Lehigh to play Auburn at the RAC

While a 15 seed may seem a bit disappointing, the fact that Lehigh women's basketball fans will be able to make a quick jaunt down 78 to 287 to Piscataway, New Jersey to see their Lady Hawks play in the first round certainly has to be a comfort.

Lehigh will be taking on the No. 2-seeded Auburn Lady Tigers, and the other game at the RAC will pit No. 7 Rutgers against No. 10 Virginia Commonwealth. Lehigh's game will take place at noon - it will probably be the first game of the NCAA women's tourney to start or finish - and the second game will be immediately following.

Tickets should be available through the Lehigh ticket office, and Rutgers' ticket office. Adult tickets for all three games are $40, while a "family pack" for Saturday is available for $60, including 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs, and 4 sodas.

Auburn, ranked No. 8 in the AP poll, is a daunting challenge for the Lady Hawks, with a team that has four seniors and balanced production across the board - they are a legitimate Final Four contender. The silver lining is that Auburn hasn't won an NCAA tournament game in at least the last three years.

[UPDATE: Lehighsports.com has more information on the matchup, including a video of the "selection party" at Rathbone Dining Hall. Notably, it's the first time that Lehigh and Auburn women's basketball have ever faced each other on the hardwood. Head coach Sue Troyan had this to say: “We made a point of telling the players that we’re not happy just to be here,” Troyan said. “We’re going to practice hard and coach hard to try to win.”]

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On the men's side, American will be lining up against Villanova in the Wachovia center. If this game were being played in Boise, Idaho, I'd give the Eagles a decent chance to pull an upset if they play their best game; but with the Wildcats in effect playing a home game, it looks like a tall order for American to shock the NCAA world a la Bucknell.

On the plus side, American will be playing at 7:20 p.m. on Thursday - meaning if you're in the Philadelphia, Bethlehem or DC area, you'll be seeing American on the tube.

[UPDATE: American has another reason to be excited: the American women's basketball team, the team I was most worried about in the Patriot League tournament, was selected for the Women's NIT, where they will face off at James Madison in a first round matchup Friday night.]

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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