Lehigh Football Nation

Lehigh's next opponent, Princeton, plays in their season opener this Saturday at 6PM. Based on the fact that it's Princeton's opener, as well as the opener of the seven other Ivy League schools, you'd think that the conference website would have plenty of articles evaluating the teams of the Ivy League, looking over offenses and defenses, checking out the prospects of all their member teams for the 2013 season. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. I figured I'd share my experience with you, dear Reader, on my attempt to find out something - anything - about the Princeton Tigers from the Ivy League website.

Division I football programs are in a consant state of change.  Head coaches, and assistant coaches, come and go all the time.  Kids graduate.  Uniforms change.  Athletic venues sping up out of nowhere, or old facilities get a facelift.  Athletic departments upgrade websites.  It's a constant "evolution": adapt, or die. Since starting this blog in 2003, it, too, has undergone "evolution".  Things pop up in the sidebar all the time that I'm working on.  Even though I very much have a non-writing day job, I'm always thinking about the next thing I can add to my blog to make it better. But blogging itself has "evolved", too, in interesting ways. It's definitely a very different game than it was seven years ago. I'm finding myself thinkng about what this blog should be - now, and going into the future. Don't worry, I can't imagine myself giving this thing up at the moment. But it is certain to "evolve". (more)

It figures that I was getting caught in a freak rainstorm last Saturday afternoon just when the first-ever conference on sports blogging started in New York City. Called with characteristic subtlety " Blogs with Balls 1.0", they managed to capture with state of "sports blogging" in one saying. (But really, did they have to add the 1.0 at the end of it to completely marry the idea to the dotcom bust? It makes it sound like sports blogging is soon going to go the way of the Rubik's Cube.) Like anything, there are outsiders that try to get the whole blogging thing, but just manage to make themselves look bad. Witness GQ's pathetic summation on their own "blog" : Part networking, part discussion, the all-day conference was a live platform for big hitters like ESPN, Real Clear Sports, and Deadspin to share their words of wisdom with newbie bloggers and argue over a few pints of Guinness about the rise of new media and which athletes are ‘roid raging...

I've been blogging about Lehigh since the 2003 football season, meaning that I'm entering my sixth straight year talking about Lehigh, "The Rivalry", and the Patriot League. It started with a computer, this upstart company called "Blogger" and a dream about a site devoted to Lehigh football coverage: the first "Football Nation", if you will, modeled after my beloved Red Sox Nation which had "officially" come into being only a year or two before my foray into... er... nationhood. Blogging has had it moments like this picture to my left, where I've simply been overwhelmed by the amount of backlog of writing articles that I've had. Holding a day job, while still writing articles for the College Sporting News and archiving articles about the FCS , it's a tough (self-imposed, admittedly) assignment. (And, yes, I probably looked a lot like that yesterday.) Each year I've done this I've looked around and seen many folks ...

This may sound strange to a lot of you, but when it comes to sportswriting I really don't know what I am sometimes. Am I a blogger, because I write on this blog religiously? Or am I a sportswriter, since I write for the College Sporting News ? It's something I've genuinely struggled with for years. More often than not, I try to wear both hats simultaneously. Which brings me to the now-infamous Bissinger vs. Leitch spat on Bob Costas' cable show Costas Now . To those too lazy to click on the video, the jist of the beginning is like this (fade on computer guy, opening many pages of Fox box scores and pictures of athletes behaving badly): Instant scores and constant updates... Analysis and breakdowns of thousands of scores in hundreds of cities. What sports fan could complain about that? But there's also.... this. The wild west of the internet. The "blogosphere". A virtual bulletin board where anyone can post anything. Opinions. Photos. Videos. ...

It's the middle of July, and I've been taking a small break from writing on my blog to (finally) go on a vacation and to finish some writings for the upcoming FCS Preview Magazine which was formerly sponsored by I-AA.org. The past couple weeks for me have involved a long-deserved break from work and writing to spend some quality time with my family -- followed by a mad blitz of writing, editing, and preparing for the upcoming FCS season. (Can you believe Patriot League Media Day is right around the corner?) I may as well also announce that on College Sporting News I am officially going to be assuming the responsibility of senior FCS columnist, taking over for the legendary Dave Coulson (who will now be writing for the Sports Network , taking over for Matt Dougherty who was recently hired as the Patriot League Director of Media Relations ). That means that the diaries that I've been doing for College Sporting News are going to be fewer in number, and I'm going to be w...

This is a very quick blog posting to let you know that the blog has undergone a major facelift. It's gone through a long-overdue template upgrade, reorganization of special features, and (the biggest job of all) undergone some "FCS Map Surgery" which involves my re-jiggering (a technical term) of the FCS Map to become a shareable map on Google MyMaps, which can then be ported to other websites. It will probably take some time to get all the data in there and make it look great. Please leave comments on the new layout, the FCS Map, or anything else you'd like to see on this page.