Lehigh Football Alumni in the News

Thought I'd take this time to highlight some prominent news regarding Lehigh football alumni (and former staff) today.

You may not have been aware that former linebacker Jason Stokes was named Bloomingdale High (FL) 2008 Coach of the Year and the first-time head coach has started to build a sucessful high school program in Florida, but now you do.

A slew of former Lehigh football assistant coaches just recently made some news at a slew of MAC schools. Start with former Lehigh assistant coach Casey Creehan, who will be coaching the defensive line at Eastern Michigan; former Lehigh assistant coach and recruiting coordinator John Powers, who just recently was promoted to offensive coordinator at Ball State; and former defensive coordinator Shannon Morrison, who left his alma mater at Marshall to become the co-defensive coordinator at Bowling Green - to serve under new head coach (and former Lehigh assistant coach) Dave Clawson.

[UPDATE: The NFL's Minnesota Vikings promoted a former Lehigh coach to the position of special teams coach. Brian Murphy was on head coach Kevin Higgins' staff in 1999. (Higgins is still head coach at The Citadel).]

Also worthy of mention in terms of Lehigh football alumni: it was recently reported that Colts head coach Tony Dungy, who recently was terminated from the Indianapoils Colts, was a true stand-up guy when it comes to "character and class", as Keith Groller from the Morning Call puts it, when it comes to life:

[Jim] Tkach and Dungy share a most unfortunate bond.

Both men lost young sons to suicide.

When Tkach lost his son [Lehigh football alumnus] Bo in the summer of 2007, Dungy called Tkach.

''I don't want to mislead anybody; Tony and I have never sat down and had a beer together,'' Tkach said. ''We haven't met face to face. But we have had five lengthy phone conversations in the year-and-a-half since we lost Bo and on three of those occasions, Tony reached out to me.

''He gives you things you can reference and use. I read his well-done Web site -- http://www.allprodad.com -- every day. Tony is the one who made me realize that every child is a gift from God. And every child's life is to be celebrated. We're just getting to that point now where we're able to celebrate Bo's life and everything he was about.''

It's a tragic story, but it's worth repeating how coach Dungy is a man of true class.

[UPDATE: In the run-up to the Super Bowl, how did I miss this? The Morning Call's Keith Groller had an update on former Lehigh TE Adam Bergen, the former Arizona Cardinal who started his NFL career catching passes from Kurt Warner, and who is now entering Denver Broncos mini-camp.]

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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