Lehigh Football Nation

Thought I'd put together this multimedia "presentation" of all the seniors that will be playing in #Rivalry152 tomorrow.  All the content here, pictures, videos, etc. are mostly courtesy of LehighSports.com, The Morning Call, Lehigh Valley Live, and The Brown and White. If nothing else it will go you something to do while waiting for tomorrow's game. Enjoy.

"I hit him with a double move, and then I knew I had him beat," Monmouth WR Eric Sumlin said after the game, thrilled with the play of his Hawks.  "It was a great feeling." The happy occasion - or unhappy occasion, in the case of Lehigh fans - was Monmouth's come-from-behind 28-21 victory over the Mountain Hawks a couple of years ago. It certainly wasn't the lowest point of that ill-fated 2014 Lehigh football season - there's zero question that the Razzie there goes for the 150th meeting of the Rivalry - but it was an unquestionable sign that there were problems that needed fixing. When Monmouth last made it to Goodman Stadium, Lehigh was riding a three game losing streak, a long injury list, and a need to turn things around, fast, before Patriot League conference play. Going into that game, Lehigh was 120th out of 121 FCS teams in total defensive yardage allowed, and that needed fixing, fast.  Monmouth, no longer the non-scholarship team Le...

There is one real adage when it comes to defensive football: if you sit around and wait for something bad to happen, it probably will. This season, the Lehigh Mountain Hawk defense knows it can't afford to hang back and let bad things happen. The 2015 Lehigh defense was a unit that saw flashes of strong play - just not enough of them. And in 2016, this unit knows that the statistics from last year indicate a unit that needs to get better. Most of all the identity of this defense needs to be formed. In most places, we know the athletes.  We know they have flashes of great play.  The question that needs to be answered: what will its identity be?

You might have thought that Lehigh's Brown defense, fresh off a strong performance in the spring game, might have let themselves let up a little once it was deemed that the morning practice was complete. Instead, in front of a swarm of fans who watched Saturday's scrimmage on a picture-perfect April day at Murray Goodman stadium, the defense were doing running drills. As junior DE Tyler Cavenas explained, this was no accident. "That's our new thing now," an out-of-breath Cavenas told the assembled media.  "If we're not running to the ball after every single play, it counts as a lack of effort and we need to run after practice." The surprise of the running drills aside, the defensive effort that resulted in eight sacks while only yielding one late touchdown, could have been the most striking aspect of the Brown and White game on Saturday,

(Photo Credit: The Express-Times) When it comes to Lehigh football players, even as freshmen there's a special place in the hearts of fans for the local products that choose to go to Lehigh after playing high school ball locally. At no. 49, we find incoming  freshman LB Evan Kauffman  as our highlighted Lehigh football athlete in today's countdown.  He comes from Freedom High School, situated about halfway between Lehigh and Lafayette,