The Basketball "Rivalry" Takes Center Stage

As everyone knows, I'm a football guy.
Even with the football season seven months away, I still get a lot of football news to sift through - but this weekend, an old-fashioned basketball "Rivalry" takes center stage.

Don't get me wrong, I still have a ton of football news to report. I'm watching the "Goodman 20" DVD for an upcoming DVD review for the blog, I'm discovering great articles about current Lehigh football players such as one gem about junior LB Tim Diamond (is he really getting talked about as a possible NFL prospect?) and on announcement about former Lehigh coach Casey Creehan getting a position with the Montreal Alouettes as a defensive line coach.

But with the 8-11 wrestling team traveling to Harvard and Brown this weekend (after their biggest win of the year this year against nationally-ranked Navy this past week), the hottest ticket in the Valley are one game in Easton and a possible sellout at Stabler Arena.

The first one features the surging women's basketball team (12-7 (4-0), Sagarin: 193) taking on the hated Lafayette Leopards (11-8 (3-1), Sagarin: 222) at 1PM in Easton in a battle for the league lead. A win here for the Lady Hawks would put head coach Sue Troyan's team in the driver's seat for the regular-season title with their seventh-straight win - including a key win against "that school in Easton". The Lady Hawks are doing it with balanced scoring and the emergence of sophomore G Alex Ross (10 ppg) and freshman G Erica Prosser (9.3 ppg, 22 steals, 2.6 apg). It's worth checking out this early battle for Patriot League supremacy and cheer the Lady Hawks on....

...and still give you plenty of time to get to Stabler for the 7PM tipoff for the men's basketball team (9-9 (2-2), Sagarin: 255) who also faces off against Lafayette (13-6 (4-0), Sagarin: 144). It's going to be a real extravaganza: it's "kid's night" with mascots, pop-a-shot and kid's activities (courtesy of the Hawk's Nest student supporters) for children, making a night out a Stabler a fun time for the whole family. Plus, the men's basketball team will be available to sign autographs for young fans as well. As a result of this promotion, the lower level is sold out - but there may be upper level seats still available.

A young Lehigh squad is 2-2 in the league, but can jump right into the upper echelon with a big win over the only undefeated team remaining in Patriot League play. Lafayette is winning from behind the 3-point line, averaging 11 hits from behind the arc per game. Fortunately for the Mountain Hawks, sophomore F Zahir Carrington (12.5 ppg) and senior F Bryan White (10.3 ppg) have been anchoring a powerful Lehigh frontcourt that has been playing much better defense of late.

It's going to be a rocking time at Stabler this weekend. These "Rivalry" clashes always are.

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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