Special: 10 Reasons to "Hate the 'Gate"

I couldn't really leave well enough alone. I'm so enthused by "Hate the 'gate" week at Lehigh that I was inspired to come up with ten (very good, in my humble opinion) reasons why you shouldn't merely root for a Lehigh victory this weekend against the Raiders of Colgate, but you should truly, honestly, "hate the 'Gate" this weekend.

10. First of all, Colgate leads the all-time series in football 24-18-2, and in almost every game in the past nine years the winner has gone on to win or share the Patriot League title. Too often that team has come from Hamilton, NY.

9. Before 1960, Lehigh played Colgate only once, in Binghamton, NY in 1922, getting embarassed 35-6. We need to avenge this embarassing stain on Lehigh's record.

8. According to local legend, this 1922 game featured the breakdown of Engine 13, stranding our beloved Engineers an extra day in Binghamton, NY and indirectly contributing to another loss to hated national-powerhouse Lafayette, 3-0.

7. In this article, Colgate's campus is said to look like Hogwarts of Harry Potter fame. The article fails to mention where the similarities begin and end. I don't know about you, but I have no desire to lose to a magical middle-school, do you?

6. Lehigh fans ask only one thing of Colgate every single year: to embarass Lafayette. So what do they do? They go out and lose to them for the first time in 10 years, getting dominated 27-10. For this indiscretion, they must pay.

5. Colgate's mascot, introduced this year as the "Raider", is beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst mascot in the Patriot League. (Holy Cross' Crusader comes a distant second.) I'm not sure if it's the pale skin from living through too many snowstorms in Hamilton, or the humiliation of not only looking like a Minuteman, but wearing a REDCOAT, putting him on the wrong side in the Revolutionary War. (May as well call him Benedict Arnold.)

4. Our Mountain Hawk could beat the living daylights out of the Raider. Heck, I'd give even odds to our cheerleading team against him.

3. Next to football, Lehigh sports fans are generally big into wrestling, a manly sport which is popular around the world and has its roots in ancient Greek and Roman times. Next to football, Colgate sports fans are generally big into hockey, some sport they play up in Canada.

2. Next to Lehigh, you have the fraternities on the Hill, bars and brewhouses in Bethlehem, and not too far away you also have Philadelphia nightlife as well. Next to Colgate, you have fraternities, snow-covered fields, and more snow-covered fields. Cow tipping has to be popular in that part of the state.

1. Deep down inside, despite our few differences I think we all know that Colgate fans and Lehigh fans are more similar than we all care to admit to ourselves. We're smart people who passionately love our football team with loads of class. Honestly. I've found myself rooting for Colgate in their miracle run through the I-AA playoffs in 2003, and I love to see them beat UMass. They are a level of class that is much higher than (say) Lafayette fans.

Which is why we need to "hate the 'Gate". They remind us too much of ourselves. We need to kick their butts this Saturday.

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....

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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