Lehigh Football Nation

What a win it was. The consensus from anyone on the Lehigh side was that the 0-2 Mountain Hawks needed a win.   Any win.  And it wasn't going to be easy, against last year's Ivy League champs, out for vengeance. And then it happened - the sort of half of football that makes all the loss experiences worth it, the type of tale of redemption after the disappointment of being so close to tasting victory and possible national recognition, only to have it taken away by a few yards in a game of inches, or a drive where the defense couldn't get that one final stop. Suddenly, all the narratives that defined the first two losses were overturned.  Times when the offense were stopped short became touchdowns.  The defense became a Steel Curtain.  The win was as definitive as it was season-affirming.  It was difficult to find much to criticize in Lehigh's 49-28 victory over Penn that had spent all offseason plotting their vengeance against the Mountain Hawks , ...

Rarely are scouting opportunities so accessible. Shortly after Lehigh beat Penn last weekend, there was an opportunity for a Patriot/Ivy doubleheader for FCS football mavens, and a chance for Lehigh football fans to get a sneak peek at next week's competition. What they saw couldn't have made any Mountain Hawk fan breathe easy. What they saw was a dominating performance by the Tigers, a 40-7 walloping that had local sportswriters like Brad Wilson of the Express-Times dig down deep to describe the depth of the blowout.  "If Frank Tavani had seen Saturday's train wreck of a 40-7 loss to Princeton by his Lafayette football team coming," he wrote , "he'd have done everything in his power to derail the Leopard Express from proceeding down the track to Disaster City." In Wilson's defense, the depth of the completeness of the win over Lafayette was hard to adequately describe.  Princeton only allowed six first downs in the first half, and...