Lehigh Football's Short And Very Brief Encounter With St. Francis (PA) In 1922

Lehigh was in a pickle.

Catholic (DC) had cancelled their game with Lehigh scheduled for October 7th, 1922, and the football team needed a replacement, fast.

Though it's not immediately clear if Charles M. Schwab, then-CEO of Bethlehem Steel, put in a call to the Saint Francis College and Ecclesiastical Seminary in Loretto, PA to fill in on Lehigh's football schedule, it is a distinct possibility. After all, right hand man (and functioning chief operations officer) Eugene Grace was a Lehigh graduate and athlete, and little happened at Bethlehem Steel or Lehigh University that escaped the notice of both men.

St. Francis (PA), which only had 165 students enrolled at the school, had just restarted football for the first time under new head coach John J. "Speedo" Laughran, a former football star at Pitt.

So in a way, the muddy, drizzly game at Taylor Stadium was hardly a fair fight, a 37-0 shellacking that was mostly notable for Lehigh's awful kicking game. Six touchdowns were scored, two in the first half but only one point-after touchdown was scored.

"It is quite possible that on a dry field the Brown and White would have run up a much higher score," the student newspaper reported. "for many opportunities to score were lost to due to the slippery condition of the gridiron." Robert M. Harper led the way with 3 of the 6 touchdowns.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Good Article, Schwab had a summmer home in Loretto.so I do not doubt he had some influence in geeting the game.

6:09 PM

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. W

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.

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini . The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero. (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people? Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog