Lehigh Football Nation

We break down the Georgetown game - and we give our fearless prediction below the flip. Head coach Rob Sgarlata should be a trendy pick for coach of the year in the Patriot League. In a year when Georgetown was picked last in the preseason poll, Georgetown instead is playing meaningful football games at Halloween, and have a golden opportunity to finish above .500. And they have to be looking at the game versus Lehigh as a critical one to achieve that goal. First, there's the matter of Fordham.  While beating the preseason favorite Rams are high on the list of all Patriot League fans, the odds of them beating the other teams on their schedule, Holy Cross and Lehigh, are much greater. There's also that tiny matter that Georgetown hasn't beaten Lehigh since 1925. Lehigh also happens to hold the second-longest active winning streak  of consecutive wins against the same opponent (14).  The longest current streak is Penn over Columbia (18).  It's no wond

"We are still our own worst enemy," head coach Andy Coen said after last weekend's tough loss to Fordham, 59-42 .  "Whether it's penalties, turnovers, if you turn over the ball more than the other team, it's going to be hard to win games.  And this is a league where things are very, very competitive." He's right. After a week where a scary car accident made everyone involved with Lehigh Athletics pause, and after a week where the availability of arguably the Mountain Hawks' most important player, junior QB Nick Shafnisky , is in doubt, the Hoyas (4-4, 2-1) come to town right in the thick of the Patriot League championship race.  Every team above Lafayette and below Fordham have an overall record of either 3-4 or 4-4, and that includes the Hoyas. The road to getting into the conversation starts this weekend versus Georgetown, against a team that would like nothing better than to get their first win against Lehigh in the modern era.

If you'd like, you can check out my FCS Top 25 vote below. The story of the week in James Madison after their loss to Richmond wasn't the fact that College Football Gameday was there, nor was it about their big CAA conference loss, which took them out of the drivers' seat for the CAA title and conference autobid. It was the fact that their superstar quarterback, QB Vad Lee , sustained an injury that would require surgery and take him out for the remained of the season. The play didn't look like much.  The Dukes, who were already down by two touchdowns, saw Lee simply try to make something happen on a routine 2 yard run left.  A shoestring tackle by Richmond's linebacker wasn't particularly dirty, though in retrospect it looked like his foot was tackled awkwardly. A play afterwards, Lee remained in, and collapsed after hucking a deep pass, and his incredible career at JMU was done.

I remember my time at Lehigh as a time to define new moments for myself. It was a time to jettison old nicknames, to break out of the scripts my parents and then-friends had written for me.  It was time to write a new script, and a time to break out into a new, better direction.  It was a time to step away from the old girlfriends, as hard as that was at times, and start to live in the moment and form new relationships, ones that were not encumbered by what happened before. I think that's something that can be applied to the Fordham loss as well, in the context of Lehigh's 2015 football season. There are two possible outcomes from this game. One outcome is that the defeat ends up defining the season, a loss made so frustration by an agonizing combination of bad luck, missed opportunities, and a record-breaking performance by RB Chase Edmonds . But the other is to jettison that past, and set off on another winning streak to go through the rest of the regular season,

Say Doc Brown had shown up at your house October 21st, 2015, and told you something about the upcoming Lehigh/Fordham game. Suppose he lets slip that senior QB Nick Shafnisky would go out with an injury before halftime, and that Fordham RB Chase Edmonds would set a Patriot League record for rushing yards in a game while getting over 400 all-purpose yards. Would you have gone to the game? Would you have bothered to be one of the 5,000 fans in attendance who watched the No. 11-ranked Rams face off against a game Mountain Hawk squad? The truth is, even though the loss was certainly frustrating and a teeth-gnashing reminder of what could have been, with two minutes to play in the game freshman PK Ed Mish lined up at the 27 yard line with a chance to make it a one-score game. At what was effectively the "two-minute warning" in the game, Lehigh had battled all the way back from Shaf's injury, their own penalties and mistakes, and put the Mountain Hawks in a pos