Lehigh Football Nation

The FCS playoffs, second round, have started. My predictions are posted on the College Sporting News website, which you can check here . The big upset prediction? Southern Illinois upsetting Montana. As for TV, you can watch New Hampshire at UMass on CN8 (or watch it live here ), and at 4PM on ESPN2 you can watch Montana State get hammered by Applachian State. (Well, that's what I think will happen.) The Lehigh Women's basketball team is currently on a swing through Ohio. After losing last night to powerful Ohio University 57-40, the Lady Hawks have fallen to a disappointing 2-5 after a 2-0 start (including a surprising win over Syracuse of the Big East). Hopefully 1-5 Akron will prove to be a good chance for a win, whose only win came over Binghamton this year, but the Lady Hawks will have to overcome some woeful shooting from the past few games to get this thing turned around. Predictably, the men dismantled D-III Swarthmore 96-33, which stopped a three-game slide to

The chants of "Lafayette Sucks" from Easton have died down; Lafayette's time in the FCS playoffs are done after this weekend; Lehigh's fall sports season is coming to a close; and the temptation is to put away the talk about Lehigh football for another year. Although I'm thinking about talking about other Lehigh sports in this space (though with the Lady Hawks basketball team sitting at 2-3 losing to the Lady Dragons of Drexel, and the men's basketball team sitting at an incredibly disappointing 2-6 after losing to Notre Dame last night), the truth is this blog is about Lehigh football, first and foremost. And although the 2006 season is over, recruiting for 2007 is very much underway already and in two short months we'll have an idea about how far Lehigh is in regards to getting another Patriot League title and FCS playoff bid in the future. With the FCS playoffs not even over yet, rumors are flying. Will a former Patriot League freshman of the week be

Against the advice of some of the readers of this blog, Sunday's word isn't going to be the word "apologist" (for my Leopardphilia this week) or "unprofessional" (for my humorous post about UMass). Instead, I'm going for "rematch". There is going to be plenty of time to recap the 2006 Patriot League season, which ended Saturday with Lafayette's loss to UMass 35-14. There's time to go over the performance of coach Coen and to start thinking of the offseason. But it's still playoff time, and the two games everyone must be following are a pair of regular-season rematches between bitter leaguemates. It's somewhat ironic that in the BCS world we're very likely going to be denied the rematch that most fans would rather see (Ohio State/Michigan) in favor of a game which will be a whitewash in Ohio State/USC. In the world of the FCS playoffs, however, we get two interiguing second-round matchups that are very special rematches that