The 2002 Penn Quakers football team represented the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in the

2002 NCAA Division I-AA football season The 2002 NCAA Division I-AA football season, part of college football in the United States organized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division I-AA level, began in August 2002, and concluded with the 2002 NCAA Divisi ...

. It was the 128th season of play for the Quakers. They were led by 11th-year head coach

Al Bagnoli Eldo P. "Al" Bagnoli (born January 20, 1953) is an American football coach and former player. He was recently the head football coach at Columbia University, a position he assumed from 2015 until 2022. Bagnoli served as a head football coach at ...

and played their home games at

Franklin Field Franklin Field is a sports stadium in Philadelphia, United States, at the eastern edge of the University of Pennsylvania's campus. It is the home stadium for the Penn Relays, and the University of Pennsylvania's stadium for football, track and fi ...

. They were a member of the

Ivy League The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. The term ''Ivy League'' is typically used beyond the sports context to refer to the eight schools ...

. They finished the season 9–1 and 7–0 in Ivy League play. On November 16, before their annual game against Harvard, Penn became the first Division I-AA team to host an episode of

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

's " College GameDay". The weekly national pregame show had begun broadcasting live from the site of a selected marquee matchup in 1993, though some weeks were produced in the studio in

Bristol, Connecticut Bristol is a suburban city located in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, southwest-west of Hartford. The city is also 120 miles southwest from Boston, and approximately 100 miles northeast of New York City. As of the 2020 census, the ...

. By November 2002, ESPN had aired 94 shows from "on the road", all at the sites of

Division I-A The NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly known as Division I-A, is the highest level of college football in the United States. The FBS consists of the largest schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). As ...

matchups. Coverage plans were decided less than a week ahead of time, which allowed ESPN to respond quickly when the Ivy League called to suggest hosting GameDay at the site where its two contenders for the conference title, with identical 5–0 league records, would meet. The pregame broadcast outside Franklin Field attracted a crowd of 900, and the presence of ESPN cameras was credited for boosting game attendance by about 5,000.

Schedule

References

{{Ivy League football champions Penn Penn Quakers football seasons Ivy League football champion seasons

Penn Quakers football The Penn Quakers football program is the college football team at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The Penn Quakers have competed in the Ivy League since its inaugural season of 1956, and are a Division I Football Championship ...