Lehigh Weekend: Huge Tests for Men's and Women's Hoops

"Unselfish" greets you when you visit Lehighsports.com to preview this weekend's basketball games, starting with a No. 1 versus No. 2 showdown up at the Hart Center in Worcester, MA.

The 16-5 Lady Hawks (Real Time RPI: 111) travel to a place where they haven't won since 2004 and have only won twice in twenty tries - and also playing against the team who beat in the semifinals of the Patriot League tournament last year.

Lehigh enters this game red-hot, winners of six of their last seven games - including their latest victory, a 66-53 win over Bucknell. Sophomore G Erica Prosser "only" had 13 points on the evening, but it's the other two of the guard trio - junior G Alex Ross and senior G Tricia Smith - who would score 10 and 17 points, respectively, to blow past the Lady Bison.

But 7-12 Holy Cross (Real Time RPI: 230) have always given Lehigh problems, and their record is misleading with losses to No. 1 UConn (96-37), Boston College (82-69) and other power teams. A win would put the Crusaders, the preseason favorite to win the Patriot League, back into a first-place tie with Lehigh. Junior G Brianna McFadden (15.3 ppg, 4.8 rpg) will give Prosser a big test from the perimiter, and if junior G Bethany O'Dell is also on the court (11.0 ppg, 3.9 rpg) it will be a challenge for the Lady Hawks in this one. Crucial will be another big game from Smith and Ross - it will be a whale of a game at 1:00 P.M., broadcast on Lehighsports.com.

At the same time, the inconsistent men's basketball team won't be able to nap against the first-placed Crusaders at Stabler Arena at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday. While junior G Marquis Hall provided the three-point buzzer-beater in a 61-59 come-from-behind win over 5-15 Bucknell on Wednesday, the 13-7 Mountain Hawks (Real Time RPI: 221) will have to play better than they did on Wednesday to knock off 10-11 Holy Cross (Real Time RPI: 188). (In their defense, according to the Easton Express-Times Lehigh was not at 100% due to an illness making its way through the team).

In the first half against the Bison, Lehigh only shot 31% from the field to fall behind 30-21, but pull things together in time to get the victory. Junior F Zahir Carrington continued his MVP-type season with 13 points and 11 rebounds for the Mountain Hawks, while sophomore G Rob Keefer scored 10 key points and dished three assists.

Holy Cross looks exactly like the type of team that might give Lehigh problems: deep (as a team, they've outrebounded opponents 36-28, with no player averaging more than 5 rebounds a game, including senior F Colin Cunningham) with balaced scoring (freshman G R.J. Evans leads the team with 13.3 ppg, with a host of players averaging 7-10 ppg). They'll need to play their most complete Patriot League game this year in order to come away with the "W".

The action will be at Stabler at 1:00 P.M., and it should be a great game.

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....

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...

#TheRivalry Flashback: November 21st, 1987: Lehigh 17, Lafayette 10

Since becoming an undergrad at Lehigh back in the late 1980s, I first heard about the historic nature of the football team and "The Rivalry" through the stories that fellow students would share. I did not attend the final meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Taylor Stadium, which was the final time a football game would be played there. Those that did attend said that was that it was cold. "I remember it being one of the coldest games ever," Mark Redmann recollected, "with strong Northwesterly winds and the temperature hovering around 20. By the end of the game, the stands were half empty because most of the fans just couldn't take the cold. "Fortunately, several of my fraternity brothers snuck in flasks to help fend off the chill."

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