Lehigh Football Nation

One of the nice things about having done this for long is that at my fingertips I can summon up the definitive account of the last five meetings of The Rivalry through my game recaps of the time.  Here's a quick summary of the last five times Lehigh faced off against Lafayette in the most important game of the season.  And heck - it's Throwback Thursday somewhere, right?

This season, I thought it would be a good idea to do a LFN report card on how the team did last week as well as reviving the old "LFN Players of the Week" to go along with it.  Lehigh's 21-19 win last week over St. Francis was, most importantly, a victory, but as hardcore Lehigh football fans we want a deeper view and analysis. So here we go.

It was marginally better than last seasons 1st round loss to New Hampshire, but it still wasn't close. After holding Stony Brook scoreless in the first quarter and battling back to a 24-14 deficit at halftime, Stony Brooks' 2-play, 77 yard drive where QB Joe Carbone found TE Cal Daniels for a 40 yard touchdown pass to make it 31-14.  Despite a couple of second half touchdowns to keep it somewhat close, Stony Brook would add four more touchdowns in the second half to really pull away from the Mountain Hawks. Statistically, Lehigh battled pretty hard most of the way - especially on offense, when senior WR Troy Pelletier concluded his Division I football career as gaining the most receiving yards in Patriot League history.  On the day he had 10 catches for 94 yards and a terrific touchdown grab that undoubtedly caught the eyes of some NFL scouts. Junior QB Brad Mayes (33-for-48 passing, 333 yards, 3 TDs, 0 INT) and junior RB Dominick Bragalone (75 rushing yards, 40 r...

The term "control of your playoff destiny" is thrown around a lot. The 3-6 Mountain Hawks were in control of their destiny this weekend.  Win against Holy Cross, and Lehigh will stay alive for no worse than a co-Patriot League Championship and possibly a ticket to the FCS Playoffs. By the time the clock hit triple zero's, the Mountain Hawks did what they had to do, beating the Crusaders 34-21, and keeping destiny in their own hands with one more regular season game to go - the 153rd meeting of The Rivalry next weekend vs. Lafayette. Junior RB Dominick Bragalone carried the offense on his back with 30 carries for 205 yards and 4 touchdowns, but he and the offense fed off the energy of  some big Lehigh defensive and special teams plays.  Once Lehigh went up 14-0,  Holy Cross would never get any closer than a touchdown.

(Photo Credit: Lehigh Athletics) The ambulance came onto the field for the third time during a Lehigh football game.  On this occasion, it was that senior TE Drew Paulsen was trying to recover an onsides kick for the Mountain Hawks.  Down only a field goal, head coach Andy Coen was trying to get the ball back to take advantage of momentum. But something happened. On the tackle, he had a head or neck injury, necessitating for the third time this year that an ambulance had to come on to the field for a Lehigh game. The extremely-loved senior out of Tampa, Florida was carted out on a gurney, and headed to local Presybterian hospital for observation.  On the TV broadcast, they showed tears from some of the players on the sidelines. Lehigh lost to Fordham, 45-35, in an extremely frustrating game where the Mountain Hawks turned over the ball  four times, twice in the red zone, and twice setting up Fordham in their red zone.  But the injury to Paulsen,...

There's a pretty good chance that senior WR Troy Pelletier , who made the Patriot League's preseason all-Conference team and is on the Walter Payton Award watch list to start the year, will be the starter in the season opener vs. Villanova. It's also not a headline that junior RB Dominick Bragalone , also on the Patriot League's preseason all-Conference team, is likely to -shocker! - be a starter on September 2nd. But that doesn't mean that there still aren't plenty of questions as the Mountain Hawks enter into their fall training camp for fans to think about.

The parties raged on in the parking garage next to Fisher Field, which were packed with Lafayette fans eager to enjoy a party with plenty of great food and copious drinks. The tiny businesses below Fisher Field, the small bits of capitalism next to the concrete husks of factory jobs that have left ages ago, had plenty of visiting Lehigh fans, enjoying the tailgates and ready to invade the stadium that they hadn't seen in four years. In the line coming into the stadium, a silent protest of hundreds of Lafayette students clad in black, handing out a political statement on a piece of paper and showing some signs that were up seemingly to simply show that these people exist, and are not happy. Somewhere in this mix of people escaping, people expressing and people denying, a football game was played, one that matched an 8-2 team that was headed to the national stage and the FCS playoffs, the other a 2-8 squad that had their fans questioning the tenure of their head coach. It w...

