A new I-AA Diary; Playoff Predictions

A New I-AA Diary
To see my play-by-play diary of the Lehigh/James Madison game on I-AA.org, click on the link below:
I-AA Diary: Lehigh vs. James Madison

Again, I felt like Lehigh played a very good game on Saturday against a great team. Lehigh has nothing to be ashamed of with a great effort, with no turnovers, awesome defense, and brave offense standing up to James Madison's physical play.

Proud Patriots
Lehigh and Lafayette both played excellent games against the best conference in I-AA, the Atlantic 10, and in both cases nearly came away with the victory. On this blog you won't see much praise of Lafayette, but they need to get their props for scaring the entire state of Delaware on Saturday. A laughingstock to the rest of I-AA before Saturday, they clearly showed that they were the equals to Delaware last Saturday and very nearly pulled off the biggest upset of the 1st round.

Overall, despite the losses, both schools did the Patriot League proud, and can enter the offseason with their heads held high.

Playoff (yuck) Predictions
I know everyone who picked Georgia Southern on their side of the bracket got upset. But 3-5 screams out to me, "Don't quit your day job".

Really right:
Furman/Jacksonville St. Predicted score: 44-17; Real score: 49-7. Furman took care of business at home against the OVC, and I did pretty well here.

William & Mary/Hampton. Predicted score: 34-28; Real score: 42-35. I thought this game might be closer than some folks thought, and I was right. The margin of victory was only off by 1 point.

Kinda right:
Montana/Northwestern St. It wasn't a 10-point Montana win like I predicted - it was more like a Montana blowout. Still, on a tough week, I'll take it.

Should have been right:
James Madison/Lehigh. Had the questionable call at the goal line not been called, and the Dukes had to settle for a FG in that spot, we all might be celebrating a 13-10 Lehigh victory.

Delaware/Lafayette. Most of I-AA Nation was shocked to see Lafayette ahead of Delaware in the middle of the 4th quarter. I wasn't. If Maurer didn't fumble the ball away with a minute to play, we might have seen overtime, and Lafayette absolutely could have pulled it off.

Eastern Washington/Southern Illinois. I knew this would be a close, well-fought game. What was amazing was I thought somehow the Salukis would come up with an answer at home, when the Eagles have thrived on close games all year. The Salukis couldn't, and the Eagles snatched the victory. Had I only had the courage to pick the upset.

Was I ever wrong!:
Sam Houston St./Western Kentucky. I guess I overrated the Gateway and the Hilltoppers' 2 losses to a I-A and Southern Illinois. Sam Houston S. proved the Southland is a good conference - at home anyway. But a 30-point blowout?

New Hampshire/Georgia Southern. The biggest upset by far of the first round, I picked a 20 point blowout GSU win. Ricky Santos sure messed that up for me. What an unbelievable victory. I was totally flat-footed.

This Tuesday: Press; Game Balls for Lehigh/JMU

Later This Week: All-Patriot Team Honors; 2nd Round Predictions

Next Tuesday: Lehigh Football Nation's Player Of the Year + Virtual Awards

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....

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

#TheRivalry Flashback: November 21st, 1987: Lehigh 17, Lafayette 10

Since becoming an undergrad at Lehigh back in the late 1980s, I first heard about the historic nature of the football team and "The Rivalry" through the stories that fellow students would share. I did not attend the final meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Taylor Stadium, which was the final time a football game would be played there. Those that did attend said that was that it was cold. "I remember it being one of the coldest games ever," Mark Redmann recollected, "with strong Northwesterly winds and the temperature hovering around 20. By the end of the game, the stands were half empty because most of the fans just couldn't take the cold. "Fortunately, several of my fraternity brothers snuck in flasks to help fend off the chill."

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