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....

Merrimack at Lehigh Game Breakdown and Fearless Prediction, 9/28/2019

It's what we do every week: copiously go over the opposing game notes and analyze the upcoming game matchup. I'm starting to call these the "football nerd" previews because it feels like the audience for these detailed team breakdowns are other football nerds like myself. For Lehigh fans, there is no greater need for a "football nerd"-level breakdown of an opponent than Merrimack. Few opponents have been as big as an unknown to Mountain Hawk fans as the school that formed right after World War II in North Andover, Massachusetts. Helping that sense of mystery is that the Merrimack Athletics' website offers no football game notes, and when you click on the link called "Weekly Two-Deep", you get a two-deep from 2018. Merrimack, until recently a member of the Northeast-10 conference in Division II, announced they are going to join the NEC as a full Division I member in time for the 2023-2024 season. “The College’s 2011 strategic ...

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.

Lehigh Football Nation

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