Lehigh Football Nation

We didn't want to be here, but we're here now once again.  Lehigh fans have entered this offseason wondering who might be on the Lehigh Athletic Department's shortlist for the next head football coach of the Lehigh Mountain Hawks. I do not know who has applied, or who is under active consideration for the position.  However as the biggest Lehigh football follower you know, I have some ideas, ideas I am sharing with you now.  (For free!) 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.  What all of these candidates have in common is that any one of them would be tremendous candidates to be Lehigh's next head football coach. Let's get to it. UPDATE: Four more names. John Allen Current Position : Wide Receivers Coach/Passing Game Coordinator, UConn (2022-present) Resume : Allen, with a long list of qualifications, is well known, as his UConn...

  I really wanted the Tom Gilmore Era to work. I did not first meet Tom Gilmore when he was a fiery defensive coordinator for some of the best Lehigh teams in history, but I thoroughly enjoyed what he created.   His defense was the final piece of the puzzle in 2001 when the Mountain Hawks earned a first round game in the I-AA Playoffs, a 27-24 win over Hofstra that was one of one of my favorite all-time non-Lafayette wins in program history.   In that game, Lehigh fell behind 14-0 and lost their starting QB, but his defense, led by guys like LB Tom McGeoy, held them to 10 points the rest of the way and ended up winning the game in overtime - where, fittingly, the Mountain Hawks prevented the Pride from scoring. I did later meet Tom Gilmore in person after a rainy afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium in 2005.  By then, he had taken over a program profoundly in trouble, the Holy Cross Crusaders, and he was in his second year at the helm. When he took over at H...

Bryce Harper took control of the city of Philadelphia on a 1-2 pitch. He fouled off two 99 mph fastballs, took a changeup just low, and then crushed Daniel Suarez's 98.9 mph sinker into the left-center stands. At that moment, so many people in the Philadelphia area erupted that it felt like it registered on the Richter scale.   Citizens Bank Park, filled with many fans who just two months ago might have been cursing the organization for being stuck in third and very possibly falling out of contention, were jumping around, waving their Red October towels, in the midst of a wild party they will never forget. For Phillies fans and Philly fans, it was a moment they had been waiting for after an eleven year playoff drought.  For my wife, who listened to the radio call on WIP on our way out to dinner, it was a goosebump-inducing experience. It's probably not accurate to call Philly fans "long suffering" (ask any Mariners fan), but in a lot of ways in this case it's not ...

  BETHLEHEM, PA - It's amazing to contemplate that only two players on Lehigh's spring roster, both fifth-year seniors, experienced anything resembling a regular, fifteen practice, spring season. LB Nate Norris had played in 2017 as a freshman in head coach Andy Coen's final Championship season, mostly on special teams.  He took part in spring activities in 2018 and 2019, only a few months after head coach Tom Gilmore took over the program.   He was joined by rising sophomore TE Alex Snyder, who started a couple of games as a true freshman in Andy Coen's final season. And then nothing resembling a typical college football schedule was able to occur for the next three years. "It really is incredible that none of our players [except Nate and Alex] have gone through Spring Ball until now," head coach Tom Gilmore told me this week. "The pandemic hit everyone at the same time, but we were in a very unique stage with our program at that point.  Having just go...

  It's the spring, and what that means is that the weather (hopefully) is getting better, the flowers are blooming, and - most importantly - we're in the middle of spring football season. Soon I am planning on posting an update on what has gone on in FCS football since the end of last season (spoiler alert: it is a lot!), but first I wanted to take an initial look at Lehigh's fall 2022 football schedule, and what sort of fun we can expect. But before I do that, I wanted to highlight something that my Twitter pal Omar Rashon-Borja wrote about his beloved Holy Cross Crusaders.     In this piece , he talks about a special game Holy Cross played last year at Polar Park, the minor league home of the Worcester Red Sox (or the "WooSox" as they are commonly known up there).  The game was branded the EBW Classic, featured an important Holy Cross vs. Colgate league matchup, and attracted 9.508 fans to attend ( which was about 2,000 more than their average at Fitton Field ...