Lehigh Position Analysis: Offensive Line

Spotlight On: Brandon Short and Zach Duffy

Somewhere after the end of the 2016 season, senior OL Brandon Short and senior OL Zach Duffy announced that they would be enrolling in graduate school at Lehigh and playing their final years of eligibility, which had to make offensive line coach Andy Merino and head coach Andy Coen high-five each other. Short and Duffy, along with senior OL Tim O'Hara, gives the Mountain Hawks a rock-solid center and bookend tackles with loads of game experience that helped carve the way for Lehigh's astounding offense last year.

Coach Coen gushed early in the summer about the leadership that Duffy and Short provide for the offensive line and the offense in general.

"I'm really thrilled that we were able to get Duffy back, a 5th year guy, and Brandon Short," he said on the call. One thing that we always try to accomplish every year is leadership development, we want guys to develop not only as football players but as real leaders that can grab the bull by the horns and create positive things. That's probably the most important thing that those two guys are going to give to our football program. They are two outstanding players, and O'Hara last year was second team all-Patriot League guy [as well]. As he's growing into his senior season he's going to move right in to where [Brandon and Zach] are."

On this Lehigh team, the offensive line will clearly be a position of strength, leadership and experience.

OL Liborio Ricottilli

One Spot To Fill

Returning starter junior OL Liborio Ricottilli is penciled in at the right guard position, but it's not totally clear who will be suiting up at left guard where OL Evan Sweeney did last season. Going into camp it looked like 6'4, 275 lb junior OL Eric Hawkinson was in the lead for that spot, but it seemed like there was a possibility that he might be pushed by sophomore OL Derek Lomax for the starting role.

Depth?

Some combination of Hawkinson and Lomax seem like a good bet for the opening two-deep at guard, but developing further depth and experience is critical. Two sophomores, sophomore OL Ryan Oneidas and sophomore OL Alex Motley, seem like they are in good shape to make the two deep, while junior C Tim Wagner seems like the backup center and may also back up other places on the offensive line as well.

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

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