Lehigh Football Nation

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....

I know, I know, it's strange when there's no Lehigh football game result to pick apart.  That doesn't mean that the rest of college football stood still during the Mountain Hawks' bye week. Lehigh's bye week came during a time when Penn State football, already rabid at the best of times, was at peak foaming-at-the-mouth after Happy Valley hosted ESPN College Gameday on Saturday morning and Michigan on Saturday night. In case you've been living under a rock, Penn State RB Saquon Barkley has a local connection: he went to Whitehall at the same time a guy called QB Nick Shafnisky was under center.  Now, Barkley is the odds-on favorite to win the Heisman with the Nittany Lions after a 263 yard, 3 TD effort against the Wolverines as Penn State coasted to a 42-13 win. Completing the return to 1986, Notre Dame also went to 6-1 after their own resounding 49-13 win over USC Saturday night as well, surprising in the ease in the way RB Josh Adams carved through ...

I don't officially vote in any of the FCS Top 25 polls, but I do share who I think deserves to be in the Top 25 .  And this wasn't a week where a lot of teams dropped out, but it was a week where there were a bunch of epic Top 25 clashes that caused some reshuffling in the ranks. For example, Youngstown State humbled South Dakota State 19-7 at home in a defensive feast, Central Arkansas overcame Sam Houston State 41-30 in a shootout, and South Dakota continued their dominant early-season performance by jumping to a 38-6 lead and then holding off a furious Leatherneck rally to survive in a 38-33 win over Western Illinois .

(Photo Credit:  Kiera Wood / The Columbia Spectator ) Below the flip, enjoy this week's "LFN Players of the Week" for the Columbia game.

As sports comebacks go, this one was pretty epic. Down 5-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, Boston OF David Ortiz jumped on the first pitch from Tigers P Joaquin Benoit , a pitch he put over the short right-field bullpen fence in Fenway Park. OF Torii Hunter leaped, and the baseball appeared to bounce off his glove, but he went head-over-heels into the dugout without the ball in hand, and Big Papi had tied the game at "five". Like so many Lehigh football games this season, Boston came from behind, thanks to heady baserunning by OF Johnny Gomes , and ultimately won Game 2 of the ALCS 6-5. It seemed apropos that this game would have that score, and be won in this way, because it seems like that game could also be a microcosm of this Lehigh football regular season, too. Everywhere you look at this season thus far, things are coming up "fives" for Lehigh.

Brazilian soccer fans are one hard to please bunch. It's not enough for the soccer nation that brought us Pele, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho to simply win their soccer games against the rest of the world: to the high-maintenance fans of the seleção, every game involving the Brazilian nation team needs to had flair and panache: style points.  They can still win, but if they win boring, the fans become restless. Similarly, Lehigh fans looked to the Mountain Hawks to go up to the upper tip of Manhattan and heap on a stylish win filled with scoring, crispness, and focus.  For some Lehigh fans, Saturday's game wasn't supposed to be about the win, it was about the style of the win. If they were looking to win on style, they didn't get that. But more importantly, the Brown and White did get the win, notching a 24-10 victory, inching closer to their goal of a Patriot League title and the all-important autobid. It wasn't crisp, and it wasn't pretty, but it was e...

After a week of silence throughout both the Lehigh and Columbia camps, finally, on a Friday, a good old-fashioned media blitz comes through to make my Game Breakdown easier. Of course there's my first choice of news, Jake Novak 's excellent Roar Lions blog , which pointed me to a piece from the student-run Columbia Spectator that gave some late, critical information on this weekend's game. And then there was the Today Show on NBC nationwide, where the Columbia football team had a segment talking a little bit about the football team and the game this weekend as well , even if Al Roker seemed a lot more engaged regarding dropping a Ylvis reference for the song " What Does the Fox Say ?" with the Baby Blue cheerleaders instead of analyzing the Lions' chances this weekend. Another thing Al missed was that the weather report for tomorrow has turned quite a bit better , with the game turning to a partly-cloudy, 10% chance of rain sort of afternoon for ...

(Photo Credit: The Daily Princetonian ) It's very rare to be able to see a non-conference opponent on the football schedule and be able to compare them completely to your own team. Non-conference opponents, of course, are not teams from your own division which you are expected to be able to compare yourself against. Columbia's non-conference schedule going into their nationally-televised game against Lehigh consists of three games: one against Fordham, one against Monmouth, and one against Princeton. It means that Columbia head coach Pete Mangurian , and Lehigh head coach Andy Coen , will be very familiar with their opponents this week.  Not only will they be able to recall last year's game at Murray Goodman in terms of personnel, but they'll also be able to pull game film on three common opponents to get the tendencies of both teams. One thing that neither team will be to one another is a surprise.

It's that time of the week where I share with you your weekly Lehigh fan viewing guide for Week 5of the college football season.  Why go to website after website when all the information you need is right here? This week's FCS Top 20 Clash at Murray Goodman will by broadcast on Service Electric 2 with Mike Zambelli, Mike Yadush and Al DiCarlo as the announcers.  For those not in the Lehigh Valley it will also be streamed for free on the Patriot League Network . And I'll be listenting to the pregame on ESPN 1230 and 1320 of the Lehigh Valley, too, with Tom Fallon, Matt Kerr and Matt Markus .  That will also be live streamed here .

