On Bagnoli's plaque: Head coach from 1992-2014, he retired as the program's winningest coach both overall (148) and in Ivy League play (112). The Quakers won nine Ivy League titles during his tenure, all of them outright, giving him more outright championships than any other coach in league history. He coached the Red and Blue to three undefeated seasons, six unbeaten Ivy campaigns, with five others that ended with a 6-1 Ivy mark. Ten of his teams earned national rankings and he coached five Ivy League Players of the Year. Bagnoli's teams won 24 straight games from 1992-95, an FCS record that stood for 20 years, and his teams still have the three longest Ivy League win streaks in Ancient Eight history.
 
by Joe Juliano
 
Al Bagnoli's first interaction with Penn football took place in 1991. The Quakers were looking for an opponent for a preseason scrimmage at Franklin Field, and Bagnoli and his Union College Dutchmen agreed to travel from Schenectady, N.Y., to Philadelphia.
 
"We were looking for a scrimmage anyway," Bagnoli recalled. "It was a very talented team we had at Union. So we went down there and I think we kind of surprised them with how well we stood up at a different division level, FCS level to a Division III. We were pretty good.
 
"That was my introduction to Penn, a scrimmage. I thought nothing of it."
 
Bagnoli was in his 10th and final season at Union where he led his teams to an overall 86-19 record and six NCAA postseason appearances. Meanwhile, the Quakers were in a rut, going 9-21 in three seasons under Gary Steele, who was relieved of his duties after 1991. Bagnoli showed interest.
 
"They wanted to hire somebody who had head coaching experience," he said. "It probably triggered a thought process that might not have been triggered if we didn't scrimmage. I don't remember scores but I think they were a little bit surprised about our talent level, and that kind of caught the attention of the Penn people."
 
He was hired. The rest, as they say, is history.
 
Of his 40 seasons as a head coach, Bagnoli spent 23 of them with Penn, rewriting the program's record book along the way. The Quakers won nine Ivy League championships, going unbeaten in the league six times, and compiled three overall undefeated seasons, in 1993, 1994, 2003. He holds school marks for most overall wins (148-80) and Ivy League victories (112-49).
 
Penn won 24 consecutive games between 1992 and 1995, an FCS record that stood for 20 years, along with three Ivy streaks of 20 (2001-04), 18 (2008-11) and 17 (1992-95) games.
 
For his success on the field and his influence over hundreds of Penn football players he led and mentored, Bagnoli, 71, will be inducted with Class XIII into the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame.
 
"It's not something you ever set out to do when you start coaching," he said. "This is the culmination of a lot of people's efforts. A whole litany of things need to take place to even give you a chance to be successful. I just feel very fortunate that we were able to get those things in alignment and keep them in alignment for a fair amount of time to enable us to have the success that we had.
 
"It spread out to a lot more avenues than just myself. It's all the factors from personal family to assistant coaches to alumni and administrative support. Obviously the most important is your players."
 
Eldo Bagnoli took a slightly different path from that of your usual successful football coach. He was born in Compo Basso, Italy, about 60 miles inland from Naples. After his father and his two uncles immigrated to the United States, Bagnoli came over accompanied by his mother, his 7-year-old sister, and his 9-year-old brother. He was five and did not speak a word of English.
 
"That voyage of seven days across the North Atlantic through some choppy seas," Bagnoli recalled. "I'm not good on the water so this trip was not great. My memory was like, 'Oh boy!'"
 
He arrived at Highland Elementary School in East Haven, Conn., too late to attend kindergarten so he was moved up to first grade. Because his mother and father worked, his two siblings accompanied him to and from school. He benefitted from the fact that his first-grade teacher spoke fluent Italian.
 
Bagnoli attended East Haven High School and Central Connecticut State, then went to graduate school at the University of Albany where he earned his master's degree and served as an assistant coach. There he met Bob Ford, a legend who spent 41 seasons as Albany's head coach and posted 256 wins.
 
