Penn Heads South To Open Season At Jacksonville Saturday

By Matt Leon

The Penn Quakers will open their 2014 season on Saturday as they travel down to Florida to visit Jacksonville University.

The Ivy League traditionally has its teams start their seasons later than everyone else, so while this will be the season debut for the Quakers, it will be game #3 for the Dolphins. Penn head coach Al Bagnoli says opening with a team that already has a couple of games under their belt is always a challenge.

"It's tough because, obviously, you should show great improvement between week one and week two and even greater improvement between two and three," Bagnoli tells KYW Newsradio. "You kind of know what 'game speed' is by the time you get to week three, your kids are accustom to that pace. So for us, we still have a couple of question marks on how our young kids are going to adapt, and what they're going to do in the opener. So we probably have more than they do, in terms of question marks, heading into the season. But we'll see, it's something that we've always had to deal with and hopefully we can continue to deal with it well."

Jacksonville, which calls the Pioneer Football League home, brings a 1-1 record into Saturday's game. They lost their opener to Southeastern Louisiana, 44-3. Last week they bounced back to beat the University of San Diego, 35-18.

"They are pretty dynamic on offense," Bagnoli says. "The old quarterback at Florida, Kerwin Bell, is their head coach and his son is the quarterback. So I think they're pretty athletic, they are explosive, just as you would expect. They have really good skill kids, so they've got a lot of speed on both sides of the ball. We're going to have our hands full. They do a nice job schematically, they play hard, so it will be a really good test for us and hopefully it will help prepare for the season."

After watching his team for weeks in practice, Bagnoli talks about finally getting to see his team in game action.

"I'd like to just see how our kids compete," Bagnoli says. "Our offensive line is really talented, they're good athletes, they're big, they're physical, they're strong. I want to see how well they compete. I want to see how well our quarterback (sophomore Alek Torgersen) can process under the heat of the game. He's a really talented kid and he's done a really nice job during camp, but can he do that, can he process things? I want to see how our young guys grow up between their freshmen and sophomore years. Are they varsity ready? I think every coach has concerns in an opening game, we're no different. But I feel confidant that our kids have prepared well, and we'll see what happens, but until they do it, you always have some question marks in the back of your head."

This will be the first-ever meeting between these two programs.

Penn and Jacksonville will kick-off at 1:00pm on Saturday.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattleonkyw.

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