Lehigh Football Nation

Still bummed that Lehigh's Patriot League Championship season is over?  Yeah, me too. That doesn't mean that I've totally tuned out the college football landscape, though. Starting tonight, there's some terrific games on TV and online streaming that I'll be watching, both at the FCS and the FBS level.  Happily, the FCS Round of 16 games are not all going up against each other like last week, so the opportunity is there to catch one or more of those games - and you can bet that I will be. Below the flip, starting with the MAC championship game tonight, are my picks for games to watch, and - why not? - some picks as to who I think will win. (Yes, it includes Penn State.  Stop asking.)

The first time I asked a question of Lafayette head football coach Frank Tavani was in 2004. It was at Fisher Field, and I had just spent my first game ever in the press box. I had gone into that press box hoping to cover an expected Lehigh victory over Lafayette, the final crowning glory to yet another Lehigh football season. I barely knew what I was doing, how I should act, or how to set up a computer in the press box.  But there I was, taking notes for a "game diary" for a national website called I-AA.org. I had proven my bona fides for writing by penning a very long, very detailed summary of the Lehigh/Colgate game a few weeks prior.  That game, a Lehigh victory that went down to the wire, was sort-of a precursor to the type of coverage I do now during Lehigh games in terms of tweeting, except rather than tweet it out instantly to followers, I would write all the observations down, shuffle them up, edit them, and put them in a thousand-word article.  (Trust me

It would be all so easy if football were a video game. If the players were pixels, with easy-to-read sliders with their statistics on them. ESCAPABILITY: 72 TOUGHNESS: 91 Then the FCS playoffs would be easy.  You'd plug in the teams, they'd hit each other virtually on the screen, and there would be a result, quantifying the relative strengths and weaknesses of each team.  A representative score would come out, and there would be one side bursting with victory, and the other in agony in defeat. There would be bitterness, some teeth-gnashing, but at least you'd have figured out that the teams gave it their best shot. But real life is not a video game.  Sometimes, star players go hunting, and come down with an illness.  It keeps them out of practice, and on the day of the big game, they're not 100%, or even 75%.  Sometimes, foot injuries do not heal, as much as you wish that they would. And then a team like Lehigh travels up to New Hampshire, not able to put