(Photo Credit: Jay Anderson/Worcester Telegram) It was a day where even when things went wrong they went right for the Mountain Hawks. It was early in the second quarter, deadlocked at 7.   Sophomore QB Brad Mayes , picked the starter as senior QB Nick Shanfisky would be the backup to let his injured leg continue to heal, would get a drive going with an 18 yard pass to junior WR Troy Pelletier .  Two plays later, sophomore RB Dominick Bragalone would run a counter play left, escape a few tackles, and surge for a 28 yard run into Holy Cross territory. You could feel some momentum building as Mayes would connect on a 4th and 7 to Pelletier to get into the Holy Cross red zone, and again when he would rifle a ball to junior WR Gatlin Casey over the middle.  There was even more when sophomore RB Micco Brisker would keep his legs moving - and his offensive line, pushing - until he reached the end zone. Up 13-7, on the extra point Shafnisky, who holds during...

On the first drive of the game, surprise Holy Cross starting QB Blaise Bell connected on a long pass to WR Jake Wieczorek, setting up a big touchdown run by WR Brendan Flaherty . On the last drive of the game, freshman RB Domenic Cozier ran up the middle to score his first collegiate touchdown for the Crusaders. In between those two touchdowns, it was for the most part all Lehigh. Lehigh's defense held Holy Cross to 281 yards of total offense and forced five turnovers - most of it coming on a couple of pass plays - and allowed the offense to to pummel Holy Cross' defense with a balanced attack.  With three passing touchdowns from sophomore QB Brad Mayes and three rushing touchdowns, two of them by sophomore RB Dominick Bragalone , Lehigh would score 46 unanswered points to win resoundingly, 46-14, at Fitton Field.

(Photo Credit: Keith Groller/Morning Call) It felt a lot closer than 14 to 3 at halftime. Sure, Lehigh had outgained Georgetown 220-64 on offense up until that point.  Definitely, the Lehigh defense, which has been playing with a chip on its shoulder for most of the entire season, was playing, as they say, lights-out, and they had just come up with a big defensive stop in the red zone to keep Georgetown from cutting it from 14-7 rather than 14-3. But a batted ball at the line of scrimmage, alertly grabbed by DE Hoya DE Hunter Kiselick , made it feel like the Mountain Hawks might rue the opportunities they had in the first hald to put away Georgetown. After coming in for injured senior QB Nick Shafnisky , sophomore QB Brad Mayes  jumped right into the fray and finished the scoring drive with a perfect pass over the middle to junior WR Troy Pelletier to make the score 14-3 Lehigh. But after a drive that went backwards and that interception, it was Georgetown that h...

(Photos and Graphic courtesy of Lehigh Athletics) Suppose you put in a copy of NCAA Football '14 into your dusty Playstation 3.  You create a team, "Lehigh", and put in the entire Lehigh roster, and make them 99s across the board. You pick a team to play against - say, Yale - and you pick a place to play, of course, the Yale Bowl.  You put it on the medium setting. Would these stat lines seem out of place if you played that game on that system? Sophomore QB Brad Mayes - 33 of 46 passing, 524 yards, 6 touchdowns, 0 interceptions. Junior WR Troy Pelletier - 13 catches, 213 yards, 3 TDs. Junior WR Gatlin Casey - 6 catches, 169 yards 2 TDs. They look like something out of a video game - yet those are the real stats to come out of the Yale Bowl this weekend in an extraordinary, awesome, ridiculousness of an offensive performance.  These numbers weren't the only great numbers to come out of this record-setting game out of the Yale Bowl, but they stick out...

(Photo Credit: Justin Lafleur/Lehigh Athletics) Once upon a time, Lehigh's offense had the nickname "Air Lehigh", and players like QB Scott Semphiphelter, QB Phil Stambaugh and many other Mountain Hawk quarterbacks hucked the ball around Murray Goodman Stadium like kids in a sandlot, and posted some serious passing numbers that made the place a very fun spot to watch college football on Saturdays. Today at Murray Goodman, senior QB Nick Shafnisky brought us back to those Air Lehigh days with a game with the same type of offensive firepower. Pairing up with junior WR Troy Pelletier and junior WR Gatlin Casey for more than 100 yards receiving apiece, the Whitehall, PA native brought Lehigh fans back to the future with a 461 yard passing performance, coming oh-so-close to setting a Lehigh record in the process. In the end, Lehigh fans left Murray Goodman stadium with a lot of pleasant memories about a beautiful, unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon and a resoundi...

