Two Out of Five... Isn't Good

The Patriot League only managed to win two out of their five Ivy League matchups this week, with Fordham and Colgate winning over two Ivy teams picked in the preseason to finish in the lower half of the league. Colgate was tied 20-20 with Dartmouth at the end of the 3rd quarter before pulling away for a 34-20 victory, while Fordham had to rally with 2 touchdowns in the final quarter to eke a 29-22 victory over Columbia in the annual "Liberty Cup".

Bucknell was unable to squeak out a victory over Cornell in a 21-20 defeat, who was picked to finish fifth in the Ivy League, and Holy Cross and Georgetown, respectively, fell to the two teams picked to vie for the Ivy League title: Harvard (losing 25-24) and Yale (losing 47-7).

What might be even more revealing, however, was how the three Ivy League games that didn't involve the Patriot League went. Brown beat Stony Brook 17-7, a team that pounded Colgate 42-26 the first weekend of the year. Princeton actually led at Johnson Hagood Stadium 17-7 at halftime over the Citadel (coached by former Lehigh head football coach Kevin Higgins) after ultimately falling 37-26 against a nationally-ranked team in the SoCon.

And Penn gave nationally-ranked Villanova all they could handle after suffering an absolutely gut-wrenching 20-14 overtime defeat. And yes, that's the same Villanova team that handled Lehigh easily 33-14 last weekend.

A 2-3 weekend that was two quarters and an overtime away from being 0-5 for the Patriot League.

Thanks to Fordham and Colgate for saving this weekend for the League.

Comments

Anonymous said…

And the Elon Phoenix rise to 3-1 and 1-0 in their conference actually pulling out a close win - something Lehigh forgot how to do.

9:38 AM

Anonymous said…

Football as we had come to know it is over and will not return, due to the administrations. Its just that simple, end of story. The patriot league stinks

12:35 PM

Anonymous said…

We need Scholarships for football before the league becomes too weak to fix.

1:30 PM

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