This Weekend in Lehigh Sports 2/16/2007

Sure, there's two huge dual meet this weekend versus ranked opponents for Lehigh's wrestling team. Sure, the men's basketball team has an always-huge game against Lafayette in Easton on Sunday. But no game in the Lehigh Valley is more important than the women's basketball team this Saturday at Kirby Sports complex.

Why is that? The Lady Hawks (9-16, 4-7) have a unique opportunity - to enter the postseason Patriot League tournament at Navy either as cannon fodder for Bucknell or a chance to wear the home jerseys for a game and put themselves with an opportunity to sweep their way into the NCAA tournament. With four teams at 4-7 (including 6-20 Lafayette) and two more at 5-6 (including next weekend's opponent Holy Cross), if Lehigh can find a way to win these three games this week, you have to like their chances in the tournament to possibly make a run. Beat hated rival Lafayette this weekend, beat league leader Bucknell at home on Wednesday, and finish off Holy Cross next Saturday, and all of a sudden, it's a brand new season. Lose all three games, and it's time for toast.

It will require complete efforts like we saw Tuesday against Colgate, where the Lady Hawks demolished the Lady Raiders 68-50. With six players with 8 points or more and 20 rebounds from the starting five, if Lehigh can keep this momentum up and play tough, we could still be in this thing. But the most important game is tomorrow night against a Lafayette team who will be eager to close out their regular season with some momentum as well. With so little separating six teams, every win is crucial.

Tonight, we're going to see the men's wrestling team continue their torrid pace with a couple of big duals versus nationally-ranked Nebraska (#19) on Friday and Penn (#20) on Sunday. The #24-ranked Mountain Hawks, and their three nationally-ranked wrestlers, will be looking to close out the duals season on a high note before the EIWA championships March 2nd and the NCAA Championships March 15th.

Finally, although the men's basketball team will be looking to close out their league slate with another win over their hated rival Lafayette on Sunday, the Mountain Hawks will be looking more to see how well C Jason Mgebroff can get back into the gameplan before the two "twin terrors" of Bucknell and Holy Cross to end the league schedule. Barring a complete collapse, Lehigh will be the #3 seed going into the playoffs and will host a first round game, but if there's any realistic hope to make a run against mighty Bucknell and Holy Cross, I'll be looking for a strong finish in the league. I'm hoping with Mgebroff back, we have a shot. We'll see on Sunday.

As always, you can follow the action on lehighsports.com.

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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