The 2017 Patsy Ratings: No. 3, Lehigh

Where were you during the last Patsy Party at Lehigh?

It coincided with morning cocktails, I think - the actual memory is hazy, a gauzy film hanging over the proceedings like Vaseline over the eyelids.

It involved neon - a very large amount of neon, as Lehigh's incoming class was announced in the morning, lights on Murray Goodman's video scoreboard.  (The neon light, I think, came from the generator trucked into the stadium to fuel the temporary lights and scoreboard, of course.)

The actual party I was actually able to recreate through my Flickr feed on my phone.  Somewhere, there was a printout of several "LFN Drinks of the week" and a 1962 Freshman Dink dyed neon purple, probably because the undergrads at the time didn't think Brown and White was an appropriate color for the party.  And there was the blue curacao, of course, which made one of the concoctions that I don't exactly remember.

Today, there is no blue curacao as the thin, typewritten letter with the "Lehigh" letterhead came to the Committee's door.  Somewhere, a microwave rang out as the steel-cut oatmeal reheated from yesterday was complete.

Mirror Match

THE GOOD

When the Committee looked at the Patsy Point results of the Mountain Chickens this time around, they blinked, and blinked again.  The totals looked so similar to Fordham's that they thought they were seeing double.

Like Fordham, the South Mountaineers had a class with lots of quality points with a significant number of starred players.  Of course starred players don't automatically become Patriot League star players, but with a baseline with this many starred recruits, it's a very nice place to be.

THE BAD

The issue with the Committee came with the meeting of Lehigh's initial needs.  With the acknowledgment that sometimes defensive ends become linebackers and so forth, shouldn't there have been more guys in this class with "LB" next to their names?  Anyone looking at Lehigh's depth chart last season can plainly see that three senior starting linebackers graduated.  Shouldn't that have been priority level one?  It wasn't clear that it was.

PATSY POINT CALCULATION
 

CLASS SIZE = 3.   19 recruits equals 3 Patsy points: 2 for the first 18 recruits, and 1 for the additional recruit.

QUALITY = 32.   This number of Patsy Points corresponded exactly to Fordham's "quality points" for their class, interestingly enough.  Only 9 out of 19 recruits had profiles on the sundry recruiting websites, but the ones that did packed a lot of points: four of them were starred recruits.  Again, it's striking that these numbers almost exactly mirrored Fordham's breakdown.

DISTRIBUTION = 8.  All bases were covered with the exception of kicker.

SPEED = 0.   For whatever reason, no "official" speed information was present on the officially considered recruiting profiles, so zero points here.

TRIGGER = 3.   What Lehigh's Patsy Point totals was missing in speed was recouped by the presence of a ** quarterback in their incoming class.  One point for a recognized recruit, and one per star, equals 3 points.

JUMBO = 4.  Out of 7 recruits, four of them tipped the scales enough to earn jumbo points.

NEEDS = 6 (of 12):  

Wanted: Lehigh's Next LBs

LB = 1 (of 5).   As mentioned in the leader, three starting linebackers for last year's Mountain Hawks graduated.  In order to meet this need, probably a bare minimum of four linebackers probably should have been in the class, just to handle possible attrition if nothing else.

Three linebackers were enough to score a single point in this area - barely - but the lack of more numbers and the lack of a starred recruit was disappointing.

(A note here:  Because a need is not met, that's doesn't mean that the Committee or anyone else is disappointed with the recruits themselves.  Every single year recruits are signed by Patriot League teams, and some of them don't have pages on Rivals or 247 yet go on to become all-Patriot League players.)

DB = 3 (of 4).   On the other hand, the Mountain Hawks scored very well in their second need area of defensive back, with three recruits and one two-star guy.  The full number probably would have been granted if there were one or two more recruits, most likely.

WR = 2 (of 3).   Determining this third need area was difficult - the conclusion, after some Committee debate, was that wide receiver was barely the Mountain Hawks' third need area, edging out OL (where two 5th year seniors return) and RB (where there's a senior and three juniors).  Considering that numbers weren't the biggest concern, it was felt that with  the position group consisting of two recruits, one starred, two needs points out of three were awarded.

COMMITTEE ADJUSTMENT:  The dreaded "committee adjustment" usually comes back after a heuristic analysis by the Committee as to whether some position group was found wanting, some group of positions is seen as unrepresentative of a particular class (e.g., if a class has 5 starred QBs, they can't all play at once), or other mitigating factors.  This is a fancy way of saying that the Committee looks at the overall class, and makes it up as they go along.

For the Mountain Hawks, there wasn't really any need to adjust in any direction.  There weren't a slew of guys with Alabama offers, necessitating a positive adjustment.  There weren't a total lack of any position group (and the low number of linebackers was addressed in the "Needs" category).  There wasn't a 5* long snapper in the group.  So the Committee left this number alone.

COMMITTEE ADJUSTMENT: 0

LEHIGH - 56