Sports Illustrated Opens The Archives

This will be a quick hit on a Tuesday, but it's cool enough to pass on immediately. Sports Illustrated just opened up their vault: namely, an online repository of every article written in the magazine in the last 54 years. After I stumbled across this, I couldn't help myself: I had to see for myself the Lehigh mentions in there.

I found 338 articles in there - more than enough for a (very) unofficial Lehigh football expert to get excited about.

For example, take this from an analysis of Colgate's 1977 squad getting "squeezed" out of a bowl - which mentions Lehigh hall-of-famer Fred Dunlap, Delaware and the Wing-T which he brought to Colgate:

A fullback at Colgate in the '40s, Dunlap was hired away from Lehigh, where he turned a 1-8 team into a 9-2 success that ranked in the nation's top five in offense and scoring in 1975. Dunlap also grew to understand the workings of limited-budget football: if you lack top-flight athletes, you stress a more subtle system of offense. Dunlap favored the wing T, a now-archaic attack once used with great success by a number of major teams. He had discovered its beauties at Lehigh practically every time he came up against Delaware, a Division II power that beat him eight of the 10 times they met. "Those game films used to disturb me," he says. "They didn't outhit us, or out-man us. Eventually I realized they simply outfinessed us."

Or look at this quote from Lehigh's AD in 1956 about his "biggest headache":

GENERAL P. L. SADLER, Lehigh University President, ECAC: Arranging satisfactory schedules for all sports, and particularly football, to satisfy our students and the alumni. We can't please everybody. Although we do our best, we hear in no uncertain terms from those who don't like our schedules. When we don't have a fair season, the headaches are bigger.

Granted, if you're a Notre Dame fan you're going to get an unparalleled college football history, but even for schools like Lehigh this is a great resource to add to the number of publicly availably free archives on the Web. You can bet the next time I work on a piece of Lehigh history I'm going to be hitting this archive.

Way to go, SI!

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