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 A.D., 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.