Lehigh Football Nation

(Photo Credit: Bill Neibergall/The Des Moines Register) On Mondays during the regular season in the past, I've offered up a "Press Roundup" of the week that was in Lehigh football.  I'll continue to do that this year, with just a slight modification: I'll post the wrap-ups with pertinent quotes, as I did before, but I'll also empty out my notebook and add my brain droppings to the mix as well. The reactions to the game were a strange mixture of highs and lows.  Highs with the play of senior RB Jay Campbell and senior LB Al Pierce (who was Defensive Player of the Week in the Patriot League ), but lows in the way that the Mountain Hawks let the Bulldogs back in the game.   (more)

The season couldn't have started out more perfectly for the Mountain Hawks. What wasn't to love about the first quarter?     Junior QB Chris Lum completes his first five passes - and starts the game off orchestrating two amazing drives that justified all the confidence that head coach Andy Coen had in him. On defense in the first half, Lehigh was money.  As a unit, they held the Bulldogs to only 38 yards and one first down - that Drake WR Nick Rosa had to earn severely after senior LB Al Pierce and the rest of the Mountain Hawk defense pounded him good. And yet - this was a game that was dangerously close to being lost.   (more)

It came out of the blue like a bolt of lightning from the clouds that hang over Mount Kilimanjaro.  Not content with the pomp and circumstance coming with hosting Lehigh for the first time ever, the Drake Bulldogs - Lehigh's opening day opponent - announced that the are going to play the first-ever football game in Africa . Really.  It's not a joke .  The trip this May will involve building an orphanage, climbing the iconic African mountain, as well as playing a football game.  It will also require a massive fundraising effort - and will, hopefully, end up being a positive life-changing trip for all the kids involved.  It sounds like an awesome idea - one that Drake head coach Chris Creighton deserves full credit for. One fundraising idea for the trip came from the Des Moines Register : from every sack Drake makes this year, or how many points they score. Lehigh's mission?  To make the Bulldogs find another team to raise their money.  Zero sacks...

Six days from today, Lehigh will be in Des Moines, Iowa ushering in the Lum era. It still seems strange to write it - no offense meant, junior QB Chris Lum .  But there's no time to sit and reflect about the past: what was a quarterback battle in preseason camp between Lum, QB J.B. Clark and sophomore QB Michael Colvin .  It's done - and make no mistake, Lum earned his shot the right way.  He worked hard in the offseason, and basically out-worked his competition. Lum took his "lumps", worked through a fierce competition, and earned his place atop the depth chart. (more)

Is it really just about 50 days until Lehigh travels to Des Moines, Iowa to kick off their 2010 season? Does that mean that the time is finally right to start taking early looks at the matchups on next year's schedule, and see what sort of players and teams the Mountain Hawks will be up against? It does to me, at least. Especially when one of the players on the Drake team we'll be facing - senior DE Dain Taylor - has been getting NFL scouts and plenty of pre-season accolades going into the season. Drake is a lot more than Taylor, of course. But Taylor's statistics should put to rest any idea that Drake of the Pioneer Football League will be a pushover fifty days from now. (more)

(Photo courtesy of The Morning Call ) I actually remember a day when Lehigh coverage on the internet was simply one or two articles that you couldn't read without a subscription to the newspaper. Now, print is not even enough to contain all of it: Lehigh coverage has gone into audio and even video. Start with the official Lehigh recap of the game on Lehighsports.com , which includes video of the postgame. It's worth it simply to see the sledgehammer, which now will be featuring Villanova on it, the postgame analysis by TV announcers Mike Zambelli and Mike Yadush ('93) and to see junior OL Ben Harden stealing valuable camera time from coach Coen. Senior RB Matt McGowan : "It felt great. I finally came back and I'm back to full strength, and I finally got a chance to show everybody what I could do. It felt great to finally get a win here in the opener." Then there's the iTunes podcast of the Lehigh post-game press conference... Intrepid Reporter: Seko...

It was very, very hard to come up with a Sunday word this week. Ultimately I settled on "soggy" because that more than anything else was the theme coming out of Murray Goodman this week. It was fun to see sophomore QB J.B. Clark get his debut, to see senior DL Brian Jackson spearhead a dominating defensive effort, to see senior WR Sekou Yansane break a big one on the second offensive series of the game. But soon afterwards, Hanna and her "soggy" sisters - rain, wind, and clouds - dominate the headlines of the game. After jumping to a two score lead, the headline became the weather. Turnovers became the norm in a rain where it was near impossible to keep the ball dry. Content with the win, Lehigh got ultra-conservative and ran the ball to senior RB Matt McGowan for about 60% of the total plays of the game. It was a defensive, physical game, with bodies flying, footballs springing loose and hopes that kids wouldn't get hurt. (Near the end of the game, so...

Coach Coen finally got his season-opening win . In a game that featured torrential rain and Lehigh's brand-new grass and drainage system almost as much as Lehigh's stifling defense, the Mountain Hawks scored 13 early points and didn't look back in cruising to a 19-0 victory. (My photo album will hopefully be up sometime in the next couple of days.) With so much talk in the offseason about quarterbacks, how's this for a debut: sophomore QB J.B. Clark 's first two pass attempts as a starting QB were completions for touchdowns. His stat sheet was modest, but efficient - 9-for-12 for 146 yards and 2 touchdowns. One of those was a beautiful streak by senior WR Sekou "Stunt Man" Yansane down the right side of the field where he "beat his man like a rented mule" as another famous Pennsylvania sports announcer once uttered. Senior RB Matt McGowan erased any lingering doubts about his injuries from last year after posting his best-ever day rushing i...

Change of plans. I decided it would be cruel to start a preview and, well, not finish it. So I decided to finish that first before finishing up the Patriot League offseason with Lehigh. Normally, I'll put the Press Links on Friday, but I'll put them after my prediction this week so tomorrow will be dedicated to my "Patriot League Offseason" special on Lehigh. Weather Update It's looking more and more like it's going to be a wet home opener. Yahoo! Weather right now reports it like this: " Rain showers early with a wind driven heavy rain developing later in the day. Chance of rain 80%." Looks like Goodman's new turf and drainage system will be tested right off the bat. Breaking Down Drake Offense Only four starters return from last year's offense from a team that went 6-5. Head coach Chris Creighton has instituted a multiple spread offense in place that the Bulldogs are still trying to click into, but he has two important veteran playe...

We are a mere 3 days away from Lehigh's season opener versus Drake. This year, I'm planning to do the following: I'm going to break my game previews in two parts thi year: part one, on Wednesday, will involve taking out first look - our "peek" at Drake, if you will. On Fridays I'll get down to the nitty-gritty: listening to the weekly press conference (which is carried by Lehighsports.com, incidentally), looking at our opposition position-by-position - and delivering my prediction for this game and the Patriot League, too. Oh yeah - if you're active on Facebook, you may want to enlist as a fan on Lehigh Football Nation's page on Facebook . It's neat because it has a messageboard (today's topic: the Drake game), it lets you know when the blog has been updated with new material... and it allows you to connect with other fans, too. Let's get right to it. (Photo Credit: Drake Athletics) Coach Coen has has two season openers in his two season...