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Around FCS: Penn reaches a big milestone

Philadelphia, PA (Sports Network) - Veteran Penn coach Al Bagnoli was getting kidded on Wednesday afternoon at the weekly Philadelphia college football media luncheon about how many of the Quakers' 1,299 games he had coached.

"It only seems like I've been here that long," joked Bagnoli.

The uber-successful Bagnoli has only been around for 18 years and 174 of those games, but he will be on the sideline on Saturday at Brown when Penn becomes the first program in NCAA history to play 1,300 games.

Yale is the next closest team to Penn, with 1,247 games since starting its program in 1872. Fordham (1,236), Lehigh (1,236), Harvard (1,228) and Lafayette (1,228) are the only other FCS programs with 1,200 games.

Navy, Michigan, Nebraska and Syracuse are the other Division I squads to have passed that milestone, with Virginia, Penn State and Texas scheduled to hit that mark before the season ends.

Penn began playing football on Nov. 1, 1876, when it hosted Princeton to begin one of college football's longest rivalries. Ironically, Princeton will reach the 1,200-game barrier when it hosts Cornell on Saturday afternoon.

The Quakers lost that first game to Princeton, 6-0, but they've won 795 games since then and are in the thick of another Ivy League championship race.

Penn won seven national championships between 1894 and 1924 and has won six of its 13 Ivy League titles since Bagnoli took the reigns of the historic program in 1992.

During his 18 years at Franklin Field, Bagnoli is 118-56, a win rate of 67.8%. When you include Bagnoli's 10 years at Union College, his record of 204-75 (73.9%) ranks him third best among active FCS coaches, trailing only Bobby Hauck of Montana (82%) and K.C. Keeler of Delaware (74.3%).

Bagnoli reached 200 wins last November when the Quakers ended the season with a 23-6 victory over Cornell and he trails only Bob Ford of Albany (240) and Joe Taylor of Florida A&M (211) on the active career victory list.

For all of that success, however, the results from the current Quaker team could be one of Bagnoli's greatest efforts.

Penn has been plagued by injuries since training camp, yet the Quakers have gone 3-0 in Ivy League play and their only losses were a narrow defeat to No. 4-ranked Villanova (14-3) and an overtime setback at Lafayette (20-17), which was 28th in this week's top-25 vote.

Penn has struggled to keep its quarterbacks healthy in recent seasons, with this year following that trend.

Keiffer Garton, who was expected to be one of the top offensive stars in the Ivy League this fall, chipped a bone in his right (throwing) elbow on Penn's final offensive play against Villanova.

He tried to play through the injury against Lafayette before missing wins against Dartmouth and Bucknell.

Garton finally returned against Columbia, but he bruised a knee in a fluky practice accident when a Penn player was flipped by a teammate in a drill, somersaulted and hit the quarterback while Graton was simply standing nearby.

Garton is questionable for Saturday's 1,300th game, but should be back for the rest of the season.

Garton got his chance to play in last year's Brown game when Kyle Olson suffered a devastating knee injury and senior Robert Irvin's chronic shoulder injuries kept him sidelined. Olson has struggled through his rehabilitation, but should be healthy enough to start on Saturday.

Promising freshman Billy Ragone led the Quakers to a 30-24 victory over Dartmouth, rushing nine times for 62 yards and a touchdown and going 3-of-3 for 17 yards passing. But Ragone was lost for the season with a broken collar bone.

Bagnoli has been so worried about depth that he has senior nickel back Brendan McNally playing both ways. McNally, a high school quarterback who has also completed 10-of-24 passes for 69 yards during his Quaker career, will back up Olson again on Saturday.

"This has been unbelievable," said Bagnoli. "We only have two healthy quarterbacks."

Other areas of the team haven't been immune to injuries, either. Running back Mike DiMaggio has been in and out of the lineup with a variety of ailments and All-American cornerback Chris Wynn, who started the year on the Buck Buchanan Award watch list, has been slowed by leg injuries all season.

"I've never seen anything like this," Bagnoli said of the injuries. "But what can you do?"

What you can do is rely on a defense that is ranked third in the country and is close to impenetrable on the ground (66.5 yards per game). The Quakers have allowed only 12 points per game and recorded their first shutout in two years in a 9-0 victory over Yale last Saturday.

And you can show your coaching ability by coming up with all sorts of wrinkles and schemes to get by on offense.

Penn will have its hands full with a Brown attack that is ranked seventh nationally in passing behind the strong arm of Kyle Newhall (290 yards per game). No team has given Bagnoli as much trouble as Brown, with Phil Estes winning six of 11 games against Penn, including four in a row.

