Sunday's Word: Marathon

It's officially less than six days until the beginning of the Lehigh football season. The twelve-week "marathon" begins next Saturday against Central Connecticut State at Murray Goodman stadium, and the excitement is similar to the beginning of a race like this: everyone starts out even at the start, with the anticipation that anyone can win it.

For me, football season is also becoming a "marathon" of a different sort. As you may or may not know, not only do I write content for this wonderful blog you're reading right now, I also do a lot of other projects as well (including - it may surprise some folks to learn - a day job).

I also write the CSN Way column at the College Sporting News during the college football regular season. In my latest article there, I talk about my 27 fearless predictions for the world of FCS in 2009. (And with Indiana State state losing in the first FCS game of the year, 26-20 to NAIA Quincy, my predictions are off to a humbling start.)

This offseason, I deployed a brand new web app called College Sports Source that attempts to be a portal to all the links anyone could ever need about Division I schools. (Here's Lehigh's team page on there). It's a work-in-progress, but the entire Patriot League is set up as is most of the schools of FCS. (The rest should be done sometime this week.)

In addition to team information, College Sports Source also provides a comprehensive list of all the Division I games on TV and online. For all the FCS and FBS games on TV or online for Week One, click here.

You may have noticed the blog widget which shows Lehigh's schedule on the left hand side. I've also been developing that - and you'll be seeing the schedule blog widget popping up on other blogs as well, which pull from the same source that College Sports Source pulls its information from. There are plans for other widgets as well, including one for standings and a current week game schedule.

But more than that, this year's "marathon" for the football players of the Patriot League seems like it's going to be a very special one indeed.

Two quarterbacks - Fordham senior QB John Skelton and Holy Cross senior QB Dominic Randolph - are NFL prospects, with Skelton most recently showing up in the New York Times as such. (And with a nickname, to boot: "Franchise".)

Nobody discounts Lehigh, Colgate or Lafayette's chances to take the Patriot League title either: the Sports Network' s Patriot League preview has them not very far behind the Rams and Crusaders, and some also a whispering that Bucknell might even be in the discussion as well. The College Sporting News also released their 2009 FCS Yearbook with an entire section on the Patriot League - with strikingly similar conclusions to the Sports Network.

All seven coaching staffs have been in place for the last four years - the only league without any head coaching turnover in the last four years. All seven teams also seem to be poised to have the same starting QBs from last year starting this year - another first. The experience on offense and on each coaching staff could mean that the quality of play in the Patriot League will be something special.

It's going to be a fun time to be a Patriot League fan this year. All this points to a very, very interesting regular-season "marathon" for the Patriot League next weekend.

And for myself, too.

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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