Skip to main content

With Tremendous Confidence, Lehigh Pulls Away Big In Second Half To Beat Georgetown 35-3


(Photo Credit: Keith Groller/Morning Call)

It felt a lot closer than 14 to 3 at halftime.

Sure, Lehigh had outgained Georgetown 220-64 on offense up until that point.  Definitely, the Lehigh defense, which has been playing with a chip on its shoulder for most of the entire season, was playing, as they say, lights-out, and they had just come up with a big defensive stop in the red zone to keep Georgetown from cutting it from 14-7 rather than 14-3.

But a batted ball at the line of scrimmage, alertly grabbed by DE Hoya DE Hunter Kiselick, made it feel like the Mountain Hawks might rue the opportunities they had in the first hald to put away Georgetown.

After coming in for injured senior QB Nick Shafnisky, sophomore QB Brad Mayes jumped right into the fray and finished the scoring drive with a perfect pass over the middle to junior WR Troy Pelletier to make the score 14-3 Lehigh.

But after a drive that went backwards and that interception, it was Georgetown that had momentum going into halftime, and they were getting the ball back as well.

That's when the Mountain Hawks, who have defined this season so far as being a second half team, put the game away resoundingly.

"I'm pleased with how the kids responded at halftime," head coach Andy Coen said after the game.  "It wasn't very pretty on the offensive side on the offensive side of the ball in the first half.  The staff did a great job, got the kids rallied around, made a couple different turns of the wheel, so to speak, and really got the thing running again.

It started with the defense settling in on stopping Georgetown after the Hoyas drove into Lehigh territory to start the second half.

A pass interference call on Lehigh sophomore CB Donavon Harris and a 10 yard completion to Hoya WR Brandon Williams would help get Georgetown to the 25 yard line, setting up a long but makeable 42 yard field goal attempt by one of the best kickers in the Patriot League, Georgetown PK Henry Darmstadter.

It had enough leg, but went wide left, and soon thereafter, the Lehigh offense would really put this game away.

This Time, It's A Catch
After driving into Georgetown territory, Mayes appeared to have a touchdown or near-touchdown pass to Casey on 3rd and 8.  After a somewhat lengthy delay, however, involving a timeout-that-ended-up-not-being-a-timeout by Sgarlata, the officials correctly overturned the call, correctly discovering that the ball squirted out of Casey's arms as his momentum carried him into the end zone.

The easy call would have been to punt the ball away and pin Georgetown deep, but instead coach Coen decided to go for it.

The gutsy call paid off, as the offense called the exact same play, with the key difference being that Casey held onto the ball this time.  One play later, sophomore RB Dominick Bragalone punched it in for the 21-3 lead.
"We went for it there because our defense was playing really well and we were confident in the play we ran because it was the exact same play we ran on the previous play when we thought Gatlin had made the catch," Coen said. "He made another good catch and Brad made a good throw. We thought it was important to be aggressive and that's the way we feel we have to be if we're going to be a team that's going to accomplish its goals."
After that touchdown, it was Lehigh stop, Lehigh touchdown, Lehigh stop, Lehigh touchdown, as the Mountain Hawk defense seemed to gain strength as Georgetown was losing theirs.

A combination of penalties, constant harassment from senior LB Colton Caslow and senior LB Evan Harvey, and a tremendous sack by sophomore LB Mark Walker would give Georgetown negative yards on two straight drives, while the offense was responding with touchdowns.

"That was fantastic, to come out here and get a team win," Caslow said afterwards.  "We were able to shut them down defensively, and get points up on offense, which was great.  One of our best defensive efforts this year."

For the fifth straight week, Lehigh quarterbacks would find both Gatlin Casey and Troy Pelletier for touchdowns in the same game, and for the third straight week, both Casey and Pelletier would exceed 100 all-purpose yards in a game as well.  Casey's 164 yards receiving and 2 TDs topped all receivers, while Pelletier's 68 receiving yards and 46 punt return yards would net 114 all-purpose yards to go along with his touchdown grab.

"All week you try to prepare as if you are going to be starting because you know you're just one play from going in there and being the starter, so it doesn't matter if it's the first quarter or the fourth quarter … once you go in, you're the starter," Mayes said. "With the weapons I have and the coaches I have, I am truly blessed. This doesn't happen without them."

Mayes, who would end the day 19 of 26 passing for 247 yards and 2 TDs, did a great job coming in and putting away the Hoyas in the second half, for good measure converting a 3rd-and-11 play with his feet, tucking the ball away and running 14 yards after no receivers got themselves open.  And he used all his weapons effectively, including senior WR Derek Knott over the middle for big gains and senior WR Trevor Soccaras down the sidelines to keep the chains moving.

It was set up, though, by Lehigh's smothering defensive effort, who only yielded a grand total of 177 yards of offense on the entire afternoon - 103 through the air, and 74 on the ground.


"They did a great job," Coen said of the defense. "I'm becoming more and more impressed with how our defense is putting the plan together every week and were maybe a couple (return) yards away from having a shutout.  Some might have called it a classic trap game but we tried really hard not to fall into that. At halftime it sure looked that way, but we rallied them up at halftime and the guys really responded."


(Thanks to Keith Groller, The Morning Call and his Twitter feed for the postgame interview.  You can follow them at @mcall and @KeithGroller.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

Made-Up Midseason Grades for Lehigh Football

 We are now officially midway through the 2023 Lehigh football season.  The Mountain Hawks sit at 1-5 overall, and 0-1 in the Patriot League. I thought I'd go ahead and make up some midseason grades, and set some "fan goals" for the second half. The 2023 Mountain Hawks were picked to finish fifth in the seven team Patriot League.  In order to meet or exceed that expectation, they'll probably have to go at least 3-2 the rest of the way in conference play.  Their remaining games are vs. Georgetown, at Bucknell, vs. Holy Cross, at Colgate, and vs. Lafayette in The Rivalry. Can they do it? Culture Changing: B+ .  I was there in the Bronx last week after the tough 38-35 defeat to Fordham, and there wasn't a single player emerging from the locker room that looked like they didn't care.  Every face was glum.  They didn't even seem sad.  More frustrated and angry. That may seem normal, considering the agonizing way the Mountain Hawks lost, but it was a marked chan

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini .  The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero.  (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people?  Here they are, in alphabetical order.