Saturday's game is a personal landmark for head coach Andy Coen : it marks the first time he's coached a Lehigh team at Penn since he was hired there from Al Bagnoli 's staff back in December of 2005. He'll be facing off against another former Bagnoli assistant coach, Ray Priore , who was a defensive coordinator at Penn when Andy was an offensive coordinator there. Franklin Field, then, becomes one of the big #NarrativeStreet storylines going into Saturday, and for Lehigh, not a good reason. Since 1895, when the enormous field was built in downtown Philadelphia, Lehigh has won exactly four times at the iconic venue, and the overall Brown and White record there is 4-28.  Along the way, among the many losses by Lehigh there, came one recent one in particular that snapped a long Lehigh regular-season winning streak.

This Saturday, Lehigh football fans will finally get a chance to get a free sneak peek at the 2016 Mountain Hawks at Murray Goodman stadium. Scheduled to start at 11:00AM, it will be a bit of a different spring game than usual, due to the fact that it will be a no-tackling practice , unlike the one I happened to catch that was partial tackling. "We never had a full practice that was all tackling," head coach Andy Coen told Lehighsports.com.  "I picked about three practices where he had at times, full contact. We never put ourselves in a situation where we were doing too much. I do believe if you want to get good at these things, you have to practice them. We've been using a lot of the techniques that the Seattle Seahawks have utilized over the last couple of years, and those techniques have been very productive for us.  We're getting a lot better with our technique and are coaches are doing a great job of staying on top of our kids regarding technique....

Coach Andy Coen at football practice (Morning Call) Lehigh's spring session has been underway for several weeks now - the period of time where Patriot League championships are won. It's a spring season where, frankly, there's not that much drama, especially on offense. There's no drama at quarterback, where senior QB Nick Shafnisky is firmly ensconced as the starter, and proven sophomore QB Brad Mayes right there next to him on the depth chart. It's very clear that sophomore RB Dominic Bragalone will be a big part of next year's offense, health willing, as well as junior WR Troy Pelletier and a many players from last year's offense that led the Patriot League in total offensive yardage. So what is the big story halfway through the spring? Whether there will be enough healthy bodies to have a spring game.

Everything about the 2015 season screamed "rebuilding," even if the Lehigh faithful never really could bring themselves to completely believe it. Lehigh was coming from a frustrating 2014 where the Mountain Hawks came close to beating James Madison at home, but couldn't finish the game, making Lehigh slide to an uncharacteristic 3-8 record. There was the departure in the offseason of RB Chris Leigh , the one player that scored a touchdown for the Mountain Hawks in the 150th meeting between Lafayette and Lehigh in Yankee Stadium, and RB Brandon Yosha , the transfer running back that battled injury and chop blocks leading to his retirement from football as well. With pretty much any other team and any other fan base, expectations for the year would have been low.  But at Lehigh, expectations are sky-high, for better or for worse, all the time.  Perhaps it's the historic success of the program; perhaps it's the fans, who are spoiled by all the Patriot League...

Not that long ago, Lehigh football players had to take those dreaded 4 O'Clock exams, an essential, dreaded part of the Lehigh experience. Today, though the 2015 Lehigh Mountain Hawks are getting areport card of a different sort. Past the halfway point of the season, it's time to take a step back and see where the Mountain Hawks are, and where they need to go to get back to the top of the Patriot League. The season, as befitting a young team, has been inconsistent.  At times, Lehigh has looked like a team that could possibly win the Patriot League title.  At other times, though, they haven't. Fortunately for all Lehigh fans, the Mountain Hawks last game, a gritty 21-10 win over Bucknell , was the equivalent of acing the mid-term exam.  That win, which brought Lehigh back to a 3-3 record, was huge.  But tougher challenges await in the last five weeks of the season.

It was a game that was pretty much the opposite of what Lehigh football fans would have wanted from homecoming. People want games in Murray Goodman Stadium that are sunny and 70 degrees, with perhaps just a hint of wind.  Instead, despite the fact that a threatened hurricane never arrived, temperatures dipped into the 50s to go with some cold, gusty winds, which caused not a few people to get runny noses. Homecoming is supposed to be a happy time, but the dark, overcast skies didn't make the game feel like a warm, welcoming place.  Though the Marching 97 tried their best, as did the Alumni band, the dreariness hung over the stadium like an unwelcome guest. Home fans always want a win on homecoming, hopefully with exciting, crisp, vibrant execution from the guys in the brown jerseys, but again, that too would end up being the opposite of what Lehigh fans were hoping for on this afternoon. Yale would turn over the ball three times, be penalized 11 times for 94 yards, a...