Lehigh Football Nation

It's a special "Bye Week" version of the Water Cooler this week. It remains to be seen if anyone even reads this today since there's no Lehigh game, but there will be a lot of Patriot League and I-AA action this week, so it should be another exciting Saturday as we patiently await Lehigh/Harvard in eight days. Where's Chuck Going This Weekend? Ralph Wallace from I-AA.org is flying out east, and he's going to be attending the Hampton/Morgan State game with me at 4:00PM, and then we will be hightailing it out of there so we can catch (at least) the second half of the Lafayette/Princeton game. With Matt Dougherty of the Sports Network also heading over to Princeton, it's quite possible that the game in Princeton, NJ will be the "best covered coverage of a matchup of unranked I-AA teams in history", as Matt said this past week on I-AA Waves . Ralph and I will be taking pictures at this game, and I will also be keeping a "I-AA Diary" on the

I want to give credit where credit is due: I think it is superfan ngineer who said that he wished that this loss didn't come during a bye week. The loss hurts all the more with an extra week to think about it. Not only the team; it hurts the fans as well. (Just looking over my inbox makes THAT point pretty plain.) But before you're ready to give up on this season, I want to say a couple more things. Lehigh is a young team, with a brand-new coaching staff and a lot of talent on both sides of the ball. Too often we've looked at teams like Princeton and thought that we're going to dispatch them simply because we're playing at home; we're nationally-ranked; or simply because we're Lehigh and they're Princeton. Those days are over. Lehigh can win and lose every week to anybody. We're a young team that is pretty raw, especially on offense. Not only on the field, but in the coaching staff as well. This is a group that is trying to find its way with the pla

I put a lot of thought into this Sunday's word. "Hubris"? Was it hubris that had us losing this game? "Ivy"? Was it the Ivy just simply putting the smack down on us? "Granite"? Was it our guys, whenever we needed a big running play, they looked like they simply ran into a block of granite? After watching the replay, to me the word that sticks out is "fitness". Why? I can't say if the players went out there expecting to beat an Ivy team before the game was even played, so "hubris" gets thrown out. Similarly, the "Ivies" put a real good hurting on the whole Patriot League this week (heck, even Colgate was down 7-6 at half to.... Dartmouth.) It *could* be league-wide hubris. But that's not why we lost. "Granite" comes closer. On 2nd-and-goal from the 3, we hand off to senior RB Marques Thompson and he gets stuffed by Princeton LB Doori Song. 3rd-and-6, and then we see another incompletion. 4th d