The Blog For Lehigh Fans

It's the middle of July, and I've been taking a small break from writing on my blog to (finally) go on a vacation and to finish some writings for the upcoming FCS Preview Magazine which was formerly sponsored by I-AA.org. The past couple weeks for me have involved a long-deserved break from work and writing to spend some quality time with my family -- followed by a mad blitz of writing, editing, and preparing for the upcoming FCS season. (Can you believe Patriot League Media Day is right around the corner?)

I may as well also announce that on College Sporting News I am officially going to be assuming the responsibility of senior FCS columnist, taking over for the legendary Dave Coulson (who will now be writing for the Sports Network, taking over for Matt Dougherty who was recently hired as the Patriot League Director of Media Relations).

That means that the diaries that I've been doing for College Sporting News are going to be fewer in number, and I'm going to be writing a more conventional column covering all of FCS. I'm really looking forward to the challenge of stepping into Dave Coulson's shoes, and it will require even more preparation and time than ever (i.e., I may have to do research every once in a while).

My expanded role with CSN is making me think about my Lehigh blog more as well. I really enjoy being the "point man" for news and opinions on Lehigh football and other Mountain Hawk sports, as well as Patriot League developments and other interesting news. I see no reason why I can't continue that as well as my column for CSN. After all, Lehigh football is my passion and it's how I got to writing about FCS football in the first place. It's also a great outlet for the passionate fan in me.

But - somewhere - there has to be a line of separation between Lehigh and the rest of FCS in my writings. It's something I've been thinking about for some time, and something you, the readers, have also been trying to tell me for some time. My goal this year is to have the Lehigh stuff and the Patriot League stuff in the blog, and anything that is "FCS National" go in my CSN column. This means the "Water Cooler", where I pick the games in the Top 25, are moving to CSN, but my Patriot League football picks will remain here on the blog.

This blog, for those coming here for the first time, talks about news and opinion involving Lehigh football, the Patriot League, and (in the off-season) other Lehigh sports. Each week I sum up the news, press conferences, give out my "Game Balls", and on Sunday I pick up a "word" to describe the weekend that was for Lehigh.

I always want to beat those Lafayette pansies every year. Don't be surprised if a "Lafayette Sucks" pops up in one of my posts, even it's about the Lehigh/VMI game.

In the next few weeks, I'm planning to post here the "Spring Roundup" from around the Patriot League, where I talk about all the off-season moves, the Spring Game, and rate the incoming classes. And RichH on the Lehigh Sports Message Board gave a great idea: this year Lehigh will be honoring the 30th anniversary of the 1977 Division II National Champions (at halftime of the Harvard game on September 29th). Why not come up with the team I would pick as my "all-time Lehigh team from the past 30 years", and post it here?

All this before Patriot League Media Day, pre-season workouts, and the two-deep. This ought to be fun.

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...

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog