Lehigh Football Nation

(Photo Credit: Philadelphia Inquirer) It's time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Penn Quakers. Penn's  game notes were out in good time, and The Philadelphia Inquirer , thankfully, still does a pretty good job in covering the Quakers in an independent way.  Both were invaluable for my analysis. Unusually, Lehigh faces Penn this time around in a game that is not the Quakers' season opener.  In prior years that made it tricky for the Mountain Hawks to sometimes get a full sense of what head coach Ray Priore might be doing, because there would be no true game film to study, only practice film and, if they're lucky, an accurate two-deep. This year, though, Penn has already had their first game, playing Bucknell in a game which they won 34-17 .  It was a strange contest, basically won in the first five minutes thanks to 17 points donated to the Quakers via two Bison turnovers and a blocked punt.  Both teams would only put up 17 points the r

This week, Lehigh makes the short trip down to Franklin Field in Pennsylvania to take on the Quakers of Penn. Kickoff time is at 3:00 PM and if you can't make it to the game, the game is available though a pay service called ESPN+.  This isn't the exact same thing as ESPN the station.  It works basically the way ESPN3 does, except that it requires a monthly subscription of $4.99 per month (though last I heard there was the availability of a free trial subscription available).  ESPN+ also carries a lot of college football games during the course of the season (including all the Ivy League home games), so it might be worth your while.  (Replays of the game I believe are available on ESPN3 for free later.) With a subscription, if you have a Roku box in your home, you can stream ESPN+ directly to your TV from there.  If you have the ESPN App on your phone and Chromecast, you can bring it up on your phone and push the "Cast" button to have it stream directly

I've never done one of these before after Lehigh's played an FBS opponent.  That's because the last FBS opponent Lehigh played was in 2003, when the Mountain Hawks lost to UConn 35-17. The Lehigh Football Nation blog was in its first year of existence back in 2003, and undoubtedly I wrote about it - but it's not currently in the archives here at Blogger, because I archived those first two years offline.  What I can tell you about that UConn game was that Lehigh faced off against a future NFL player in QB Dan Orlovsky and that QB Chad Schwenk got hurt late in that game, which made it his final game in a Mountain Hawks uniform and effectively threw the rest of that season in some turmoil. Fortunately turmoil doesn't seem to be a part of the report card today.