While many around the Ivy League contend that the nation's fourth oldest college has sacrificed its academic principles in quest of athletic principals, Penn officials vigorously deny that they've compromised their admissions standards to save a once-sagging football program.

"I would refute any suggestion that our ability to achieve success on the football field has been related to any change in our admission standards of student-athletes," says Lee Stetson Penn's dean of admissions.

"It's a shame that when a program does well, people suddenly think you're doing something wrong," adds Stetson.

Berndt attributes grumblings about his student-athletes to "sour grapes," citing the fact that in his four-plus years in Philadelphia only two Penn football players have failed to earn a degree.

The easy-going, mild-mannered coach--who all Penn officials credit for the historic turnaround--points out that when the Quakers first won the league crown in 1982, the seniors and juniors on that team were recruited and admitted in the pre-Berndt-Hackney era.

But if Penn hasn't changed its academic standards, and if its student-athletes are still representative of the entire student body--as even Reardon says they are--then how does one explain the fact that it had been almost four decades since the Quakers had won as many games in two seasons as they did in 1982 and 1983?

Part of the reason Penn has been able to attract better football players is a result of the newfound national prestige for the school that was founded in 1740 by Benjamin Franklin.

"The overall image of the University has risen in recent years, and that has helped the University in many ways," says Stetson.

That includes the football program, which this year boasts a native of Nevada for the first time ever. A larger and more diverse applicant pool has enabled his team to attract better football players, Berndt says.

But a good deal of Penn's success is directly attributable to Berndt, even though he credits Penn's success to his assistant coaches.

"Almost all of the credit has to go to the quality of coaching," says Stetson, who many credit for raising Penn's national image. "Jerry Berndt came in here and turned around our program with well-organized and targeted recruiting."

Both Stetson and Berndt emphasize that the coach's reputation in the Midwest, a region in which Penn never had much recruiting success, has allowed the Quakers to attract football players they never could have in the pre-Berndt era.

"We can now recruit in the East and the Midwest, where he had a reputation and was known," says Stetson.

And Berndt--a native of Toledo, Ohio and graduate of Bowling Green--admits that he expanded the Quakers' recruiting to include the talent-laden areas of Chicago and St. Louis, which had been strictly off-limits to almost everyone but Harvard and Yale.

What's more, Berndt's ability to turn the 1982 team--recruited almost entirely by his predecessor--into college football's biggest surprise of 1982 paid immediate dividends.

Stetson and Berndt both say it has been directly responsible for a new outlook on the Philadelphia campus each fall, has prompted an increase in alumni giving, and has prompted athletes who might not otherwise have applied to give Penn a closer look.

But maybe it was Reardon who best explained Penn's unparallelled success.

"They went out and hired a great coach," he says.

Tomorrow: A look at that great coach