What I Did (Or Am Doing) This Summer

I'm away on summer vacation, but I couldn't resist getting in a few tidbits of information about Lehigh before I left. (I wrote this post earlier.)

While I'm enjoying the seaside, junior RB Jaren Walker was volunteering at the Sports Camp at Lehigh. The Johnson-McCormick family tried to blog about the experience without me knowing, but - let's just say I have ways to find out things.

This past week Kyle and Owen were in Sports Camp at Lehigh. They had their most fun week yet of the entire summer! They LOVED LOVED LOVED it. They just soaked it all up and could not have been happier with it.

Last week, fall practice started. In the official release, coach Coen makes one very interesting note:

“Freshman RB Zach Barket and freshman RB Tony Kablan have a great opportunity in front of them; the running backs always see a lot of action and get a high number of reps during camp so each one of those guys will have a chance to show what he’s capable of.”

I haven't made an official determination (yet) of preseason camp needs, but you can bet No. 1 is the battle between Barket, Kablan, Walker, junior RB Jay Campbell and sophomore RB Matt Fitz. You've got to believe that Walker has the inside edge - as long as he's 100% - but after that it gets real, real interesting.

Sharp-eyed roster watchers saw a new face on the Lehigh roster: sophomore OL Blake McCroskey, a 6'5 300 lb lineman who transferred to Lehigh from Cincinnatti of the Big East. He originally was planning to come to Colgate - but it was reported to be Lehigh's business school which tipped him to come to Lehigh instead. Will he step into the "O" line right away? We'll see.

Lehigh also added a name to the coaching staff a few weeks ago: young Moravian coach Sal DeWalt, who will be coaching the "O" line. He did a great job with D-III Moravian's line the past two years. Coach Coen had this to say about him:

"I am excited to announce Sal as a member of our staff," Coen says in a news release. "He comes highly recommended as a football coach and as a person.

"In the short time he has been with us, I am impressed and I know he will help us as we work towards our goal of winning a ninth Patriot League championship."

Finally - since I've got to get going - if you saw someone who looked like Matt Millen at a Lehigh game last year, it was probably him:

"This off-season, after I got fired in Detroit, I watched high school football, I watched Division III football, I’d go to Muhlenberg, Moravian, local high schools around there (in Pennsylvania). I went to a couple Lehigh games, I watched Lafayette and went to the Lafayette-Harvard game, and that was really interesting. You can see where football’s going and how the top influences the bottom. It’s really fascinating. I went to the Harvard game and was shocked how much is taken away from the field and is on the sideline. I couldn’t believe it.”

Yes, Matt, we really do play football here at Lehigh (and "that school in Easton").

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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