Skip to main content

Lafayette's Holcomb Moves On, As Does Fred Mariani

As we wait to find out all the total number of names in Lehigh's incoming class of 2013, some more movement in the coaching ranks in the Patriot League these days.

Following the departure of Lafayette offensive coordinator Bob Heffner to Northwestern last week, this week Leopard defensive line coach Al Holcomb recently announced that he accepted a postition with the NFL's New York Giants.

"I think it's a tribute to what we have built here with Lafayette football that members of our coaching staffs are highly sought after by institutions and organizations at the highest levels of football," Tavani said. "I'm confident that we will continue to work with some of the top coaches in the country."

Coach Tavani is right, of course: it's a great tribute that both of these coaches are moving to big-time positions. But it's equally true that as a Lehigh fan, I'm pretty happy to see the back of two coaches that played a big part in giving me nightmares the past seven years about the third weekend in November. Still, we wish them the best in their new positions.

Holy Cross reportedly announced their new schedule for 2009 at their postseason banquet, which includes home dates against Sacred Heart, Harvard and Dartmouth while their two out-of-conference road games are short trips to Brown and Northeastern. A link to the full schedule is here at the Any Given Saturday message board.

Finally, former Lehigh assistant coach Fred Mariani, who was formerly the head football coach at Iona College, had a nasty surprise after this season when the Gaels abruptly announced they were discontinuing football. After by every account going the extra mile to find homes for the players on his former team in other college football programs, coach Mariani got a great reward: he was hired by Rutgers as director of football recruiting operations.

Comments

Anonymous said…
adam scheier to bowling green.... another good lehigh coach departs

Popular posts from this blog

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...