Sunday's Word: Heat

Preseason practices are underway, and although this weekend has featured record-breaking "heat", with report #1 and report #2 coming in from Lehighsports.com on preseason practice it's beginning to look a lot like football season.

This tails in with my own "heat" - this weekend, I ended up with a 103 degree fever as I returned from vacation. (We think it might have been "heat" exhaustion.) Fortunately for Lehigh (and unlike myself), despite the brutal conditions everyone seems to be holding up just fine for preseason training.

The Mountain Hawks went through a three-hour session in helmets and shoulder pads on the Goodman Campus and even with the sticky weather, fourth-year head coach Andy Coen was pleased with what he saw. “Weather like this will really tax you, but I thought the guys showed good energy and really fought through it.” He continued, “It’s obviously very early, but I like what I have seen from this group so far. Guys are working hard and everyone has come with a good mindset and lots of energy.”

After the Mountain Hawks coaching staff ran the team through a number of drills, the Lehigh offense lined up versus the defense for a series of plays that generated plenty of excitement on both sides of the ball. “We need guys to continue to execute the fundamentals and to learn their assignments,” Coen commented. “I really like what the defensive front has been doing out here. Junior DE David Brown has looked very strong in the early going and that’s exciting, and senior DT BJ Benning continues to be a playmaker. And I really like this freshmen class, particularly the skill players.”

Coen offered his thoughts on the younger Lehigh offensive players. “Freshman WR James Flynn and freshman WR Ryan Spadola both had a few nice catches for us today, and freshman TE Jamel Haggins caught a touchdown down there as well; he’s got a lot of potential with his size and athleticism.”

He went onto add, “We had a lot of our young linemen in there and overall they did a nice job; they battled all afternoon. The young running backs looked good in there, too. Overall the offense looked sharp in the beginning and they looked to have the upper hand, but the defense came back towards the end, particularly our front. Freshman DB Bryan Andrews returned the one interception for a touchdown, so there were a lot of good things going on out here on both sides of the ball.”

Look for more later on this week, as I recover from the "heat".

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. W

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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