Lehigh Football Nation

This year's FCS playoffs, the first since the field was expanded to 20 teams, has made for a season of growing pains.  Not necessarily bad ones, but pains nonetheless. With a 16 team bracket, it made for an easy beginning and end to the FCS regular season.  It always ended the weekend before Christmas, the all-America teams were done - and the national champions were crowned, as all of the world of FCS partied on the eve of the new year. But with an extra round of playoffs, it was the semifinals that would end the week before Christmas - and three long, long weeks before knowing for certain the identity of the national champions. And the team that defeated Lehigh in the playoffs the week after the playoffs may very well be the team that is this year's champion. (more)

Another day, another day of cutting down basketball nets. Lehigh basketball fans learned yesterday that championships never get old, and you can win Patriot League titles in a variety of ways. This year's women's basketball championship didn't have the drama that the men's final had the day before.  But that was fine with everybody at Stabler arena last night, when the fans in attendance saw exactly what the women's team is capable of doing in the NCAA tournament.  Their 58-42 victory was pretty much a done deal early in the second half - if not before.  The only question was if American, who averaged 62.7 points per game and had outscored their opposition by an average of 20 points in each of their other tournament games, would be held under 40 points by Lehigh's "40 minutes of hell" defense. (more)

Before the game this Friday, I didn't have a good feeling about Lehigh's chances. That's not to say I didn't have confidence in Lehigh's abilities as basketball players.  I knew they certainly could win it, and had the ingredients to win it: leadership, in the form of co-captains senior G Marquis Hall and senior F Zahir Carrington .  But nagging memories of Lafayette's 90-75 victory in February still lingered: and that maybe, just maybe, they would shoot the lights out again and deny these two Lehigh superstars a shot at a championship and the NCAA tournament. Thankfully, Carrington simply refused to let that happen. It was a true team performance to get Lehigh the championship - let's be clear about that.  But what folks will remember through the ages was that Zahir simply refused to lose this game. (more)

I'm not the first to say it, but it's hard to believe that this has never happened before. Lehigh and Lafayette have both made the NCAA tournament before - three times.  The Leopards and Mountain Hawks have made it to the title game about a half dozen times since the tournament field expanded to 64. There have even been a few pretty good tournament games with Lehigh and Lafayette facing off. But never at the same time, and never in a game of this magnitude. (more)

This FCS offseason, there was a spirited battle going on.  No, not for recruits, but for the new site of the FCS National Championship game.  Chattanooga, the host for what seems like forever, suddenly had someone to bid against: Frisco, Texas, who boast Pizza Hut Park, home of Major League Soccer's Dallas Burn. Today, the NCAA made it official : the first FCS championship game to be played in January will also be played in a new venue.  In a town where there is no FCS team, next year's championship will be played about a half hour north of Dallas. And "Big Tex", the iconic mascot of the Texas State fair, isn't the only one who's smiling: the Southland columnist at the College Sporting News is also smiling pretty broadly as well.  In his excellent blog posting covering the announcement , he details the reaction across the country - and the happiness the bid is bringing to members of the Southland conference.  (And in Ralph's Rag over there as well , ...

(Photo Credit: Alexa Welch Edlund, The Richmond Times-Dispatch) This weekend, the Richmond Spiders came away with the 2008 Division I Football Championship . The Spiders, of the powerful Colonial Athletic Association used their powerful defense to stonewall four division champions. The first came against Eastern Kentucky of the OVC (38-10, at home), against Appalachian State of the SoCon (yes, that Appalachian State, on the road at Kidd Brewer Stadium) 33-13, and against Northern Iowa of the Missouri Valley Football Conference (21-20, on the road). The Spiders then proceeded to beat the Big Sky conference champions into submission at the site of the Division I National Championship game in Chattanooga, Tennessee 24-7 in front of a near-sold-out Finley Stadium and in front of a national ESPN2 audience. The broadcast was an effective three-hour commercial about the University of Richmond and their academics. First year head coach and Richmond football alumnus Mike London (who took ov...

The FCS Championship game is tonight (on ESPN2) . Go Griz! We'll be back on our regularly scheduled program next weekend. I promise.