Penn football marks 150th season with Rick Santos debut schedule
Penn’s 10-game 2026 slate opens Rick Santos’ era and lands in the program’s 150th season, with Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton shaping the first real test.
Penn’s 2026 football schedule is more than a routine Ivy League release. It opens the Rick Santos era, lands in the program’s 150th anniversary season and gives the Quakers a clear early read on whether this can be a year of continuity or a reset under new leadership.
The school announced a 10-game slate with five home dates and five road games, beginning Sept. 19 at Bucknell and bringing the home opener to Franklin Field against Lehigh on Sept. 26. Ivy League play starts Oct. 3 at Dartmouth, then Penn returns to Philadelphia for a non-conference home game against Howard on Oct. 10 before the conference race takes over.
That stretch is where the season starts to take shape. Columbia visits Franklin Field on Oct. 17, followed by Yale on Oct. 24, giving Penn a chance to stack home results before a difficult closing month. The Quakers then travel to Brown on Oct. 31 and Cornell on Nov. 7, host Harvard for Homecoming on Nov. 14, and finish the regular season at Princeton on Nov. 21. Three of the final four games are on the road, a setup that could decide where Penn lands in the Ivy standings.
The backdrop matters as much as the dates. Penn finished 2025 at 6-4 overall and 4-3 in Ivy play, so Santos is not inheriting a blank slate. He arrives with major FCS credentials after guiding New Hampshire to three NCAA FCS Playoff appearances as a head coach, and Penn has made clear that it hired him to keep the program in championship contention. At Penn, he carries the title of George A. Munger Head Football Coach.
The 150th-anniversary framing gives the schedule extra weight. Penn’s football roots go back to 1876, when the sport first appeared on campus, and the program’s history includes national championships in 1895, 1897, 1904 and 1908. In that context, the 2026 slate is not just a list of opponents. It is the first public roadmap for how Santos intends to balance Penn’s history with the expectations of an Ivy program that still measures itself against the national FCS standard.
The opener at Dartmouth may be the first real tell. Penn leads the all-time series 49-40-2, but the Quakers have not beaten the Big Green at Franklin Field since Oct. 5, 2013, a reminder that league landmarks and rivalry history still carry real bite in the Ivy race. Harvard’s visit for Homecoming and the trip to Princeton will likely tell the rest of the story. Penn’s first Santos schedule is built to test whether the Quakers can honor the standard that came before while showing something distinctly new.
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