As Men's Basketball Ends, Another Door Opens

As the season of the men's basketball team ended with a thud in a 64-61 overtime loss - again - to Army, an announcement from a mid-major basketball powerhouse concerning my favorite sport at Lehigh - football.

Drake announced today that they will be traveling to Murray Goodman Stadium to be our home opener this year. Drake, out of the non-scholarship Pioneer Football League, last year became the first-ever Division I non-scholarship team to beat a fully funded FCS scholarship team when they beat Illinois State 27-24 in their season opener last year.

"We are excited about going to Bethlehem, Pa. to play one of the great Division FCS programs in this country," said first-year Drake coach Chris Creighton. "We are also happy to announce that Lehigh will be coming here to Des Moines in 2010."

Teams from the PFL have made great strides recently, with Dayton ruining the homecoming of last year's Patriot League Champion Fordham 31-24 , so it should be more of a challenge that it might appear to some. Don't be fooled by the moniker "non-scholarship". That means a lot less than it used to.

Looks like a good game to kick things off this year, and finally Lehigh will be able to announce their 11 game schedule for 2008 - hopefully soon.

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