Lehigh Football Nation

Highlight reels can be very misleading. I'm not saying, dear reader, that Lehigh's 35-14 win over Columbia was bad.  Not at all.  The Mountain Hawks went to 6-0 this afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium, in front of a pacing break crowd of a little over 5,000 fans. But if you simply judged this game by looking at the highlights, you wouldn't get an accurate impression of how this game unfolded. Sure, Lehigh jumped to 14-0 and 21-7 leads, and the Mountain Hawks made some bursts of impressive plays to score touchdowns on Columbia.  But it was critical Lehigh mistakes that led to the Lions' 14 points - which put a bit of a damper on the post-game celebrations for Lehigh head coach Andy Coen .

Sometimes, I wonder what I'm going to write about the world of FCS on a Friday afternoon. But then, an idea drops in from out of the sky. Almost literally. That's after I discovered, thanks to Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated ,  of Georgia State's effort to buy fans get students and fans to show up at a football game featuring a nationally-ranked opponent in FCS facing off against your 0-5 team. That's to have - get this - a halftime drop of cash . The Facebook promotion to my left is no joke.  No joke at all.  At halftime, Georgia's Own Credit Union is going to be dropping $10,000 cash from the rafters in order to booster attendance at their game against nationally-ranked New Hampshire this weekend. It's probably not the dumbest idea in all of sports, but it's certainly up there.

(Photo Credit: Columbia Athletics) We break down the Columbia game - and we give our fearless prediction, below the flip. WEATHER UPDATE: The weather situation for this weekend is evolving at this point , though the high of 68 and the 30% chance of showers remain.  Isolated thundershowers are now in the possible weather forecast for this weekend, so pack appropriately.  I happen to think that the weather will hold steady, and if it does, it will be an excellent October day at the stadium, which also happens to be "NCAA Take a Kid to the Game" day. And when you do, Joe Uliana , ambassador to the Lehigh football program, also has this to say: Off the field, we will be honoring the 55 th Anniversary of the 1957 Lambert Cup Team at our pregame tailg...

If Columbia head coach Pete Mangurian ever wants to take on another line of work, he'd be a great blogger. Perhaps it's understandable that he hasn't done a lot of blogging in his first year as the Lion head coach - I can imagine he's, um, a bit busy -  but his blog makes for interesting reading when he does. Last weekend, after a particularly tough 33-6 defeat to Princeton ,  Mangurian made the game about something other than the lopsided score, or the turnovers - he made it about the fans. It also highlights that Mangurian is in the middle of a rebuilding job at Columbia, and the fact that there will be growing pains as he crafts a winning football team in upper Manhattan.

(Photo Credit: Kevin Mingora/Morning Call ) Sometimes, the most exciting, entertaining games are the ones you least suspect, and this well-recapped Fordham/Lehigh game was one of them. I can't recall a week when it was so abundantly clear that there needed to be three special-teams Players of the Week.  As much as I tried to narrow it down, I couldn't - all three made such huge contributions, I simply had to include them all.

My vote for the FCS Top 25 for the week ending 10/1/2012 follows below the flip.

I don't know why, but there were an awful lot of echoes to me, for some inexplicable reason, of the Lehigh/Hofstra playoff encounter at Murray Goodman Stadium this weekend. Well before senior PK Jake Peery 's walk-off 23 yard game-winning field goal this Saturday, I was getting flashbacks to RB Trevor Dimmie 's fumbled toss, QB Luke Ciannello 's improbable march downfield to tie the Pride with 19 seconds to play, and PK Brian Kelley 's game-winner in overtime - one of the most exciting games I've ever witnessed at Murray Goodman stadium. It's a game in the past - a happy memory for Lehigh fans. But something else fans should remember, too, is that there "ain't going to be no rematch" of that fateful game in 2001. For Hofstra's football program is "gone".