Unbeaten in the Ivies, Princeton will test Penn

The math is simple for Penn's football team. If the Quakers expect to successfully defend their Ivy League title, they will have to beat their biggest rival, Princeton, at noon Saturday at Franklin Field.

Picked fifth in the preseason poll, Princeton is 6-1 overall and is the only team with an unblemished 4-0 Ivy league mark. Penn is 4-3, 3-1 after last week's 27-0 loss at Brown.

A Princeton win would give the Tigers a two-game lead over Penn with two to play. And Princeton already has knocked off Ivy contender Harvard, a team that Penn visits next week.

"To add a championship to this rivalry is awesome," said Penn cornerback Dan Wilk, who leads the Quakers with five passes defended. "They are one of those teams that was down the last few years and they are a bunch of hungry kids, and we have to come ready to play."

The Princeton program has been resurrected by coach Bob Surace, a former Inquirer all-South Jersey center from Millville.

This is Surace's fourth season at Princeton after he spent the previous nine years as an assistant coach for the Cincinnati Bengals.

Princeton went 2-18 in his first two years, but the Tigers improved to 5-5 last year and have taken it to a new level this season.

Now Surace hopes to win a title as a player and a coach. He was a senior on Princeton's 1989 Ivy League championship team.

"The easy part the first two years was the players were phenomenal and worked hard and bought into everything," Surace said.

What they have bought into is one of the more exciting offenses in the nation. The Tigers are averaging an Ivy League-leading 45.1 points per game.

"We have to react well to that hurry-up Oregon offense," Penn coach Al Bagnoli said.

The Quakers will face one of the country's most accurate quarterbacks in Quinn Epperly. During last week's 53-20 win over Cornell, Epperly set an NCAA Division I mark by completing 29 consecutive passes.

Epperly has thrown 18 touchdown passes and one interception.

"The game has slowed down for Quinn, and he is making great decisions," Surace said.

Bagnoli said that Penn also has to do a good job against a tenacious Princeton blitz. The Tigers lead the Ivy League with 27 sacks.

One thing that should help Penn is the expected return of quarterback Billy Ragone, who missed the last two games because of an ankle injury. Ragone returned to practice on Tuesday.