Three Days to Kickoff: The Media Blitz

It's three days until Lehigh's season opener against Central Connecticut State, and before I finish my preview of this weekend's action it's worth detailing the volumes of coverage in the lead-up to the Big Day.

First of all, Lehigh Athletics released their broadcast schedule for 2009 - and we see nine out of eleven games broadcast on local and national outlets. Locally, three games will be broadcast on WFMZ Allentown (Villanova, Colgate, Lafayette) while the other six (CCSU, Princeton, Harvard, Georgetown, Yale, Holy Cross) will be broadcast on Service Electric 2. Better yet, many cable subscribers will be able to see the games on Fox College Sports Atlantic either live or on tape-delay (which, happily, I get at home).

Also worthy of mention is that the Lehigh Sports Magazine will also be broadcast on WFMZ Allentown and FCS Atlantic - of which you can see the latest installment online, where (20 minutes or so in coach Coen talks about the 2009 Mountain Hawks and also talks a bit about Central Connecticut State.

Lehigh's athletic department also released their preview for 2009 as well, including a video practice report. It's a comprehensive view of the entire team, starting with the defense and working their way all the way through special teams.

In the press, Keith Groller of the Morning Call released a piece about senior LB Matt Cohen, who came locally from Central Catholic and who - just maybe - might be looking to see if he can get a chance in the NFL.

Lehigh, which had just hired Andy Coen as its head coach and Donnie Roberts -- Cohen's high school coach at Central -- as a defensive assistant, saw his potential on the tackling side of the ball.

''Even when he was 14 and a freshman at Central, we could see certain things,'' Roberts said. ''We could see he could run. In fact, we had him at wide receiver. But we also saw him on the kickoff team and he wasn't afraid to hit people.

''He played tough through injuries. He had the determination even back them to be a good football player.''

Finally, speaking of hanging tough through injuries, there's a story about "Rango" - the heroic dog who came back from tearing his ACL to win the Lehigh Valley Hunting and Fishing extravaganza. What's the link to Lehigh football, you ask? Rango's owner is John Kucher, who works statistics at Lehigh games.

Look out for my preview of the CCSU game tomorrow. I can't wait.

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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