Peter Pilling is Columbia’s new athletic director, but before that he was just a guy with an idea. It was a zany idea, as far as these things go. A confidant told him of a rumor, down in Philadelphia, that a just-retired football coach was already getting restless. So Pilling made a phone call.
“I said, ‘Al, this is a little awkward,’” Pilling recalled. “I’m not the AD, and you may not be interested in this job. But let’s pretend.”
The job was football coach at Columbia, and the stunned voice on the other end belonged to Al Bagnoli, who was sitting at a desk in his new office on the Penn campus, watching the snow fall and the hours tick by until springtime, the first spring in 23 years that he would not be coaching his beloved Quakers.
Bagnoli, 62, had lifted Penn’s program to unprecedented heights. When he stepped down in November, fulfilling plans to retire to an administrative role he had been talking to friends about for years, Bagnoli had won more Ivy League football games than anybody except Yale’s Carm Cozza. But doubts had already begun to pierce his quiet withdrawal from the game, and what Pilling was suggesting amounted to Ivy League heresy.
Only eight men have coached two Ivy League football programs. The last was Pete Mangurian, who led Cornell from 1998 to 2000 before Columbia hired him in 2012. In three years in Morningside Heights, Mangurian coached 30 games and won only three.
He resigned in December amid allegations that he was abusive toward players and ignored safety concerns. A rift was forming between upperclassmen and lowerclassmen. The Lions had also lost 21 games in a row.
Mangurian’s winning percentage was actually better than three other coaches in Columbia’s gloomy history since 1956, but the sense of desperation had reached a fever pitch. On Feb. 3, Pilling was hired as Columbia’s athletic director, and that evening he boarded a train to Philadelphia.
His sole objective was to convince Bagnoli to join him in New York.
A New Era
One evening last month, Bagnoli wore a light blue T-shirt tucked into dark gray shorts and a whistle around his neck. Practice was running late at Robert K. Kraft Field, way up in the narrow neck of Manhattan. Evening traffic formed on the Henry Hudson Bridge, and trains whistled at the bend into the Spuyten Duyvil station. But team drills continued.
“Right hash!” Bagnoli yelled. “Right hash, let’s go! Play with some urgency.”
When he spoke, his lines were short, direct, impatient. They reflected the Philadelphia fashion of mashing words together: Rightash, leggo! There was no time to waste.
Born in Campobasso, Italy, Bagnoli moved to East Haven, Conn., with his family at age 5. His father worked in a steel warehouse; his mother became a seamstress. Bagnoli played defensive back for Central Connecticut State and thought he might attend law school.
But when a friend got a job as a graduate assistant for Albany’s football program, in 1975, Bagnoli joined him, thinking it was not a bad way to earn a master’s degree.
Forty years later, he stood with his hips jutted forward, his back arched, his arms folded and his countenance subdued, surveying what had perhaps been the worst football team in America last season.
While at Penn, Bagnoli had beaten Columbia 18 times in a row, so he knew better than anyone that every detail required inspection. The kickoff coverage team even practiced the trifling detail of timing their steps before the ball left the tee.
Like a hawk, Bagnoli watched how many steps they took, where their feet landed, if they stepped offside.
“Notice the difference!” he cried. “Notice the difference in tempo.”
A conference room in the Baker Athletics Complex has the smiling photos of all of his predecessors hanging on the wall. It is a wall of shame, of sorts, but it also provides a glimpse of Columbia’s football history. The 10 coaches who preceded Bagnoli, dating to 1956, all had losing records.
Bagnoli’s office is just down the hall.
“There’s no need to be politically correct; it’s been a coaches’ graveyard,” Bagnoli said, adding: “I’m either going to crash and burn, or they’re going to build a statue. It’ll be one of the two.”
Three days before the final game of the 2014 season, Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, hired Rick Taylor, a former football coach and athletic director, to oversee a comprehensive review of the football program. The announcement included what many construed as a vote of confidence for Mangurian.
