Lehigh Football Nation

The one thing you can say for certain about the demise of St. Peter's football is that it came at the absolute worse possible time. It came at a time when FCS powers were meeting in Chicago, IL to discuss the future on non-scholarship football in Division I. I'm guessing that the demise of a non-scholarship conference wasn't on the original list of talking points. Forget for a moment that clever MAAC puns (like the not-so-funny one titling this post) are history. Forget that you won't be seeing any matchups like Iona/St. Peter's in 2007. Forget that St Peter's scheduled out-of-conference foes for 2007 in the form of Monmouth, Wagner, and St. Francis (and a bunch of non Division I teams) are now left in the wilderness with extremely slim chances to reschedule games in the next couple of months. (Although this blogger feels confident about Monmouth's chances of rescheduling.) Forget the St. Peter's football alumni. Forget the returning players of th...

"News You Need to Know" sounds like a good blog posting title for a list of those dibs & dabs around the world of Lehigh, the Patriot League, and FCS Football that good Lehigh fans ought to be aware of. Even though kickoff is 86 days away, it doesn't mean that there's no news to speak of. As a matter of fact one huge development could be occurring today in Chicago. Expansion with Bryant? One fact in which there is no doubt is that Bryant University, based in Smithfield, Rhode Island, is beginning an exploratory year where this D-II school out of the NE-10 conference is hoping to join Division I. “Filing this application shows the seriousness of our intent,” Bill Smith, director of athletics, said yesterday. Bryant has had informal discussions with the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), Northeast Conference (NEC) and Patriot League ... “The next step is to continue conversations with the commissioners, athletic directors and presidents. We have to see if...

It's becoming more and more clear that Patriot League schools aren't the only schools among the intellectually elite institutions that are having the debate about athletic recruiting and academics. This article from the San Francisco Chronicle treads a lot of the same ground I did in my "New Realities" blog postings and the College Sporting News article , even though the subject matter is the long-term survival of Stanford in the Pac-10. If anything, it shows that the subjects being tackled by the Patriot League in regards to academic indexes and institutional control are hardly unique to our league. From the article: "They can't keep raising the bar,'' said Dave Tipton, a former All-America defensive tackle at Stanford who served as an assistant coach there for 18 years under five head coaches. He said the admissions standards for football players are "markedly'' higher than they were 10 years ago. "Hopefully it will go back ...