By Dave Zeitlin C'03

Twenty-five years ago, Penn running back Terrance Stokes C'95 didn't pay much attention to all the trash talk coming from the mouth of his counterpart at Princeton, Keith Elias. If anything, he was appreciative of how much extra buzz it brought to the November 6, 1993 showdown between the undefeated Ivy League rivals.

But Stokes, a little running back out of Trenton, New Jersey, brought a fairly large chip on his shoulder into that game for another reason.

"That was a school that didn't recruit me," Stokes said. "I'm 25 minutes from your campus and you didn't think I was good enough. To go out and have that kind of game against someone from my backyard, that was even more rewarding."

The "kind of game" Stokes had was one of the most incredible performances in one of the most memorable victories in Penn's storied football history. While Elias was smothered by Penn's ferocious defense, Stokes erupted for 272 rushing yards — which still stands as a school record — in a 30-14 win over Princeton, setting the stage for the Quakers' first Ivy League championship in five years and one of just four perfect seasons in the program's modern era. (The 1986,1994 and 2003 squads completed the others.)

"That year it was perfection all over the place," said current head coach Ray Priore, a defensive assistant at the time. "They were very, very hungry. We had been in a drought for a while. We hadn't won a championship in a number of years. They came in, they were very passionate about it and played hard all the time. We had great leadership across the board."

While beating Elias and the Tigers proved to be the season's signature moment, the '93 Quakers showed their resolve from the start by shutting down another bona fide Ivy League star in future NFL quarterback Jay Fiedler. Opening the season against Fiedler and three-time defending Ivy champion Dartmouth, Penn's defense stole the show in a 10-6 win at a wet and rainy Franklin Field.

"That game really defined our season," Stokes said. "The defense was just phenomenal that year. They really went out and established what it was going to be like to play against us."

"Back then, it was always Dartmouth, Princeton and Harvard," added defensive end Dave Betten C'93, a fifth-year senior. "We knew it was one leg of the stool we kicked out."

Although the defense — led by, among others, Betten (Penn's defensive MVP in '93) and linebacker Pat Goodwillie W'96 (a 2017 Penn Athletics Hall of Fame inductee) — was the more experienced unit, Penn's offense certainly carried the load at times, too. With second-year head coach Al Bagnoli, who replaced Gary Steele ahead of the 1992 season, opening the playbook, veteran quarterback Jim McGeehan C'94 WEv'02 thrived in the passing game with receivers Miles Macik C'96 and Chris Brassell W'93. And then, of course there was Stokes, the player Priore called "Little T Bone," the one who said he might not be able to play in today's game because "if you stretched me I was 5-8 and if you put weights in my pocket I weighed 170 pounds."

"While we didn't have that big-name superstar like Keith Elias or Jay Fiedler in our program, we did have some talented guys," Stokes said. "And we knew coming off that 7-3 season [in 1992] that we definitely had an opportunity to compete."

Following the season-opening triumph over Dartmouth, the Quakers exploded for 30 points or more in their next seven contests, including a 34-30 come-from-behind win over Fordham that Betten said gave the Quakers the confidence they could "rally the troops." The stretch also included blowout victories over Columbia, Brown and Yale, which nicely set up the Homecoming clash vs. Princeton that was billed, at least according to T-shirts being sold outside Franklin Field, as the "Game of the Century."

Making the matchup even more enticing was Elias, Princeton's cocky Mohawked star who came into the game averaging 183.7 yards per game, spouting off about Penn's admission standards.

"What made the game even larger, besides the fact that both teams were undefeated, was the fact that he was such a personality," said Stokes, who's had a few healthy conversations with Elias later in life about the image that the Princeton running back tried to maintain in college. "If he wasn't that personality, the game would have been just like any other game between two undefeated Ivy teams."

"There was a lot of talk," Betten added. "But for many of us, we played against him for two years already and we knew what to expect. That was part of his shtick, to try to intimidate you and get in your head. At that point, it was just like whatever."

Once the game started, in front of a huge crowd that Stokes said "felt like 100,000 people" (it was actually a little over 35,000), Betten said Elias "didn't have too much to talk about" as the Penn defense swallowed him up and took advantage of a few mishandled Princeton snaps. Meanwhile, the typically pass-happy Quakers kept the Tigers off-balance with a slew of clever draw plays that paved the way for Stokes' record-setting performance.

"You felt the energy all week on campus leading up to that game," Stokes said. "You felt it was going to be a special day."

The Quakers, though, didn't have too much time to celebrate the program's first win over Princeton since 1988 or read about it in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times or any of the other national outlets that descended on Philadelphia to cover the latest in the season two unbeaten Ivy teams had met since 1968. Up next was a trip to Harvard, where Penn hadn't won in 20 years.

But the magic continued in Boston, as the Quakers rallied from a 20-10 halftime deficit for a 27-20 victory, thanks in large part to a 80-yard catch-and-run touchdown from McGeehan to Stokes. Even more impressive, Stokes did it with a stiff neck he first injured a week earlier vs. Princeton.

"He had a heart of a lion," said Priore, who recruited Stokes out of Trenton. "He was really hurting that day."

Betten was in plenty of pain, too, by the end of the season, joking his "body was happy" that Ivy teams are ineligible for the playoffs. But he dug deep in the season finale vs. Cornell, as the Quakers once again rallied from a deficit to score 17 unanswered points before preserving the 17-14 win — and the perfect 10-0 season — on a 4th-down stop on Big Red running back Chad Levitt in the final minute.

"I think he fell on top of me," said Betten, who teamed with fellow defensive end Michael "Pup" Turner W'93 to lead a nine-sack effort that day. "I had no idea where on the field we were in relation to the first down. But I was able to see from my teammates jumping up and down that we had stopped him.

"The last game really couldn't have gone any better for the team, and myself. It was a perfect ending."

A perfect ending for a perfect team.

Afterwards, Penn fans tore down the goalposts and tossed them into the Schuylkill River for the second time that season (they did the same after the Princeton game) — a "record that I think still stands," Stokes laughed.

"People thought with our 10-0 teams, 'Oh you must have dominated people,'" Priore said. "We didn't dominate people. We just played really, really hard."

Remarkably, the Quakers also went 10-0 the following season, making up the bulk of a 24-game winning streak from 1992 to 1995 that until recently stood as an NCAA Division I-AA (now FCS) record.

But it was the '93 campaign that kickstarted the period of dominance under Bagnoli, helped put the Quakers back on the map after a few down years, and will be honored at Homecoming on the occasion of its 25-year anniversary.

"I don't sit and think about it often anymore," said Stokes, who plans to return to Franklin Field for the Homecoming game vs. Harvard on November 10. "But when I do, I'm like, 'Wow, we really did something special that year.'"