But a day after a 41-7 loss to Brown ended the season, 25 players signed a letter to Bollinger, a trustee and a trustee emeritus in which they detailed a series of grievances concerning Mangurian, including accusations of verbal abuse, alienating injured players and ignoring head injuries. Mangurian resigned Dec. 5, a day after the letter became public.
The letter was quickly retracted. The university said in a statement that its investigation had found no evidence of a breach of the university’s protocol for handling head injuries, but discontent festered about Mangurian’s treatment of position battles; his insistence on predawn practices; and his ideas for making players “lean and mean” via a weight-loss effort that led the Lions to start a 227-pound right guard against Princeton in 2012.
Continuity on the coaching staff was another issue.
“One of the junior offensive linemen said that he’s had four line coaches in three years,” Bagnoli said. “You wonder.”
Before accepting Pilling’s offer, Bagnoli made a list of assurances he said he needed from Columbia in order to commit. Chief among them was the football budget. A person with knowledge of the figures, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the subject, said the university agreed to increase the budget by at least 50 percent. Pilling said the budget was expanded “substantially.”
The new money allowed Bagnoli to increase spending on recruiting and travel; expand the coaching staff and improve its salaries; and hire two additional football-only strength and conditioning coaches (including a speed coach), and a full-time player personnel director. Columbia also replaced the artificial turf at Kraft Field.
In an email, Taylor — while declining to offer specifics about his study, which ended in February — praised Columbia’s response to the review as “extraordinary and comprehensive.”
He added, “And Peter’s securing of Al Bagnoli as head football coach was a masterstroke.”
Unretirement
Bagnoli had announced in April 2014 that his 23rd season at Penn would be his last, and at the time he meant it. He had been flirting with the idea of quitting for years. Then autumn would come, and he would change his mind. Another year, he would say. In 2014, he finally followed through.
He moved into a new office and title: director of special projects. His tasks were to standardize the recruiting software systems, manage equipment inventory and raise money. He envisioned spending more time golfing and vacationing at his home on the Jersey Shore.
But for an obsessive competitor who as coach had habitually arrived to work before 7 a.m., carved out an hour for a daily workout and made recruiting calls on the rides home, the lifestyle was a dramatic shift. He quickly found he was not ready for a desk job.
“I thought I was,” Bagnoli said. “Until I did it.”
One of Bagnoli’s closest friends, Villanova coach Andy Talley, was the one who tipped off Pilling, a former Villanova athletic administrator. “Ultimately,” Pilling said, “I was trying to gauge if he still had that fire in his belly.”
Bagnoli’s tenure at Penn did not end as he had hoped it would. Injuries and a disappointing defense resulted in a 6-14 record in the two seasons after his Quakers won the 2012 league championship.
In his latter years coaching the Quakers, Bagnoli began to institute a policy that sounded incongruous with his tough-guy persona: Have fun. He wanted his players to relax. He has brought the same message to Columbia.
“They haven’t been successful in 20 opportunities,” Bagnoli said. “We have to get them to not think, ‘What’s going to go wrong today?’”
Practices have been livened up with music, and players no longer need to rise at the crack of dawn for practice. He and his coaches reject longstanding excuses for Columbia’s lack of success, like how the team needs daily bus service from campus to its workouts at the Baker Athletics Complex 100 blocks north.
Jon McLaughlin, one of two assistants who came with Bagnoli from Penn, likes to point out that Columbia’s baseball team, which has won the past three Ivy League titles, takes the bus, too.
“There’s positivity in the building,” defensive lineman Hunter Little said. “He’s changing how you look at things that were once considered negatives.”
Bagnoli signed a five-year contract and said he plans to see it through. His friends, family members and assistants have all remarked about his newfound energy, using words like “spark,” “fire,” “juice” and “recharged” to describe his attitude this summer. Bagnoli described the challenge ahead with a word of his own: invigorating.
His commute to the Penn campus used to take him 25 minutes, he said. Now, from his new home in Riverdale, it takes only six — scarcely enough time to think about all he needs to get done.
About the Author
