Last year, for the first time, we were successful in getting Penn president Amy Gutmann's NCAA bracket. And this year, we've managed to repeat the feat.

I've had this since Thursday afternoon but wanted to wait until the first round was over to evaluate Dr. Gutmann's picks. The Penn prez clearly has some Philly pride (with Villanova heading to the Final Four), but after yesterday's Cornell upset, perhaps some Ivy League camaraderie would have been a better choice. Then again, it's entirely possible she put faith in a statistic that a certain former DP writer has been touting for a week.

Since I know that many of our readers will be asking, yes, there are similarities between Dr. Gutmann's bracket and the picks made by a certain other President earlier this week. But I don't think either of them had anything truly revolutionary, and I think that the Penn President took a few more risks, particularly her choices of ODU in the first round and Purdue in the Elite Eight (full disclosure: I attended Indiana University for a year prior to transferring to Penn, so my bias in this selection is pretty clear).

I know that it wouldn't be fair to subject Amy Gutmann's bracket to such scrutiny without letting you look at mine, so here it is.

A blog dedicated to  Columbia football -- yes, the same Columbia football team that is currently on a 12-game losing streak -- just wrote a post about Al Bagnoli and the quick turnaround of the Penn football team he masterminded in the early 1990s.

But as Quakers fans know, the last four years have brought zero Ivy League titles and three straight losing Ivy campaigns. Why the decline?  Well, according to the post, maybe Penn President Amy Gutmann is to blame.

But 2003 was the last time Penn won the football title. And that's also when current Penn president Amy Gutmann came on the scene.

Could the two incidents be related? When I asked Bagnoli last year if he felt he was getting enough support from the administration, he mostly shrugged. I get the feeling he had more to say ... but couldn't.

And then later:

For all I know, Gutmann is supporting athletics more than anyone at Penn, but the time parallels here are pretty clear. This is not only the longest championship drought for Bagnoli, his Quaker teams have had three straight losing Ivy seasons! And basketball fell off a cliff in 2007-08 for the first time in... forever.

Oh, and quarterback Robert Irvin is also to blame, says the blog, despite the fact that he was injured for all but 1.5 games last year and performed well in his sophomore season when he earned honorable mention All-Ivy honors.

Although this post is more than a little suspect -- Gutmann surely can't be blamed for Penn's football woes -- the blog, Roar Lions Roar, actually does have some legitimate information. Some links of note for Penn fans:

Will Lions WR Austin Knowlin have a big game on Saturday?

Is there a rivalry between Penn and Columbia?

Scouting Penn