Lady Hawks Get the 13 Seed!

Last year, the Lady Hawks thought they were destined for a 13 seed after an impressive season which had them as a top team in terms of RPI. When they were assigned the 15 seed and a game versus powerful No. 2 seed Auburn - where regionality seemed to dictate a closer game at Rutgers - the Hawks were disappointed.

Fast forward to this year. The Lady Hawks again had a fantastic season in the Patriot League, ending with an emphatic Patriot League title win vs. American this Saturday at Stabler. Would Lehigh get downgraded again?

No, they wouldn't. Lehigh will be travelling this weekend to Ames, Iowa, to take on Iowa State as a No. 13 seed. In one of the final games of the first round, Lehigh has a good matchup and a chance to make history. (more)

“Last year we were a little disappointed with our seed and it’s very exciting to get the 13 seed this year and represent the league,” junior G Erica Prosser explained at the Goosey Gander room after the selection. And and thought of Lehigh thinking that they're just "happy to be there?" Think again: "“We don’t want to settle with just being part of the Tournament, we would like to go there and have some success.” head coach Sue Troyan said after the selection.

Not to say that it will be easy by any stretch. While Lehigh didn't lose on their home court all season, Bill Fennelly's Iowa State team shared similar success, going 16-1 at home this year. (Their lone loss came to the No. 2 team in the country, Nebraska.) They're third nationally in attendance, too - 9,633 a game, right behind UConn and Tennessee.

Fennely heaped praise on the Lady Hawks in his statement from the Iowa State press release. "They (Lehigh) look on paper a lot like us,” he said. “They don’t score a lot, are a good defensive team, shoot the three a lot, and we’re obviously scrambling like crazy to find out. You win 29 games, and you are doing something right. We’ll spend a long night tonight trying to get information and luckily we don’t play until Sunday. The challenge of playing someone new is always fun. We’ll do the best we can to get ready.”

Similarly, Troyan was beginning the process on collecting information on the Lady Cyclones as well. "We’ll know more tomorrow when we watch a little film,” she said. “The little we do know is that we match up pretty well with them because they play a similar style to us. They have a good point guard and a talented inside player that is pretty versatile. Our kids will have some confidence because we match up well.”

Worthy of mention too is something brought up in ESPN's preview of the Dayton bracket: that "it all centers around the health of senior G Allison Lacey, who had pneumonia, a bronchial illness...they say she'll play in the NCAA tournament, but how effective will she be as their point guard?" If she's not 100%, that might help our swarming defense, led by senior G Tricia Smith, shut down the Lady Cyclones' outside shot.

Both the men's basketball team and women's basketball team will be facing off against the best the Big XII has to offer. But Sunday in particular should be a whale of a game. Lehigh doesn't just want to look good: they want to advance.

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....

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...

Made-Up Midseason Grades for Lehigh Football

We are now officially midway through the 2023 Lehigh football season. The Mountain Hawks sit at 1-5 overall, and 0-1 in the Patriot League. I thought I'd go ahead and make up some midseason grades, and set some "fan goals" for the second half. The 2023 Mountain Hawks were picked to finish fifth in the seven team Patriot League. In order to meet or exceed that expectation, they'll probably have to go at least 3-2 the rest of the way in conference play. Their remaining games are vs. Georgetown, at Bucknell, vs. Holy Cross, at Colgate, and vs. Lafayette in The Rivalry. Can they do it? Culture Changing: B+ . I was there in the Bronx last week after the tough 38-35 defeat to Fordham, and there wasn't a single player emerging from the locker room that looked like they didn't care. Every face was glum. They didn't even seem sad. More frustrated and angry. That may seem normal, considering the agonizing way the Mountain Hawks lost, but it was a ma...

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