Lehigh Football Nation

We break down the Holy Cross game - and we give our fearless prediction, below the flip. The 3-6 Crusaders, like 2-6 Lehigh, are a young team who is looking to show that they are ready to move forward and become a force in the Patriot Leaugue title race in the future. Critically, in their win over Lafayette two weekends ago, they've shown that they can indeed hunker down and figure out how to stomp on a team to win a football game. Holy Cross' schedule shows a lot of close games, with losses by a field goal to Brown, Albany, Colgate, and Dartmouth this season.  It's awful easy to see this team, in an alternate universe, winning all four of these games and heading towards "senior day" with a 6-2 record.

It's a different sort of November for Lehigh this time around, but one that's still very important in regards to building up to the 150th meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Yankee Stadium. The Mountain Hawks are essentially out of the playoff race, but the test this weekend against the Crusaders will be interesting for one very big reason: sophomore QB Pete Pujals . Pujals and Lafayette sophomore QB Drew Reed are cut from the same cloth, young, mobile quarterbacks that can easily take off with the ball and also kill you with a precision passing game. It's the closest thing to a dress rehearsal that Lehigh will have before the 150th.

It was a point when the Lehigh football team could have packed it in, or simply decided that they wanted to just play out the string. Instead Lehigh went down to Washington, DC and got their second win of the season, as well as their first Patriot League win of the season, with a 27-19 victory over the Hoyas. It wasn't always pretty.  Just like against Cornell, the mixture of young and veteran Mountain Hawks made some big errors to keep Georgetown in the ball game. But despite the goofs, for Lehigh there was a lot more good than bad. For the first time since a few weeks, hope and optimism, for the rest of this year up to the 150th meeting of Lehigh and Lafayette - and beyond - made an appearance.