"I owe a lot to Coach Ford," he said. "He made an indelible imprint on so many coaches, myself included. His forte wasn't always X's and O's but just the way you structure things, the way you handle yourself, the way you treat people, and the way you organize your day. Those were the things he was exceptional at, and it transferred down to all of us. It gave us a blueprint that allowed us to be successful."
 
Others who influenced Bagnoli were Union head coach Tom Cahill, soon to hold the same job at Army, who gave the young coach a chance "to put your imprint on certain things," and former Brown assistant Joe Wirth. Bagnoli called Wirth "a brilliant technician, so far ahead of his time. We were zone blitzing before people even knew what it was."
 
Ray Priore, now in his ninth season as Penn's head coach, got to know his predecessor through his brother, Chuck, who was Bagnoli's offensive coordinator at Union and later joined him at Penn. Ray Priore has been on the Quakers' staff since 1987.
 
He said he got "tremendously lucky" in 1992 because, of all the applicants for Penn's head coaching job, the only one he knew was Bagnoli. The two became close friends and still talk to this day.
 
Priore called Bagnoli a "fierce competitor."
 
"He had a great perspective of game management, as a game manager, making the right decisions in the heat of battle," Priore said. "I thought he was a very, very good evaluator of talent in the world of recruiting. He had that type of personality that kept you pushing as a staff and as players. He was a really down-to-earth person to work for, family-driven. It's awesome to know a person like that."
 
Bobby Fallon, Wharton '05, played defensive end for Bagnoli from 2001 through 2004 and made second-team All-Ivy his senior year. In his four seasons, the Quakers went 35-4, the winningest team over that period at the time.
 
"He commands a lot of respect from guys who played for him," Fallon said. "He was not a big pre-game orator. He wasn't like a rah-rah guy. He actually wasn't a yeller in either direction. You definitely felt it if you messed up, for sure, but he wasn't a screamer. I think that most people found him very fair."
 
Fallon said Bagnoli took a liking to tough players.
 
"He just loved embracing the fact that Penn was kind of the more blue-collar Ivy League school that would show up," he said. "He would always use the term lunch-pail and grit. He liked the Philadelphia mindset and really leaned into it."
 
Bagnoli won his final Ivy League championship in 2012. Two seasons later, he retired from coaching and went into administration, feeling he could share some of his insight and experiences as a mentor.
 
However, after about three months in the job, Bagnoli discovered, "I didn't like it." He wanted to get back on the sidelines. Conversations with Columbia athletic director Peter Pilling, who he quipped "covertly" recruited him, convinced him to return to the profession he loved.
 
"I was fresh, recharged," he said. "For 92 days I didn't have to travel, I didn't have to work seven days a week, I didn't have to deal with 120 kids. So you're kind of reinvigorated. It also gave me a better perspective, an appreciation, of what I had.
 
"It was awkward the first couple years because I'm looking across the field and I know more about the Penn kids than I do the Columbia kids. The first time I went to Franklin Field as the coach of Columbia, it was as strange as hell being on the visitors' side coming out of the other locker room. I'm thinking, 'Well, this is weird.'"
 
Bagnoli led the Lions to a 35-35 record in his seven seasons, including an 8-2 mark in 2017. He announced his retirement less than two months before the start of the 2023 season after undergoing an aortic dissection earlier in the year.
 
"I didn't feel like I was going to have the energy level," he said. "That's what caused it. I could have coached but it would have been coaching at 70 percent, 80 percent and I'd have to modify my schedule and I'm just not wired that way. I felt bad about those guys coming in at 6:15 and I stroll in at 9. That wasn't going to fly."
 
Bagnoli is doing just fine in retirement, however. He is in a fund-raiser, goodwill-ambassador role at Columbia. More importantly, he has extra free time to "experience things that I've never been able to experience because of the profession I was in."
 
As for his legacy at Penn:
 
"To me, it was always about, can we keep the program where it rightfully should be, and hopefully I was a pretty good caretaker for 23 years," he said. "We've done some things that I think people appreciated. We did some things that were pretty positive accomplishments. We ran a good program, a solid program, and we treated people for the most part the way they wanted to be treated, and I think I'm most proud of that."