Friday, April 17, 2015

Overcoming the Bumps in the Road




After new Columbia Head Coach Al Bagnoli turned Penn from a bottom dweller to a contender in 1992, the Quakers won two straight Ivy championships in 1993 and 1994.

But that was not the only turnaround story for Bagnoli at Penn. While none were more statistically dramatic than the five-win improvement from 1991 to 1992, some of the other rebounds he oversaw were just as impressive.

The first real bump in the Bagnoli road came at Penn just when most successful coaches start to have success. The 1996 season was the first year when the entire Quaker team was truly all Bagnoli's players. But the '96 Penn team was snake bitten by close loss after close loss. All five Quaker losses were by less than seven points, including a 20-19 OT loss to the Lions at Franklin Field. Penn finished 5-5 and 3-4 in the Ivies.

The next season, things got worse. A respectable 6-4, 5-2 Ivy season was wiped out at the end of the year when it was discovered that standout defensive star Mitch Marrow was an ineligible player. Five of Penn's wins were vacated and Bagnoli faced the most serious crisis of his coaching tenure in Philadelphia.

So what happened in the following season? The 1998 Quakers went out and won another championship. Led by Duke transfer QB Matt Rader and the great RB Jim Finn, Penn went 8-2 and 6-1 in the Ivies to silence those who thought Bagnoli had run out of gas.

The next five seasons saw the Quakers win three more titles, including two straight undefeated Ivy seasons in 2002 and 2003, and an overall 10-0 season in 2002.

But the next bumps in the road came in 2005 both on and off the field. Senior Kyle Ambrogi committed suicide, casting a pall over what looked like a promising season out of the gate. Penn lost its last four games and finished 5-5 and 3-4 in the league.

The next two years weren't much better as the Quakers couldn't find any consistency with QB Robert Irvin and Penn finished 3-4 in the Ivies in 2006 and 2007.

Then I believe Bagnoli had an epiphany. While his championship teams in the past at Penn had all been great defensively, they stood out for their offensive stars like Finn, Rader, and then another great QB in Mike Mitchell. By 2008, Bagnoli seemed to realize that great offensive skill players were getting harder to stockpile and he seemed to change his focus into creating a solid overall team defense and offensive line and then try to consolidate the talent in the skill positions by committee.

The '08 Quakers started the recent Penn tradition of winning ugly. They went 6-4 overall, but 5-2 in the Ivies with three of the conference wins by less than a TD.

That set the stage for an incredible 2009 championship run where none of the offensive skill players put up very impressive numbers, but the defense and the offensive line made Penn unbeatable in the Ivies. The Quakers lost their first two games of the season in tough matches against Villanova and Lafayette, but then they didn't lose again. Along the way, Penn allowed just eight points per game to all its Ivy opponents and only Dartmouth and Columbia scored more than seven points in a game against the Quakers.

The 2010 Penn team put together another championship season with the same formula but also with the winning ugly play of QB Billy Ragone who never had the greatest stats, but found ways to win time and time again.

A bit of a down year on defense doomed Penn to a 2nd place finish in 2011, but a number of Ragone-led gutty comebacks brought the Quakers a surprising championship in 2012.

Bagnoli's last two seasons at Penn have been well documented as not his best, but they don't look like they were any worse to me than the 1996, 2006 and 2007 seasons and we know how well the program rebounded from those years.

The point of all of this is to show that Bagnoli hasn't been just on some kind of long cake walk at Penn for the last 23 years. There have been several challenges and now he's taking on a new kind of challenge at Columbia. And just like there are a lot of people who say the Columbia problem can't be solved, there were a lot of people who said Bagnoli and Penn would not recover from those clusters of consecutive non-winning seasons he suffered in Philly.





 

 

3 comments:

Coach said...

NOBODY at Penn thought that they would not recover after 2006-2007. The President and alums were totally and fully committed to the program from an administrative level, with a tremendous AD, and a great football coach and program in place. The problem in this league is that it is always a dog fight to stay competitive with Harvard, Yale , and Princeton. Coaching stability at Penn with Bagnoli has been a big part of it.

Peter Stevens said...

Nottingham was with the team and participated in practice drills yesterday at Baker Field.

oldlion said...

Interesting report on Nottingham. I had thought that he had burned too many bridges to come back insofar as it is pretty shocking for a captain to quit. I wonder if there was a team vote on letting him come back. PS, how did he look throwing the ball?