Brown, which trails Harvard and Penn by a game in the Ivy League standings, also needs a victory to hang in the championship chase. A victory by Penn would likely set up an Ivy League showdown between Penn and Harvard in Cambridge, MA. on Nov. 14.

ANOTHER MILESTONE

While Penn was getting a step closer to game number 1,300 last Saturday, across town at Villanova Stadium, Andy Talley was giving Philadelphia its second football coach with 200 career wins.

Talley reached the milestone when Villanova thrashed Rhode Island 36-7 on a rain-soaked day to improve to 7-1 overall and 4-1 in the CAA.

Quarterback Chris Whitney made it easier for Talley to get that big win by rushing 17 times for 124 yards and completing 11-of-15 passes for 121 yards and a touchdown.

A Philadelphia native, Talley has won 172 of those games since arriving on the Main Line. He is 172-102-1 in 25 years at Villanova, after going 28-18-1 in five seasons at St. Lawrence.

But while many coaches might be thinking of winding things down after a 30- year head-coaching career, Talley has enjoyed a renaissance in the past couple of years.

While relaxing in a bye week, Talley and his current Wildcats are preparing for a showdown next week at No. 1 Richmond - a game which will likely determine the automatic bid in the CAA and could all but lock down a top-four seed for Villanova.

The Wildcats close out the season with a road game at Towson and their annual rivalry game at home against Delaware.

Richmond (7-0, 5-0) must get by one of the league's bottom feeders, Towson, on Saturday before meeting Villanova.

GETTING A REPRIEVE

For Eastern Washington, getting the news on Tuesday that the NCAA Division I Infractions Appeals Committee had overturned the Eagles' postseason ban for the 2009 season, was pretty much like getting an 11th hour call from the governor to commute a death sentence.

Since February, when the NCAA imposed penalties for rules violations in the football program from 2003-2007, EWU's current coach Beau Baldwin had rallied his team around the concept that they were competing for a postseason bid and a Big Sky Conference title until their appeal was denied.

It proved to be a wise strategy as the senior-laden Eagles have rolled to a 5-3 record overall and have gone 4-2 in conference play to keep those slim playoff hopes alive.

With games remaining against Portland State this Saturday at Seattle's Qwest Field and on the road at Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, the Eagles can make a case for a playoff spot by winning three games.

"It gives our players hope," said EWU coach Beau Baldwin. "But we do have to take care of business to give us an opportunity to possibly be selected. The scenario we are in is the same as it was in 2004 and 2007 when we had teams that had to win their last four games to get in."

Playing a tough schedule that has included losses in road games at Cal and No. 2-ranked Montana and at home against No. 14 Weber State, the Eagles have survived long enough for the NCAA to overturn penalties that many thought were unfair.

The NCAA nailed EWU for violations that included impermissible participation by ineligible student- athletes, the use of too many countable coaches, the lack of institutional control and failure to monitor by the university.

Much of the blame was placed on the shoulders of former coach Paul Wulff, now the head coach at Washington State, and ex-athletic director Darren Hamilton, who eventually landed as the AD at Alcorn State.

But while Wulff and Hamilton were getting off easily, the current coaches and players were the ones with the postseason ban hanging over their heads.

Eastern Washington self-reported the violations to the NCAA in February, 2007 and self-imposed several penalties that have already been implemented. But the infractions committee levied additional penalties, including the 2009 postseason ban and put the Eagles on three years of probation.

The violations, in and of themselves, were considered secondary violations, but the volume of the violations led the committee to rule that this was a major infractions case.

Eastern Washington agreed with the NCAA findings and other penalties, but appealed the postseason ban as excessive.

For a penalty to be set aside, NCAA bylaws require that the penalty must be excessive such that it constitutes an abuse of discretion.

In determining the penalties, the Infractions Appeals Committee noted that the Committee on Infractions based the postseason ban "substantially on (the Committee on Infractions) judgment" that the violations provided the university with a significant competitive advantage.

But the Infractions Appeals Committee disagreed.

"While the violations provided some competitive advantage, the conclusion that the advantage was 'significant" was a clear error of judgment, such that the imposition of the postseason ban was arbitrary," the appeals committee wrote in its decision.

The Eagles, who have made six playoff appearances through the years and advanced to the quarterfinals in 2004 and 2007, are currently 5-3 overall and 4-2 in the Big Sky Conference.

It isn't often that this columnist agrees with the results of NCAA sanctions, but it is refreshing to see that the appeals committee made the right move in this case, particularly for a group of athletes that were not at fault.

Chalk this one up as a case where the system worked.

10/30/2009 5:42:29 PM

 

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