Lehigh Football Nation

How will you watch Bucknell at Lehigh this afternoon?  What a ridiculous question.  Like me, you're headed to the stadium for a 12:37 kickoff. Wait - really?  You're not going to Murray Goodman today?  Why not?  Unscheduled dental emergency?  Flying in from Buenos Aires?  Need to find out how to catch the game online, by a video stream or online radio? Never fear.  LFN's here.

Not going to Murray Goodman today?  Need to find out how to catch the game online, by a video stream or online radio? Never fear.  LFN's here.

New Year's Eve is supposed to be about all the good things about college football. For FCS, it's about the run-up to the FCS National Championship game in Frisco, Texas.  This season - again - North Dakota State heads to the party once again, while the No. 1 team in the nation. Jacksonville State, tries to be the team that finally harpoons the Bison to break their consecutive national championship streak. In the FBS, the bowl games that really matter - the plus-one playoff teams, the four teams that could win their bowl championship - are being played.  Lots of people will tune in.  Advertisers will see a very strong return on investment on their ad buys for the game.  The administrators for Alabama, Michigan State, Clemson and Oklahoma will be entertained, and well paid. Yet now, at the end of 2015, there are dark clouds on the horizon looming pretty much everywhere about the entire sport.  Folks are worried about head injuries more than ever.  The...

It may not have seemed like much, a bit of news quietly released during the news dumping ground of Friday afternoon by ESPN Stats and Info. "Upgrades sharpen ESPN's college FPI model," the release was titled , a piece which explained some changes that were being made to ESPN's "Football Power Index". One of those changes involve how FCS wins and losses were represented in their model. And it's actually a bigger deal than you think.

Exactly when is a media entity not entitled to report on itself? This is the question I frequently pose to myself when ESPN, Fox and CBS report on anything about college realignment issues in general. It's especially true about this report made by Jeremy Fowler of CBS Sports.Com, which purports to be an inside look at who has the "most say" in realignment - TV networks or the conferences themselves. The good news is that there are a lot of revealing insights into the top men running the show in collegiate athletics, including media people and conference commissioners.  The bad news is that it reads like the writer is trying to snooker the reader into thinking that TV has no influence over realignment - when a keener, more independent look at the quotes reveals anything but.

(Photo Credit: Doug Kapustin, The Baltimore Sun) If past performance were indicative of how things are going to go this Saturday, Lehigh would have nothing to worry about. In eleven meetings with the Tigers, Lehigh   has gone 10-1 against Towson, and lit them up for more than 40 points in five of those meetings. But nobody at Lehigh has any illusions that this Towson team will resemble those Tiger teams from the 1990s and 2000s. The Tigers' story is an easy one to admire: from a 1-10 season to a 9-2 record in the SEC of FCS, Towson is easy to like, too recently a member of the FCS "haves" to be hated by anyone.  But even though they're a feel-good story, there's a reason these Tigers are CAA champions.  They are loaded with talent.

Make no mistake, it's a groundbreaker. Earlier today, the Patriot League reached a new agreement with CBS Sports Network to show Patriot League sports contests on their network. It's an eye opener on a multitude of levels, partially due to its impact on football coverage and some, um, interesting announcements about football coverage coming up in the next couple of days. But the big story today involves the effect on basketball, where the Patriot League says goodbye to ESPN, the network that has carried the Patriot League men's basketball championship since 1991. (more)