I-AA Roundtable: Lehigh "On The Bubble"

Yesterday on the I-AA Waves internet radio show, national I-AA columnists Dave Coulson (of I-AA.org) and Matt Dougherty (of the Sports Network) discussed their preseason top 25. Ralph Wallace, the host, asked them about what they felt about the Patriot League and their preseason prospects. This is what they said:

Matt: The only three teams you can look at [for the Top 25] are Colgate, Lafayette and Lehigh... for Lehigh I kind of want to see what they do post Peete Lembo there. I like what [junior QB] Sedale Threatt brought to their team at the end of the season.

Dave: With Lehigh I kind of want to see how things are in the post-Lembo era before I really would pick them in the Top 25 yet. I did get a chance to see Sedale Threatt a couple of times... and was impressed with his athleticism, and that's a new dimension for a program like that up there - you don't usually see QB's like that in their league. They could be a sleeper type of team.

Interesting tidbits, and national respect for Sedale. For the first time in a long time, however, we're not the frontrunner in the Patriot League and we're instead considered a "sleeper team". It's to be expected, I guess, but it will make for an interesting beginning of the year, fighting for respect and (quite possibly) not being ranked in the Top 25.

Coming soon is the Any Given Saturday Top 25 poll. I'm a voter there, and I think I'll be putting Lehigh on my ballot... no higher than 25, though.

With I-AA Waves, it's rapidly proving that there really is no offseason, and it seems like almost every week Lehigh or a Patriot League team is mentioned on their broadcast. I'd suggest browsing through their archives, and consider downloading it to the ol' IPod. Shows of note:

5/9/2006: "Tubby" Raymond, former Delaware coach and Lehigh rival, and Kevin Kelly, Georgetown's new head coach

4/25/2006: Carol Femovich, Executive Director of the Patriot League

4/4/2006: Coach Frank Tavani of Lafayette (featuring Ralph Wallace and your favorite I-AA columnist, Chuck Burton)

3/21/2006: Coach K.C. Keeler, Delaware head coach

3/7/2006: Featuring your favorite I-AA columnist, Chuck Burton

2/28/2006: Coach Pete Lembo, former Lehigh head coach and current Elon head coach

Please forgive the shameless self-promotion, but seriously, they are great shows and feature incredible national guests.

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."

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog