-0 blanking of Penn Saturday did the Quakers look like an Ivy championship football team. Or even a competent one.

Playing Brown was supposed to be an afterthought for Penn, but it took the Bears exactly one play to change everything.

With a crucial homecoming weekend game looming against rival Princeton next week, the Red and Blue (4-2, 3-0 Ivy) hit the road on Saturday to take on Brown, a feisty team that pushed Penn to the brink a season ago.

The Quakers’ next three games will be important to deciding whether they can take home a second consecutive Ivy title as the Red and Blue have a long way to go before reaching the ultimate goal of four outright titles in five years.

It wasn’t pretty at first, and it certainly wasn’t pretty at the end, but for 40 minutes, Penn looked like it had the best football team in the Ivy League.

With starting quarterback Billy Ragone out, Penn turned to fellow fifth-year senior Ryan Becker at QB and didn’t miss a beat, beating Yale, 28-17, to avenge the Quakers’ only loss in Ivy play from last season.

After a fantastic performance against Columbia, Penn’s defense will need to be on its toes this week, as Yale’s up-tempo option offense will call for the front seven to stick with their respective assignments.

Coach Al Bagnoli told the DP Wednesday that Ragone’s X-rays and MRIs came back negative, meaning that Ragone did not sprain his ankle at Columbia. Still, Bagnoli said the team is “treating it like it’s a sprained ankle” and labeled Ragone as questionable for Saturday’s home game against Yale.

After a nonconference victory over Lafayette and two wins over inferior Ivy opponents, Penn’s special teams have been a cause for concern.

Against Columbia, in a game where the offense seemed unable to finish its drives, Penn’s defense showed that it has the potential to carry the team to great heights.

With Billy Ragone playing inconsistently through five games and now dealing with an injury, Ryan Becker needs to take a more prominent role at quarterback for Penn football.

With Billy Ragone struggling, Penn’s defense stepped up and held a lowly Columbia team to just seven points as the Red and Blue won an ugly 21-7 victory.

On Saturday, the Red and Blue will look to take care of business early against a seemingly overmatched Columbia squad and avoid a repeat of 2012’s near-disaster.

The Quakers are not satisfied with the status quo offensively, as the team feels it has room to improve after their 2-2 start.

It hasn’t been a good season for Columbia football. Or last couple years. Or last decade. You can easily say that the state of Columbia football program is bleak at best and it doesn’t look like 2013 is going to help that outlook at all.

If Penn’s schedule against opponents outside of the Ivy League has taught us anything before, it is that where the Quakers finish the season rarely corresponds to how they began it.

Catch up with the rest of this weekend’s Ivy football competition.