What Playoff Expansion Means For The Patriot League

The long-rumored expansion to the FCS playoffs came true late Friday of last week. Starting in 2010, the NEC and Big South will have automatic bids into the FCS playoffs, and NEC schools and Big South schools couldn't be more delighted with the announcement.

Below, I list the three immediate impacts that playoff expansion has on the Patriot League from my perspective.

Impacts

The NEC and the Big South will be offering more free education. With their brand-new shot at the FCS championship, you can bet that neither league will stand pat and not want to compete. The NEC is likely to bump up their scholarship levels - right now they offer 30, and it's likely to be bumped up to 45 in 2009, and maybe even 63 come 2010. They may find some level of resistance from the smaller schools in their league, like St. Francis (PA) and Sacred Heart, but the pressure of competition is probably too great. Similarly, Big South schools also haven't always been funding a full array of scholarships either, but the pressure on VMI, Gardner-Webb and Charleston Southern will be enormous to "cowboy up" with schools that are already there or close to it: Coastal Carolina, Liberty and Stony Brook.
Any recruiting advantage of "playing for a national championship" will disappear with NEC schools. Patriot League recruiting is hard and becoming harder with more and more free education around them with the full array of NEC schools and Stony Brook. But there was always that autobid that the Patriot League could always dangle in front of a recruit to say that "we have access to the championship, and if you go to Central Connecticut State you very likely won't have that chance." In 2010, that recruiting advantage is gone.
If nothing is done, the Patriot League will continue to slide. A long-overdue overhaul of the AI - very likely simply the formal adoption of an Ivy League-like banding system - may seem like enough to the Patriot League presidents to stay competitive. But it's clearly not the solution, with more and more free education luring away the remaining middle-class students that may want to look at a Patriot League education but are put off by the need to apply for financial aid. A partial scholarship model, with a strict Academic Index, mostly need-based aid for football players combined and some scholarships to get good middle-class students, could be a powerful combination competitively, while still keeping academic integrity intact and increasing economic diversity. But if solutions like that aren't considered - or if AI reform is considered "good enough" - we could see what Lafayette head coach Frank Tavani feared most: that things might be "staying the same [while we] watch the level of play diminish".

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. W

Made-Up Midseason Grades for Lehigh Football

We are now officially midway through the 2023 Lehigh football season. The Mountain Hawks sit at 1-5 overall, and 0-1 in the Patriot League. I thought I'd go ahead and make up some midseason grades, and set some "fan goals" for the second half. The 2023 Mountain Hawks were picked to finish fifth in the seven team Patriot League. In order to meet or exceed that expectation, they'll probably have to go at least 3-2 the rest of the way in conference play. Their remaining games are vs. Georgetown, at Bucknell, vs. Holy Cross, at Colgate, and vs. Lafayette in The Rivalry. Can they do it? Culture Changing: B+ . I was there in the Bronx last week after the tough 38-35 defeat to Fordham, and there wasn't a single player emerging from the locker room that looked like they didn't care. Every face was glum. They didn't even seem sad. More frustrated and angry. That may seem normal, considering the agonizing way the Mountain Hawks lost, but it was a marked chan

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

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