It's that time of the week where I share with you your weekly Lehigh fan viewing guide for Week 4 of the college football season.  Why go to website after website when all the information you need is right here? Last week I was remiss in forgetting to mention Lehigh's broadcast information.  Tonight at 6PM, Lehigh at Princeton will be broadcast nationally on NBC Sports Network, and will also be available for live streaming on NBC Sports Live Extra , if your cable company supports it (you'll probably have to check for yourself). And I'll be listenting to the pregame on ESPN 1230 and 1320 of the Lehigh Valley, too, with Tom Fallon, Matt Kerr and Matt Markus .  That will also be live streamed here .

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.

A week after Lehigh plays on national TV (CBS Sports Network) against Joe Moorhead 's Fordham squad, head coach Andy Coen will find his team, once again, making the trek to New York City to play football. They'll be playing Fordham's cross-town Rival Columbia, who is led by head coach Pete Mangurian , on NBC Sports Network, as a part of the Ivy League's conference TV package with them. For Lehigh, it will be two big national media appearances in the media capital of the world in consecutive weeks. And like the Fordham game, it might not be as easy as people might believe.

(Photo Credit: Staten Island Live) While the news has broken that Quinnipiac and Monmouth will be accepting bids to the MAAC conference and leaving the NEC in all sports, nothing is official just yet.  The MAAC's presidents will be conducting a formal vote on the matter tomorrow, and until then, it's technically speculation. So is the thought of Wagner and Monmouth headed to other football conferences - something that seems fairly logical, should their moves to the MAAC be confirmed.  The MAAC does not sponsor football, and while the Hawks and Seahawks could spend $250,000 in exit money and then re-apply for associate, non-voting membership in the NEC for next season, it's far from clear whether either party would welcome the arrangement. If Wagner is thinking about joining the Patriot League in football, what could that mean to them? It could open up an interesting concept I've felt has been a missed opportunity for years - annual contests to see who'...

(Photo Credit: Kevin Mingora/Morning Call ) It may have been pacing break, but the Columbia/Lehigh game wasn't lacking photo and video evidence that it occurred. I don't know if it was the overcast weather, the colder, more fall-like  temperatures, the pink or what, but the shots of the game from Kevin Mingora of the Morning Call look absolutely stunning, as do the shots from the Brown & White photographers that were at the game. I'd encourage you to go over there and check out the Morning Call's eleven-page gallery , which is filled with great shots. The shot above, too, comes from that collection.  And there is a album of pictures from the Brown & White as well as a video recap of the game as well from Alec Murphy . They make my whopping two pictures on the Facebook Page seem pretty dim in comparison.  Then again, I didn't get to field level this game!

It was not a "sunny" day this last Saturday at Murray Goodman stadium. And just like the rain threatened but never came on Saturday, Lehigh threatened to make the game into a laugher this weekend, but somehow the dominating performance never came, and the Mountain Hawks let Columbia stick within striking distance until some late touchdowns finally led to the 35-14 win. But as I was leaving the post-game press conference, a ray of sunlight bathed the field, and I snapped this shot of the scoreboard and field - the only "sunny" part of the weekend, I believe. In a strange way, it seemed to sum up the Lehigh season thus far - "sunny" because the Mountain Hawks are 6-0, but with clouds on the horizon.

Highlight reels can be very misleading. I'm not saying, dear reader, that Lehigh's 35-14 win over Columbia was bad.  Not at all.  The Mountain Hawks went to 6-0 this afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium, in front of a pacing break crowd of a little over 5,000 fans. But if you simply judged this game by looking at the highlights, you wouldn't get an accurate impression of how this game unfolded. Sure, Lehigh jumped to 14-0 and 21-7 leads, and the Mountain Hawks made some bursts of impressive plays to score touchdowns on Columbia.  But it was critical Lehigh mistakes that led to the Lions' 14 points - which put a bit of a damper on the post-game celebrations for Lehigh head coach Andy Coen .

(Photo Credit: Columbia Athletics) We break down the Columbia game - and we give our fearless prediction, below the flip. WEATHER UPDATE: The weather situation for this weekend is evolving at this point , though the high of 68 and the 30% chance of showers remain.  Isolated thundershowers are now in the possible weather forecast for this weekend, so pack appropriately.  I happen to think that the weather will hold steady, and if it does, it will be an excellent October day at the stadium, which also happens to be "NCAA Take a Kid to the Game" day. And when you do, Joe Uliana , ambassador to the Lehigh football program, also has this to say: Off the field, we will be honoring the 55 th Anniversary of the 1957 Lambert Cup Team at our pregame tailg...

If Columbia head coach Pete Mangurian ever wants to take on another line of work, he'd be a great blogger. Perhaps it's understandable that he hasn't done a lot of blogging in his first year as the Lion head coach - I can imagine he's, um, a bit busy -  but his blog makes for interesting reading when he does. Last weekend, after a particularly tough 33-6 defeat to Princeton ,  Mangurian made the game about something other than the lopsided score, or the turnovers - he made it about the fans. It also highlights that Mangurian is in the middle of a rebuilding job at Columbia, and the fact that there will be growing pains as he crafts a winning football team in upper Manhattan.

(Photo Credit: College Football Performance) When Lehigh lines up against Columbia on October 6th, they will be facing their third first-year head coach in the third consecuttive week. Had you asked Columbia fans back in December whom they wanted that coach to be, the overwhelming fan favorite - according to the folks at Roar Lions , the Columbia fan community - was Holy Cross' Tom Gilmore , a face that Lehigh fans know very, very well. Columbia athletic director Diane Murphy , however, had other ideas, ultimately deciding on Pete Mangurian , a former head coach at Cornell as well as an assistant coach with Bill Belichick and Raheem Morris . It will be interesting to see what Mangurian does when he takes his Lions, who finished 1-9 last year, to Lehigh.