Formerly Retired Penn Football Coach Joins Lions

It still does not look real, the image of former Penn football coach Al Bagnoli standing at a podium in front of a bunch of Columbia logos.

Bagnoli, in the foreground, is second in wins and conference titles in Ivy League history. He had three perfect seasons at Penn before calling it quits at the end of last season.

And now here he is in front of that light-blue WordArt arch of a logo? With the laughing lions that look like jesters (And they might as well be fools for smiling as Columbia has lost 21 straight football games).

This all can’t be right. It must be Photoshopped, like those photos of LeBron James wearing a Hornets jersey that circulated the internet this summer. Or like that Kim Jong Un Looking at Things meme.

But somehow, the image is real. Somehow that photo of Bagnoli wearing one of those laughing lions right above his heart is actually from Tuesday’s press conference in which he was introduced as Columbia’s next football coach.

The idea is shocking. Blow-dryer in the bathtub shocking. Kite in a thunderstorm shocking. WTF shocking.

This is nothing like ex-Harvard assistant coach Tony Reno getting his chance to lead a program by going to Yale. It’s not even like a gang leader switching sides.

A brief reminder of Columbia’s ineptitude: the Lions have not scored a point against Harvard since 2011. They haven’t won an Ivy title since 1961.

In the meantime, former Columbia coach Pete Mangurian became a meme himself, like Chuck Norris—except the opposite. His press conferences were increasingly dour, full of answers like “the problem is, you don’t play halves,” and “the day will come when [the score] won’t be 69-0.”

So Bagnoli’s decision to take the job is not just surprising because he is leaving Penn for another Ivy job. It’s where he has decided to go that leaves me stunned. It’s like Homer Simpson retiring from The Simpsons and then deciding he wants to go star on Bar Rescue. It’s your girlfriend saying she’s not looking for anything serious and then all of the sudden getting hitched with Oscar the Grouch. Unthinkable and impossible.

But it’s happening.

If you look at the move close enough, you can see some shrapnel of sense, bits of logic floating in an ocean of confusion. Newly hired Columbia Athletic Director Peter Pilling used to work at Villanova, across Philadelphia from Bagnoli. A mutual friend evidently connected them two weeks ago.

Bagnoli, at the time, was three months into an experiment in sports administration. Princeton coach Bob Surace told The New York Times Monday that he knew Bagnoli would not enjoy that line of work.

“I couldn’t imagine him sitting at a desk all day without just pulling his hair out,” Surace said.

And chatting over e-mail as he travels this week, Harvard coach Tim Murphy said he could see what Bagnoli found appealing about the Columbia job.

“I think that the best jobs are the one's where there is no place to go but up,” Murphy wrote.

That is certainly the case for the Lions.

As for why he left Penn, Bagnoli said, “At a certain point in time, you run out of challenges.” That should not happen for a long time in his new position.

Still, Murphy said he expects Bagnoli to turn the Light Blue ship around and become “very competitive” within three years.

We have certainly given Columbia some abuse of late, but in three years, maybe the Lions will have joined the league’s royalty. The basketball team, title-less since 1968, appears headed in that direction after upsetting Yale this weekend with a better roster expected next year. And now with Bagnoli headed to Kraft Field, the football team could get there too.

Welcome to the Age of Columbia Athletics, I guess.

—Staff writer Jacob D.H. Feldman can be reached at jacob.feldman@thecrimson.com.