Just Reporting the Rumors

All of Lehigh Nation is anxiously awaiting the announcement of coach Coen's staff, and trying to divine the tea leaves from the various announcements, the press conference, and (of course) what Marty overheard Joe tell Frank at the basketball or wrestling games. Everyone wants to know: Who's staying? Who's going? Are there players who have left the program, or maybe staying another year? Is OL coach John Powers (pictured here) staying or going?

It's an odd place for Lehigh Nation to be right now. Normally we're counting the days until spring football or eagerly going to lehighsports.com to find out when the Class of 2010 will be announced. Instead, we're trawling every corner of the web trying to figure out who's in and who's out.

After an exhaustive search, I've identified three serious issues that fans are looking at.

1) OL line coach John Powers: staying or going? I've heard reports that he's already been out the door, with coach Coen taking over the OL coaching duties -- a rumor that may have come from the fact that coach Coen was both offensive coordinator and OL coach at Penn. I can't say that this is true or not, but I do know that coach Powers is still on the Lehigh campus, making this statement a RUMOR, most likely.

2) WR Andre Hall and DE Mike Murawnski, gone? On the official Lehigh roster, both Hall and Murawnski's names disappeared from the roster, and folks have been wondering if they have really left, or is it a typo. The answer is that it is FACT that both have left the team. Hall was a big WR who likely saw a huge logjam for playing time on the depth chart this year, but Murawnski to me looked like a promising DE who could have pushed to be a starter in 2006. Having said that, it's not uncommon to see some folks drop off the roster year to year, especially in areas where we've been loaded in 2005 (like DE and WR).

3) Can/Will Eric Rath return in 2006? With senior RB Eric Rath having such a great 2005, fans are wondering if he has a year of eligibility left, and will be play another year for the Mountain Hawks. This comes up since during Eric's sophomore year, he took a year off from football. It is a FACT that he could possibly play in 2006, though it would require a petition of the Patriot League and the NCAA in order to play his final year of eligibility. However, ss much as we'd like to think that everyone's decisions on their education comes solely from a football perspective, the truth is that there are many many more issues to deal with that just football when it comes to spending another year at school. Therefore it is only RUMOR that he is actually coming back - there is no indication one way or another that Eric wants to come back in 2006.

4. Central Catholic's Donnie Roberts' heading back to Lehigh coaching staff. Coach Coen talked highly of coach Roberts who is a good friend of his, in this January 5th article from Keith Groller. It's still a RUMOR at this point of him coming back to the Mountain Hawks, but an intriguing possibility if it's true. You also have to wonder if some of the other local coaches in the article - Quakertown's John Donnelly or Emmaus' Jon Bottiglieri - might also find themselves as possibilities on Coen's new coaching staff.

Keep checking in here for all the latest.

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

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

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

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