Lehigh Football Nation

With the Lehigh wrestling team taking the weekend off before the EIWA wrestling championships, the focus turns to two struggling teams hoping to close out their regular seasons with much-needed "W"s on senior day. Who needs their win over Holy Cross more? Probably the women's team - who possibly can escape the possibility of playing powerhouses Bucknell or Army if they win Saturday at 7:00PM. The Lady Hawks could finish anywhere from 5th to 8th depending on the results from Saturday. Conversely, the men's team has third place locked up and will host a first-round playoff game even if they lose on Sunday at 1:00PM (by virtue of their regular-season sweep over American, the 4th-placed team). But riding a three-game losing streak is NOT the way to enter Patriot League tournament play, which is what both our basketball teams face going into this weekend. The way both teams played their past two clangers, both teams are going to need to turn things around immediately

With every single one of Lehigh's winter sports teams laying a humongous egg this weekend, and with the reality of Lehigh's recruiting class now fully digested by all you Lehigh football fans out there, it's time to delve into one of the favorite offseason topics: the state of Patriot League football, the types of football recruits we can get, and what steps to take, if any, to move forward. It's a complicated subject, to put it mildly. That's why I'm subdividing this into a "series" of blog postings to go over the state of the league. Part I will introduce about the Patriot League recruiting and compare it against the Ivy League in particular, Part II will consider football recruiting against full-scholarship and partial-scholarship FBS and FCS schools, and Part III will consider where to go from here. Who Are We, Really? The Patriot League is a Division I sports league that competes in Football Championship Series (FCS, formerly known as I-AA) and