Scholarships And Recruiting In 2008

I've been spending the past two weeks recovering from the "worst cold I've ever had in my life", so apologies for not talking about the upcoming week in Lehigh sports (although I'm beginning to think I shouldn't, since as soon as I skipped the preview the wrestling team, men's basketball team and women's basketball team all sported big upset victories).

As we're in the long offseason, we catch glimpses and rumors of players that may be committing to the Brown and White for the class of 2012. Starting next week I'll start posting more information on some of these "potentials" as more information starts to become available.

But deserving of equal time is the ones that don't choose the Patriot League - over, presumably, a free education. Looking for Lehigh recruiting information, I stumbled across this:

Two-way linemen Austin Kugler of Toms River River North and Mike Murphy of Toms River East said Saturday they have made oral commitments to play football at Monmouth University.
Kugler, a 6-3, 225-pound defensive end/tight end, and Murphy, a 6-4, 254-pound center, defensive end and defensive tackle, were 2007 Asbury Park Press All-Shore first team selections.
Kugler said he was impressed with the scholarships offered by Monmouth and with its plans for a new athletic facility.
"They're building that new sports complex for basketball and for football locker rooms and things like that," he said.
Kugler said he was recruited to play defensive end.
"I really didn't care what position," he said. "I liked them both. Whichever one they thought I was better at was fine with me."
Kugler said he also was recruited by Albany, Bucknell, Lafayette, and Lehigh.

This is becoming a more familiar refrain around the Patriot League these days. Division I football athletes, "impressed" with scholarships, picking a less selective school because his education at Monmouth is paid for.

It's just a stark reminder: scholarships at schools like Monmouth are truly taking a hefty slice out of former Patriot League recruiting strongholds. And it's probably going to take more free education to have these same athletes -who obviously have the grades to be considered at Bucknell, Lehigh and Lafayette - consider going back to a Patriot League school.

Comments

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....

Merrimack at Lehigh Game Breakdown and Fearless Prediction, 9/28/2019

It's what we do every week: copiously go over the opposing game notes and analyze the upcoming game matchup. I'm starting to call these the "football nerd" previews because it feels like the audience for these detailed team breakdowns are other football nerds like myself. For Lehigh fans, there is no greater need for a "football nerd"-level breakdown of an opponent than Merrimack. Few opponents have been as big as an unknown to Mountain Hawk fans as the school that formed right after World War II in North Andover, Massachusetts. Helping that sense of mystery is that the Merrimack Athletics' website offers no football game notes, and when you click on the link called "Weekly Two-Deep", you get a two-deep from 2018. Merrimack, until recently a member of the Northeast-10 conference in Division II, announced they are going to join the NEC as a full Division I member in time for the 2023-2024 season. “The College’s 2011 strategic ...

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini . The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero. (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people? Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog