Lehigh Football Nation

(Photo Credits: Delaware Online ) When I heard the news  Tubby Raymond , legendary Delaware head football coach, died last week at the age of 92, two immediate memories came rushing back to me. One occurred on October 16th, 1999, when Tubby had made a complaint to the local paper or radio in the run-up to  Kevin Higgins ' Mountain Hawks beating his Blue Hens on Delaware's homecoming, 42-35. I have no idea if the quote even actually happened, but my recollection is that Tubby said that Lehigh had "St. Bartholomew's" on their schedule, and hadn't played anybody.  It was a verbal jab that many Delaware fans took with them to the stands to heckle the Mountain Hawk fans that made the short trip to Newark. Up until that point, I had watched a bunch of Lehigh football games over the years.  I experienced their rise in the 1990s.  I enjoyed wins, and championships, and playoff victories. But never had I felt a win so viscerally vindicating than the one ove...

Recently, I wrote an entire article about how the way the NCAA allows schools to become FBS is broken. It turns out I had no idea exactly how broken until I was guided towards the Idaho Vandals Football Consultant report, helpfully posted in full on the University of Idaho's website . In that report, one of the possible avenues that Idaho was mulling over was to join the WAC. I was confused - the WAC had stopped sponsoring FBS football long ago, a couple of years after then-commissioner Karl Benson finished his uncanny impersonation of Baghdad Bob in regards to saving FBS football for that conference - only to leave his job to take over at the Sun Belt Conference. But it turns out, after a fresh read of the NCAA rulebook, it is indeed true. Like a bad horror movie, the zombified WAC football conference could indeed resurrect itself - and, in the process, shows how royally screwed up this system of FCS and FBS movement really is.

My vote for the FCS Top 25 for the week ending 11/4/2013 follows below the flip. But first, check out this great picture from the crazy Delaware/Towson game this weekend, courtesy of Towson Athletics. Three times, Towson had a chance to put away Delaware up by 2 touchdowns.   Three times, the Tigers didn't convert. With 4 minutes, 19 seconds left in the third quarter, Towson (8-2 overall and 4-2 in the Colonial Athletic Association) had a chance to pad a 28-10 advantage, but senior PK Drew Evangelista ’s field-goal attempt from 33 yards banged off the left upright.  On the ensuing possession, Tigers LB Monte Gaddis put enough pressure on Blue Hens senior QB Trevor Sasek to incite him to float a deep pass that junior CB Tye Smith intercepted at Towson’s 26-yard line. Smith wove his way 74 yards into the end zone, but the Tigers were flagged for clipping, which nullified the touchdown with 2:27 remaining.  And on Delaware’s penultimate series of the contest...

My vote for the FCS Top 25 for the week ending 9/23/2013 follows below the flip. But first, by all means, enjoy this great shot of a big Top 25 game last week, McNeese State at Northern Iowa.  (Photo Credit: Matthew Putney / The Waterloo Courier ) The picture tells the story of the game pretty well, as the Panthers in the UNI Dome took apart McNeese, 41-6.  In my poll last week, both were Top 10 teams.  Not this week, though I didn't drop the Cowboys too far.

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 .

Unless you've been living under a rock the last five years, you've probably heard about "realignment", or, as I like to call it, "realignmentageddon", in Division I athletics. Led by Nebraska's departure from the Big XII to the Big 10, the dominoes have tumbles all through Division I, directly affecting pretty much every conference's membership with the exception of the Ivy League. Central to "realignmentageddon" is football, whose value to television executives is broadly accepted as the reasons why, say, Rutgers and Maryland abandoned decades-long relationships with their old conferences in order to get larger chunks of TV money. But why is it only individual schools?  Why wouldn't a conference which currently sponsors FCS football just decide, one day, to become an FBS conference? The short answer is: the NCAA rulebook is written than way. But the long answer is that the NCAA rulebook, essentially, forces the current FCS ...

(Photo Credit: CNN) The bye weekend is always a weird weekend, mainly due to the fact that there's no football game to recap, no game to travel to, no undefeated record on the line. It was made weirder, too, by "Sandy". The epic "Frankenstorm" - as it's been dubbed - that was headed towards my house and the Lehigh Valley ultimately dwarfed my weekend, even pushing - gasp! - football to one side as I frantically did everything to get the house prepared for the storm. It seemed to parallel a similar storm that hit a couple top teams in FCS - thus making, for the time being, the Mountain Hawks the only undefeated team in all of FCS.

If you look at the small picture, it probably looks like it's going to be a banner year for football attendance across all of the nation. In FBS, five schools (Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Penn State, and Alabama) average more than 100,000 fans thronging in their stadiums, and with a bunch of rivalry games yet to go, it looks like there might be more than ten teams that average more than 90,000 fans per game. And in FCS, too, five teams (Appalachian State, Montana, James Madison, Jackson State, and Georgia Southern) are averaging more than 20,000 fans a game.  That's already up from last year, too, where James Madison and Georgia Southern have rejoined the 20,000 club this year. Yet these individual attendance wins obscure a larger picture. For every Michigan or Appalachian State, there is another side of the coin - a college football program that is seeing attendance diminish year to year.  And there are plenty of reasons for this decline.

(Note: This blog posting has been cross-posted at Technorati , and can also be found in its entirety there .) In January, the University of Delaware issued a press release that has unfortunately, been all too common at smaller schools all over the country. They announced they were cutting a non-revenue men's athletics program - in this case, men's cross country and track and field - due to fiscal and Title IX compliance concerns. What was different this time was that the co-captain of the hundred year-old team, Corey Wall, decided to file a complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights. It cited reverse gender discrimination , and suggested that the enforcement of Title IX was, in reality, taking them away from men "against the spirit of Title IX." Truer words have never been spoken. (more)

This year's FCS playoffs, the first since the field was expanded to 20 teams, has made for a season of growing pains.  Not necessarily bad ones, but pains nonetheless. With a 16 team bracket, it made for an easy beginning and end to the FCS regular season.  It always ended the weekend before Christmas, the all-America teams were done - and the national champions were crowned, as all of the world of FCS partied on the eve of the new year. But with an extra round of playoffs, it was the semifinals that would end the week before Christmas - and three long, long weeks before knowing for certain the identity of the national champions. And the team that defeated Lehigh in the playoffs the week after the playoffs may very well be the team that is this year's champion. (more)

(Photo Credit: Matt Breitel/The Brown & White) It still is hard to comprehend that the football season is finally, truly, over. In case you're like me, you'll want to go over the final game recaps of Lehigh's fall in the second round of the playoffs. It was a year to remember on a whole lot of fronts. Lehigh's first Ivy league sweep since 2005. The Patriot League's first win in the FCS playoffs since 2003. The Mountain Hawks' first outright Patriot League title since 2001 - and their first playoff victory since that time, too. To top it off, the three teams they lost to - Villanova, New Hampshire, and Delaware of the CAA - are all still alive in the playoffs today, implying that they are three of the top eight (or nine) FCS programs in the nation. But today is a day to recap Lehigh's season-ending loss to Delaware this past Saturday, and below the flip are the recaps of the Mountain Hawks' final game in 2010. (more)

(Photo Credit: Mark Campbell/Delaware Athletics) So the first team to 21 points indeed was the team that ended up winning, as I predicted. And Delaware - to their immense credit - put up 40 points on Lehigh's defense. (So much for my bold prediction that the Blue Hens wouldn't put up 40 on the Mountain Hawks.) But heading down the tunnel off the field after the Lehigh football season came to a cold end in the FCS playoffs in Newark, Delaware, there were no hung helmets from the Lehigh players. Some disappointment, sure. But no tears. No humiliation, as a different type of swarm came around the Lehigh players - a group of Lehigh fans, who silently gave their support for a season that exceeded all fans' expectations. Lehigh came out of the gates with some momentum and kept the game close early on - but Blue Hen QB Pat Devlin , who looked an awful lot like a first rounder in the NFL draft this afternoon, kept making play after play to shred Lehigh's defense. (...

Admit it: if you're a Lehigh or Delaware fan, you are having serious fun this week.  The playoffs are always great - but of all the first round matchups, without question no other matchup evokes the animal spirits like the one happening in Newark, Delaware this weekend.  (I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Eastern Washington/Southeast Missouri State hasn't spawned hundreds of pages of smack, and dozens of print articles, on their matchup this weekend.) For Lehigh, Delaware and Villanova, whose Northeast-based fans can enjoy a double-dip of playoff football (Lehigh/Delaware at noon on WFMZ 69, and Villanova/Stephen F.Austin at 3:30 on Philly CW 57 - honestly, are you going to pass that up to discover who wins the Big East?) it's the best of times. But, it's also the one year anniversary of the "worst of times", too, for Northeast football - the announcement that Hofstra, joining Northeastern who had announced their decision a week prior, ha...

(Photo Credit: William Bretzger/The Delaware News-Journal ) Yesterday, I broke down the " Blue Route Rivalry " in terms of the players' views on the game, and the long and storied rivalry that has been Lehigh and Delaware through the years. But it's not going to be Tubby Raymond or John Whitehead on the sidelines this weekend - it's K.C. Keeler and Andy Coen on the sidelines for the Hens and Hawks this time, and the dynamic count not be more different.  Rather than smack, it's all about mutual respect and the "challenge" of playing Delaware. In this Part 2 of the playoff preview, I'll start with an extended breakdown of the Blue Hens, and then end with my (patent pending) fearless prediction of the game this weekend. (more)

"I was at Delaware practice the other day,", a message board poster on Any Given Saturday said , "and asked a couple of the seniors how they felt about the one time rival. "Both said the same thing, before my time ." This is absolutely true, by the way.  The last time the Blue Hens and Mountain Hawks played on the gridiron was 2005, so the players do have a point.  If they were Blue Hens at that time, that would have made them redshirt freshmen when a missed extra point in overtime doomed Lehigh to a 34-33 defeat . The talk this week will be of the renewal of a regional rivalry that dates to 1938.  It will involve talk of talkative former Blue Hen head coach Tubby Raymond , whose games with Lehigh in the 1970s up until the 2000s have gone into "legendary" status.  There will be a lot of rejoicing that the FCS playoffs can - once again - rekindle a regional rivalry that ought to happen a lot more often than it actually does. But for the kids on...

Even though I'm on vacation, I did want to post a quick "Sunday Word" on a subject that may not seem to affect Lehigh - but it does. Recently, Delaware state's government rolled the dice about allowing sports gambling in the state. In an effort to plug the massive hole in the state budget, they instituted a plan to take advantage of a federal loophole to re-institute a form of sports gambling that they had dropped in 1976. Whatever the motivations of Delaware governor Jack Markell, he had to know that the NCAA doesn't take kindly to sports gambling - they've largely upheld a ban of sanctioned NCAA postseason events, for example, and none of the big-money events - so he must have known that the NCAA would be likely to bring the hammer down on Delaware schools if sports gambling were legalized. And this Friday, the NCAA delivered what was expected: a ban on NCAA postseason competition for schools in the First State. For those Patriot League fans scoring at ho...

Three days after I opine that perhaps something is awfully fishy down Big East Way , Georgetown athletic director Bernard Muir suddenly fills the vacant AD position at Delaware : Georgetown announced Monday that athletic director Bernard Muir was resigning to accept the same post at the University of Delaware. Georgetown's search for Muir's replacement will begin immediately. "I am grateful for the contributions that Bernard Muir has made to Georgetown," Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said in a statement. "Bernard has recruited outstanding new coaches and bolstered academic support and leadership development opportunities for our student athletes." Sources close to the program said Muir's relationship with DeGioia became strained when he interviewed for openings at Duke and Northwestern in the past year. Many Georgetown and Big East observers are scratching their heads . Why should the athletic director, who told the head football coach he would ...

The expected snow-in yesterday allowed me to get caught up on some Lehigh football news, headlined by word of a very poorly-kept secret - the departure of a Lehigh assistant coach. **** It's not printed anywhere, but the Big Green Alert blog is reporting that Lehigh assistant coach Adam Scheier is headed to Bowling Green to serve under head coach (and former Lehigh offensive coordinator) Dave Clawson. Scheier, who coached wide receivers and was special teams coordinator for the Mountain Hawks, reportedly will be co-special teams coordinator and tight ends coach. It's a great opportunity for Scheier, who now will get to coach for an FBS program. Congratulations! Replacing him on the Mountain Hawks will be interesting. Not so much on the special teams side, where it's possible to envision kicking & punters coach Pete Morelli doing that job going forward, but on the wide receivers side. Here's a bit of wild, unsubstantiated speculation from me: what about Harvard...

This blog posting is basically a hodge-podge of different things I wanted to mention before 2008 comes to a close. My YouTube highlight film of Lehigh/Lafayette is still in the process of getting done (I forgot how much of a pain in the you-know-what it is to go through game film to make a ten-minute highlight reel), as is my announcement about the LFN "Hawks of the Year" (which, if I ever can get the hang of it, will have YouTube support as well). But those, alas, will have to wait until 2009 to be complete. I've archived pretty much all of the Lehigh game wrap-ups for 2008 from the mainstream media on the CSN Log , before it's gone to the dusty archives of the Easton Express-Times and Allentown Morning Call . I've also been archiving much of the press clippings from the rest of the Patriot League, Richmond, and other schools. It's a big job - and I'm working to make it less so. I also recently helped pick the College Sporting News Fab 50, as well as...

(Photo Credit: Mustafa al-Ammar, The Daily Pennsylvanian) I'm trying something new in an effort to make my weekly wrapups better: I'm going to attempt to sum up all the scores of the Patriot League for the week and also add to it other scores of interest from the Ivy League, CAA, NEC and others as I see fit. The focus will still be from a Lehigh perspective (meaning: the focus will be on Lehigh's past and upcoming opponents), but I think it's worth taking a peek at football elsewhere in the East as well. At Franklin Field Saturday afternoon, a former Lehigh foe (Villanova) faced off against Penn (Lafayette's foe next week) in a "Big 5" rivalry game. Despite junior QB Antwon Young 's four interceptions, Villanova escaped with a 20-14 overtime victory after senior DE Dave Dellasandro forced a fumble in the overtime that was recovered by Villanova - and after the Wildcats had their extra-point blocked, meaning a touchdown and an extra point would have ...