Lehigh Football Nation

When the 2017 Lehigh Mountain Hawks released their very first positional two deep back in September, it had five freshmen and nine sophomores listed.  That's a fairly normal type of depth chart for a largely veteran team that was ranked in the FCS Top 25. Only two freshmen,  OG Jackson Evans and LS Jack Dean , were expected to contribute right away, while  sophomore FS Riley O'Neil had already started nearly every single game he'd played since his freshman season - already a veteran. Entering the ninth game of the season, the depth chart that head coach Andy Coen will present to the officials on Saturday will look very different. The two defensive captains on opening day, senior DT Jim Mitchell and junior SS Sam McCloskey , won't be anywhere to be found - both injured, out for the year.  Junior CB Donavon Harris - still out with a head injury.  J unior LB Mark Walker - out.  Junior ROV Nick Thevaganayam - out.  Senior TE Drew Paulsen - ...

One has been here before; the other has not, at least not lately. Over the course of the last few seasons, Villanova Stadium has hosted all sorts of games involving Top 25 teams.  James Madison, New Hampshire, Richmond - all of these CAA teams have been to the Main Line, at one time or another, at the same time the Wildcats have also been in the Top 25.  When it comes to hosting big football games, Villanova is no stranger to that situation. Not so, Lehigh. Sure, the Mountain Hawks have played a bunch of Top 25 teams over the course of the last several seasons.  And last year, Lehigh returned to the Top 25 as well. But the Mountain Hawks haven't hosted a game like this, a Top 25 tilt between two opponents that are both in the Top 25, since the Mountain Hawks beat New Hampshire 34-27 back in 2012. This year's season opener represents the cumulation of the long, hard road of building a Top 25, national-caliber FCS football team.  Last season was a year o...

"The Engineer football team once again showed their supremacy over the Yankee Conference leaders by defeating the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Wildcats, 16-3," read the October 26th edition of The Brown and White  in 1979. LB Jim McCormick intercepted a UNH pass early in the game, and returned it to the Wildcat 4, setting up an early touchdown.  After that, the Engineer defense would take over, crushing UNH's offense the rest of the way. That would be the last time Lehigh has won at Cowell Stadium - 1979, a year where Lehigh was one of four teams in the I-AA playoffs and made it to the championship, ultimately falling to Eastern Kentucky in the finals. So much has changed since then.  The I-AA playoffs have been renamed the FCS playoffs, and not have 24 teams instead of 4.  The Yankee Conference essentially was renamed to the Atlantic 10 Football Conference and now the CAA football conference, morphing from a Northeastern-based conference to one whose c...

Perhaps you've heard that the Cubs, managed by a Lafayette grad called Joe Maddon , broke their more than century old championship drought vs. the Cleveland Indians last night. The Lehigh Mountain Hawks' championship drought isn't quite as long as that. But if the Brown and White hope to raise the trophy at Murray Goodman Stadium this weekend, they'll need to break a mini-curse of their own. It refers to the Mountain Hawks' inability over the last four years to win both Game 10 and Game 11 on the schedule, specifically during the last four years. There have been years that Lehigh has needed Game 10 to have a chance to win the Patriot League, but haven't been able to get it done.  There have been other years where they've needed Game 11 to do so, and missed. When Games 10 and 11 have title implications, and when Lehigh wins those games, they tend to be Patriot League champs.  When they lose one or the other, there tends to be the type of hurt that...

"With the exception of the first five minutes," The Brown and White said, "Lehigh played indifferent football.  At times the Brown and White showed flashes of form, but for the most part they lacked the dash and drive which characterizes the opening minutes of the game.  The aerial attack which gained so much ground last week was poor, and it was not until the latter part of the third quarter that Lehigh completer her first successful forward pass." This quote, taken from the 1923 student newspaper detailing the first-ever official football meeting between Lehigh and Fordham, won't be something that's repeated in the student newspaer in their recap this weekend.  In fact, the fifteen points scored in that 1923 game, a 9-6 Lehigh win, might very well be outdistanced in the first five minutes of the game this weekend., and it's a guarantee that Fordham and Lehigh will be completing their first passes well before the 3rd quarter. It would be stunning...

No college football coach wants to face a team boxed in a corner. In that way, Harvard was stepping into a purple hornet's nest last weekend when the nationally-ranked Crimson came to play the wounded Crusaders. After their injury-riddled team failed to hold onto a win against Bucknell, ultimately falling 21-20, Tom Gilmore 's team needed to make a stand against a really good football team in order to keep their season from a limp to the finish. Even if they didn't win, they had to keep things close - few pundits gave Holy Cross much of a chance against the better bankrolled, historically dominant Harvard team that hadn't lost a road game a non-conference game in their last sixteen tries. Cornered like rats, Holy Cross responded in a big way.  Six sacks and a second-half shutout later, the Crusaders would notch their first win over a nationally-ranked opponent since 2009, thus turning things around at the exact right time for them and the exact wrong time for ...

