Patriot League Tops in APR, And The Playoffs Expand

Two quick big news items that hit the wire today, both covering the entire world of FCS football.

First was that Lehigh and the Patriot League were singled out for praise in an AP story in regards to academic performance. The NCAA singled out 712 sports teams across the NCAA for their excellent work in the classroom, of which 150 were from the Ivy League and 89 were from the Patriot League.

Yale produced the most impressive classroom performance for the second straight year. Of the 29 men’s and women’s sports offered by the school and measured by the NCAA, the Bulldogs made the list in 28 sports. Dartmouth was honored 24 times, followed by Brown (21), the University of Pennsylvania (20), Princeton (19) and Harvard (18).

Other schools that fared well included Bucknell (17), Lehigh and Holy Cross (15), Davidson (14), Lafayette and Colgate (13). The Naval Academy, Duke and Georgetown each had 12 teams on the list, and Notre Dame had 11 although the Fighting Irish did not make it in football.

Lehigh didn't make it in football either - and interestingly, 11 of the 15 teams which were honored were women's sports. The full list of Lehigh's award-winning sports are: Baseball, Men's & Women's Cross Country, Men's & Women's Tennis, Wrestling, Women's Basketball, Women's Golf, Women's Lacrosse, Women's Rowing, Women's Soccer, Softball, Women's Track (Indoor), Women's Track (Outdoor), and Women's Volleyball.

The second item - and one that I will be talking about next week for sure - is the expansion of the FCS football playoff field to 20 teams in 2010:

As a result of the NCAA Board of Directors� approval of a new budget that allows for the expansion of the Division I Football Championship Subdivision post-season bracket, the Northeast Conference will gain automatic access into the Division I Football Championship beginning in 2010. NEC Football is also eligible for automatic qualification into the championship bracket during the 2008 and 2009 seasons if its champion meets specifications of the bridge program.

The recently-approved budget contained a proposal from the Division I Football Championship Committee calling for an increase in the number of FCS playoff participants to 20, a 25 percent rise from its current 16-team format. The NEC will acquire one of the four added berths and be guaranteed an opportunity to play for the 2010 FCS Championship.

The other automatic bid is widely believed to be the Big South, home to Stony Brook, Coastal Carolina, Liberty, Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, and VMI. Should they compete as a league for the next two years, their first year of playoff eligibility will be, indeed, in 2010.

The interesting thing to the Patriot League is the domino that might now have fallen in terms of scholarships for the NEC. It seems likely that the NEC will vote an increase in scholarships offered from 30 to 45 to prepare for 2010, making the competition for Division I football players even more intense in the northeast.

2010 will officially look like a very different world than even 2008 in terms of FCS football. When recruiting against the NEC, there was always the carrot of a possible autobid to play in the FCS championship. In 2010, NEC schools can offer the exact same carrot - and scholarships to boot.

What, if anything, will the Patriot League do?

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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