Lehigh Football Nation

Kids come to play football at Lehigh because they want their games to matter. They come to Lehigh willing to sacrifice so much, because they want to win games, of course, but they also play the game in order to win championships - Patriot League Championships. They want those rings. Sure, they get to square off against the Villanova's, James Madison's and New Hampshire's of the FCS world to measure themselves against the best of their division.  And they get to participate in the nation's most played Rivalry in all of college football, putting them in an elite club of players and into college football history. All of those things are very important, of course, and allow them great playing memories and, in the case of the Lafayette game, perennial bragging rights.   But 2015's heartbreak in Hamilton, the 49-42 loss  to Colgate, really hurt on a fundamental level for this Lehigh team.  When that senior class was recruited, one of the things that ...

It would be all so easy if football were a video game. If the players were pixels, with easy-to-read sliders with their statistics on them. ESCAPABILITY: 72 TOUGHNESS: 91 Then the FCS playoffs would be easy.  You'd plug in the teams, they'd hit each other virtually on the screen, and there would be a result, quantifying the relative strengths and weaknesses of each team.  A representative score would come out, and there would be one side bursting with victory, and the other in agony in defeat. There would be bitterness, some teeth-gnashing, but at least you'd have figured out that the teams gave it their best shot. But real life is not a video game.  Sometimes, star players go hunting, and come down with an illness.  It keeps them out of practice, and on the day of the big game, they're not 100%, or even 75%.  Sometimes, foot injuries do not heal, as much as you wish that they would. And then a team like Lehigh travels up to New Hampshire, not abl...

It is an easy narrative to point at the 150th meeting of The Rivalry as the turnaround for the Lehigh football program, where the Mountain Hawks got together after that bitter, bitter loss and decided that enough was enough, and that they were going to not allow their team to be a cellar-dweller.   For Lafayette, though, you need to go back further, past some very enormous wins over Lehigh, and wonder.  "I can't believe I typed it, but there it is," I wrote back in 2006 after a crushing 49-28 loss where Lehigh was dominated on both lines of scrimmage.   "We've lost three straight to Lafayette. and I've got some news: We're no longer the hunted. The sooner we realize that we now have to be the hunter, the better off we'll be." The co-championship they shared with the Leopards that year had the feel of the worst consolation prize imaginable.  For the second straight year, Lafayette had stolen the FCS Playoff bid right from under the...

(Photo Credit: Chris Barry/ The Brown and White File Photo) In terms of national recognition, life in the Patriot League isn't always easy. Certainly Patriot League players and fans read the preseason magazines about FCS.  And last I checked, the youth of America still watch ESPN, and they see some FCS darlings in the FCS Kickoff Classic, like North Dakota State. They tune into the college football landscape, and they see Eastern Washington upsetting Washington State, Bo Pelini coaching Youngstown State, Albany upsetting Buffalo. Yes, the national FCS scene has their darlings, and frequently it feels like the Patriot League and their opponents are mere afterthoughts in the world where Big Sky teams are putting up big scores, Sam Houston State is beating all comers, The Citadel is dominating in the South, and the Missouri Valley Football Conference sees almost half its members in the Top 25. And despite having junior WR Troy Pelletier and junior WR Gatlin Casey sittin...

(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...

At Cooper field in Georgetown, Lehigh jumped to a 14-0 lead and coasted to a 35-3 victory. After senior QB Nick Shafnisky appeared to go over on his ankle funny, sophomore QB Brad Mayes came in, and shortly after running 12 yards for a first down, found junior WR Gatlin Casey for Lehigh's second touchdown on the afternoon.

( Photo Credit: Craig Shipley /The Morning Call ) What a difference two weeks makes. At times it's hard to comprehend how desperate it felt for Lehigh fans after the Mountain Hawks' slender loss at Villanova to fall 26-21 to the nationally-ranked Wildcats. At 0-2, after a pair of excruciating losses, a rematch with the defending Ivy League champions Penn awaited, a game that the Quakers had circled on their calendar since about December.  Following that tough test would be a Princeton team that laid 52 points on Lehigh last year and returned almost all of the skill players on the team that beat them then. A losing record going into the Colgate seemed like a best-case scenario. And yet, here we are after these two tough tests, and the Mountain Hawks are 2-2, with a boatload of momentum going into their game vs. 0-2 Yale next weekend.  Suddenly, 3-2 and a three-game winning streak going into an enormous game vs. Colgate seems like a real possibility. The reason for...

(Photo Credits: Justin Lafleur, Lehigh Athletics) Penn QB Alek Torgerson and the Penn offense had torn through the Lehigh defense like a hot knife through butter.  Again. Nearing the end of the first half, the Huntington Beach, CA native lined up on a 4th and 1 play in the Lehigh red zone.  Faking the handoff to RB Tre Solomon , he instead took it himself, running through an enormous hole on the left side of the line for a 8 yard touchdown run. The touchdown and extra point put Penn back ahead, 28-21, but with 1:14 left, and three timeouts, it wasn't a question whether Lehigh was going to try to drive the length of the field to tie up the game, or at least try to cut the deficit a little.  Head coach Andy Coen was going to try.  Definitely. So the experienced senior QB Nick Shafnisky took the field, knowing what needed to be done - the same thing that Lehigh's offense had already done three times in the same half - drive the length of the field an...

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.

Tomorrow, Lehigh football players will report for camp, and on Wednesday, they will start with their first preseason practice of the season, 32 days away until it starts vs. Central Connecticut State. At no. 32, we honor incoming  freshman LB Evan Harvey  as our highlighted Lehigh football athlete.