Art Thou Readee For Somme Foote-Ball?

Math was never their strong suit

Some of my fondest memories of college....well, one of my fondest memories of college occurred in the friendly confines of historic Franklin Field during the first semester of my freshman year, when Penn's football team managed to emerge victorious in a 36-35 shootout with Harvard, winning on a missed Crimson field goal attempt as time expired. The victory preserved an undefeated Ivy season for Penn and set up a championship tilt with the equally undefeated Cornell; the Quakers went up to frosty ol' Ithica and shellacked the Big Red 45-10. After the Harvard game, me and a few thousand other students rushed onto the Franklin Field astroturf and attempted to execute the Penn tradition of uprooting the goalposts and hurling them into the Schuylkill River. Apparently, either the administration got tired of replacing the goalposts, or the Philadelphia authorities frowned on thousands of rowdy white suburbanites throwing a large, non-biodegradable object into the river, because a) the goalposts were now sunk into the ground with concrete, and b) campus police and security immediately set to the task of clearing us off of the field - I'm told that after I left, the pepper spray came out. Even so, it was a fleeting moment of spontaneous pandemonium during my college career - a nice complement to the fun-but-pro forma rounds of "Drink a Highball", the ensuing toast-hurling, and other assorted trad foofaraw that were typically more hotly anticipated than the actual games themselves.

In honor of that moment, I present to you my completely uninformed Penn 2007 Fact-Free Football Preview, wherein I will predict down to the final score the results for all of the Quakers' contests this season without relying heavily on football facts or observations.

Week 1 - Lafayette, 9/15
$1 for the first person who can tell me what Lafayette's nickname is without having attended Lafayette personally or having a family member who is a student/graduate.
Prediction: Penn 46, Lafayette 4 (two safeties scored when Penn snaps ball out of the end zone due to lack of knowledge about rarely performed "punting" maneuver)

Week 2 - @ Villanova, 9/22
I know what you're thinking: Villanova has a football team? Sadly, yes.
Prediction: Penn 56, Villanova 10

Week 3 - @ Dartmouth, 9/29
And so it begins. Penn, being an Ivy League school, cannot participate in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA) playoffs; the Ivy League championship is the only thing we care about. The only thing that determines the Ivy League championship is your head-to-head record against other Ivies. So, in essence, the previous two weeks were pre-season games for the Quakers. The Dartmouth squad, probably coked out of their mind and tuckered out from whining about how their frats used to be so awesome before the administration stepped in and were the real inspiration for Animal House and everything, will be the first to taste our wrath for realz.
Prediction: Penn 89, Dartmouth 1

Week 4 - Georgetown, 10/6
If this was a basketball game, we'd be in trouble.
Prediction: Penn 37, Georgetown 0

Week 5 - @ Columbia, 10/13
Real football fact alert: Columbia's football team is something of a joke. During the 1980s, they went something like five consecutive seasons without a win - not much has changed since. Also, their freshman dorms are very, very tiny, like closets or jail cells.
Prediction: Penn 97, Columbia -5

Week 6 - Yale (Homecoming!), 10/20
Another actual fact: Yale was last year's Ivy football champ, sharing the crown with...Princeton. Penn lost at New Haven 17-14 in overtime last year; I anticipate that the favor will be repaid in kind. Tri-staters can catch all the action on the YES Network.
Prediction: Penn 73, Yale 6 (OT)

Week 7 - @ Brown, 10/27
Brown finally got a curriculum a couple of years ago (apparently prompted by their sliding U.S. News ranking; way to stick to your academic guns), all but guaranteeing that their graduates will have to learn something during 7 years of college. Of course, that something can probably still be basket weaving or bong maintenance.
Prediction: Penn 48, Brown 4:20

Week 8 - Princeton (Parents Weekend...!), 11/3
The Penn-Princeton rivalry only really applies to basketball: no other Ivy has won the hardwood championship since Cornell did it in 1988, and only six times in 51 years has neither school won at least a share of the title. Still, I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at a beatdown on the gridiron, assuming that Princeton can a field a team, what, with the annual all-Eating Club cooking sherry drink-off scheduled for the same weekend at Old Nassau.
Prediction: Penn 117, Princeton -24

Week 9 - @ Haaavaaaahd, 11/10
Any institution that has granted President Bush an advanced degree should have its academic credentials stripped. That, and "The Red and The Blue" is a vastly superior tune compared to the fake-Latin bowdlerization that is "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard." (Apparently Latin envy runs rampant in the so-called "upper echelons" - it's a tradition at Princeton for the student speaker at commencement to deliver an address entirely in Latin; the graduates are surreptitiously supplied with an annotated copy of the speech complete with cues on when to laugh, applaud, etc. How very droll.)
Prediction: Penn 10,000, Men of Harvard 0

Week 10 - Cornell, 11/17
Ah, Cornell, our traditional season-ending opponent. Excellent Hotelier program, a gorge, sub-zero wintertime temps and plenty of snow - it's practically the U Miami of the Ivy League! This one could be a squeaker.
Prediction: Penn 27, Cornell 26 1/2


So there you have it: a 10-0 season and another Ivy crown for the trophy case. Remember, we promised baseless analysis, not unbiased analysis.