Lehigh Sports Weekend: A Very Busy Friday

Since it's still college football season for me (as evidenced by my new poll asking readers for their vote for LFN Player of the Year, my open letter to NCAA President Myles Brand, and my preview of FCS games this weekend, including the playoff quarterfinal games), I haven't had much of a chance to do much hyping of the Lehigh winter sports that I enjoy so much.

But while I was busy, Lehigh's wrestling team was - shall we say - busy.

Busy resurrecting themselves as a national program. As EIWA title contenders. Maybe even rising from the ashes to make some serious noise this March in the NCAA Championships, too.

Lehigh has gone from being unranked starting the year from going an amazing 8-0 in the early going all the way to a No. 10 Intermat ranking. That included an utter 41-3 domination of Princeton. A win over No. 9 Michigan. And last weekend, it meant an upset win over No. 7 Oklahoma State in the Northeast Duals to give the Lehigh wrestlers a perfect 8-0 mark.

That's right. A perfect record. Thanks to a perfect 8-0 record by senior 149 lb Trevor Chinn and identical 6-1 records by junior 165 lb Mike Galante and junior 184 lb David Craig - Lehigh wrestling once again is amongst the elite programs in the nation.

This weekend, the grapplers are in Las Vegas to compete in the Las Vegas Invitational. Not since 2001 has a Lehigh wrestler won at this event - but this year, where every week has proven to be filled with pleasant surprises, who knows?

That highlights a very busy Friday. What other events grace the schedule?

Women's Basketball (Record: 5-2: Real-Time RPI: 169):
7:00 P.M. 12/5 Friday, Bethlehem, PA vs. Bryant (Record: 3-4: Real-Time RPI: N/A)
1:00 P.M. 12/7 Sunday Villanova, PA vs. Villanova (Record: 3-4: Real-Time RPI: 166)

Two very winnable games for the Lady Hawks, including one against a D-I transitional team in Bryant (out of Rhode Island) that might be tougher than you think.

Men's Basketball (Record: 5-2: Real-Time RPI: 181)
7:00 P.M. 12/5 Friday, Stony Brook, NY vs. Stony Brook (Record: 3-3: Real-Time RPI: 301)
7:00 P.M. 12/8 Monday, Bethlehem, PA vs. Albany (Record: 5-2: Real-Time RPI: 47)

It doesn't get any easier for the Mountain Hawks this week. You can't overlook the Seawolves, and for basketball fans who know their stuff, the game versus Albany should prove to be a great litmus test as to how far along the basketball team realy is.

Should be a great weekend! Most of these events can be seen or heard through LehighSports.Com.

(All RPI calculations are figured out using http://www.realtimerpi.com.)

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

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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