Penn Wraps Up Season Saturday Against Cornell

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The University of Pennsylvania football team will wrap up its 2017 season on Saturday at home with an Ivy League match-up against Cornell.

The Quakers are on a roll. They improved to 5-4 (3-3 Ivy) with their third straight win this past Saturday, taking it to Harvard up in Cambridge, 23-6. The Quakers scored on a 77-yard touchdown run by running back Tre Solomon on the game's first play from scrimmage and never looked back.

"It was great to see our team win in all three aspects from start to finish," Penn head coach Ray Priore tells KYW Newsradio. "The most complete game we've had on the season. Great to see our seniors and some of our key players have great performances."

Despite this late season surge, the Quakers were eliminated from the Ivy title race last week when Yale beat Princeton. But Priore is proud of how his team bounced back from a mid-season four-game losing streak which included their first three league games.

"It's a testimony to our kids, our program," he says. "We talk about grit and resiliency all the time and our kids really were faced with some tough situations throughout the course of the year and they rose. I think it bodes well for our program moving into the future."

Cornell comes to town 3-6 (3-3 Ivy). Last week they lost at home to Columbia, 18-8.

"Dangerous team," Priore says. "They have played good football. They play 'in your face' defense, press man and those things. A running game that really has been established and controlled the ball. It's a great rivalry, the Penn-Cornell tradition goes back a long, long time."

Penn/Cornell is the second-longest uninterrupted series in all of FCS (behind only Lehigh/Lafayette). This will be the 99th straight year that these two teams have battled. Overall, the teams have played 123 times with Penn leading the series 72-46-5.

Last year, the Quakers beat the Big Red in Ithaca, 42-20.

Saturday's game at Franklin Field kicks off at 1:30pm.