The Lehigh Football Partnership

With all the Spring football reports, coverage of FCS Players in the NFL Draft and free agency, maintenance on the Facebook page, and a general blog spring cleaning in progress (do I really need to have the 2006 schedule still up on there?), I almost missed a very important announcement made by Lehigh's athletics department in the days after the Spring game.

It's the announcement of the Lehigh Football Partnership, an extension of the existing Lehigh Sports partnership:

“This is just a first step, and an exciting one, in a series of steps we have planned to build sport-specific partnerships for each of our varsity sports,” said Bill Griffin, Associate Director of Athletics. “The mission of the Athletics Partnership is to provide a framework and support system that will enable our former student-athletes to remain connected to their Lehigh sports program, and all who participated in it, in a manner that’s fun and impactful for the sport they played.”

Pete DeLuca ’79, a member of Lehigh’s 1977 National Championship Team, will serve as the Alumni Ambassador for the Football Partnership. “The Lehigh Football program is important to me, so if we can steadily build a strong Football Partnership, the football program will only benefit from the ongoing engagement and support of our football alums.”

It's an extension of Lehigh's "Forever Family" Athletics Partnership campaign, which already boasts 3,500 participants (full disclosure: even though I'm not a football alumnus, I'm a donor to the Partnership). The Football Partnership's aim is to reach out to former football alumni specifically to keep the connection alive with the University and the team.

If you're around the Lehigh football program for any length of time it's easy to see the bond with the groups of football alumni - in some ways, it's simply putting up a formal organization to support what football alumni have already been doing informally for years - through tailgating, coming back to campus for non-Lehigh/Lafayette games, and other activities. And it's not only teammates, either: it spans generations as well.

It seems like the organization has gotten off to a flying start - Pete has already set up five committee chairmen, and the weekend of the Spring game involved a gathering with coach Coen (called "Inside the Huddle II") as well as a postgame reception at Rust Pavillion.

With such pumped-up alumni, key organizers in place, and a large initial group of members, it's hard to see this as anything but a huge positive for Lehigh football. (I just hope they keep coming to Lehigh Football Nation and the Lehigh Sports Forum for news and information!)

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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