Senior QB Nick Shanfisky called them "motivation games", and it's clear during this four game winning streak motivation hasn't been lacking for this Lehigh football team. Start with Penn, where it was critical for the Mountain Hawks to avoid an 0-3 hole.  Then proceed to Princeton, where the defense gave up 52 points last season in a loss; to the Yale Bowl, where two years ago no less than five players came down with injuries in another loss; and of course Colgate, where last season the Raiders' stop at the goal line preserved their 49-42 victory and snatched a Patriot League title that was within the Mountain Hawks' grasp. At 4-2, and in the drivers' seat, along comes a game for Lehigh at Georgetown, which by any measure doesn't have the same types of motivation that fueled this four game winning streak. Not that there's no motivation, mind you.  Conference games count for more than games against Yale, or Monmouth. But you can't ...

(Photo Credits: Lehigh Valley Live) The word cloud around the Lehigh Colgate game the last decade has almost always involved the words "tundra", "cold", and "November". So when the 2016 schedule was released, and Lehigh fans read "October 8th: Colgate", many were disappointed, even as they still circled the game on their calendar with a maroon Sharpie. They were probably thinking back to last season, when, in the second weekend in November on a prototypical Lehigh/Colgate chilly afternoon with a chance of snow showers, the Mountain Hawks and Raiders were battling, essentially, for a Patriot League championship, ending up five yards short of a game-tying touchdown. But now, in what seems like a better move by the minute, the moving up of a critical conference game that has very often determined the eventual winner of the League seems terrific for not only both schools, but the entire Patriot League. That's because, in a week that d...

For one reason or another, I hadn't been back. Since my undergraduate years, I hadn't gone to see Lehigh play Yale at the Yale Bowl.  It was either too long a trip as an undergraduate to catch the Engineers, a trip to Disney with the family interfered, or maybe I was just saving up my energy for a big conference game the following week. No matter what it really was, it really was a bucket of excuses, with the ultimate result being I hadn't gone back, even though Lehigh had played there so often. It feels almost criminal, even though I have driven past the stadium many times. This weekend, for the first time since a beautiful night for football in October of 1977, I will be heading back to the iconic Yale Bowl. And in contemplating this trip, a flood of memories returned from my first trip there - my first-ever college football game, and thus the very first inspiration for what I would end up doing the rest of my life.

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 , ...

(Photo Credit: Pat Goodridge/Daily Pennsylvanian) "[We're] trying not to over-plan for Lehigh," Penn head coach Ray Priore said in his first Penn coaches' teleconference of the year.  "And the kids are very focused.  We got off to last years' start 1-3, our first loss was to Lehigh, and they tattooed us pretty good up there, so our kids remember that... " If there was any doubt that the Penn players had somehow forgotten the way they kicked off the Ray Priore era - that they had forgotten that humbling beginning to their Ivy League championship season from last year - any doubt of that was easily erased by the easy way that " so our kids remember that " uttered from Priore's lips at the press conference. College football head coaches generally don't like their opponents lying in wait for them for months upon months upon months.  They prefer to sneak into town competing as lightly-regarded underdogs, preferably playing a "s...

Villanova is listed as No. 22 in the STATS Top 25 poll this week, and No. 19 in the Coaches' poll.  Lehigh, as has been the case since 2014, is unranked. Additionally, since resuming play against the Wildcats in the modern era in 2004, Lehigh is 1-4 against Villanova. So, simple matter for Lehigh to put the Monmouth loss behind them and kick off the rest of the 2016 football season with a win, right? Not exactly. That the Villanova game this Saturday will be a big challenge appears to be something head coach Andy Coen, junior OL Tim O'Hara and the rest of the Mountain Hawks are quite aware, but that doesn't mean that anyone will be backing down. "The message we're going to have is don't get on the bus unless you think you're going to win the game," Coen said.  "So, we're looking forward to it."

The enormity of the challenge of Lehigh's 2015 football schedule was evident to everyone looking at the schedule. "October 10th, at Bucknell.  October 24th, at Fordham" . In August, every Lehigh fan wants to be an optimist.  They want to believe that this is the year that they win a Patriot League champions.  They look at the entirety of the schedule, and say, "Yeah.  We could win that one." But even the biggest optimists looked at this two-game stretch, at Bucknell, and at Fordham, and had to pause, and perhaps exhale.   "Number Two and Number One in the league last year," they think.  "On the road.  And Fordham, a Top 15 team for the last two years, who has gone to the FCS playoffs for two straight years, with a returning Jerry Rice award-winner in RB Chase Edmonds." Lehigh defied their preseason expectations by beating Bucknell 21-10 two weeks ago , setting up an extremely meaningful game in the Bronx this coming weekend for ...

The buzz went through the press box in the minutes before last year's game versus Bucknell that QB R.J. Nitti , the starter for the 4-1 Bison, was not suiting up at quarterback. Almost immediately, the mood of the Lehigh folks covering the game picked up. Without Nitti, it would mean little-used QB Trey Lauletta would be the starter in his place.  That, along with the injury to the regular starting RB C.J. Williams , what seemed originally like a close matchup between two close teams felt like a very good shot at a win for the winless Mountain Hawks and might actually get Lehigh's season pointed in the right direction.  It didn't work out that way. After jumping out to a 7-0 lead, Bucknell would ride a record-setting performance by WR Will Carter , who would get 3 big-play touchdowns during a stretch of 31 straight Bison points to power through to a 45-24 win over Lehigh and effectively ending any dreams of competing for the Patriot League title. For the last t...