Lehigh Football Nation

It honestly felt like a day from another era out there on Saturday - in a good way. In a world of bitter political debates, supposedly declining college football attendance, alleged tensions between the generations and the ongoing charges increasing collegian apathy, there it was: the official attendance total of the Colgate/Lehigh game of 9,255. There were a multitude of reasons why people wanted to go see the game.  Perhaps it was something good to do with the family on Family Weekend.  Maybe it was a concerted effort to get students into the games, and keep them there, with new policies and new promotions.  Maybe it was a thumb-your-nose effort at the fans who come for cocktails but don't go enjoy the game.  Maybe it was individuals, all as a unit, wanting to come out and see if this high-flying, record-setting Lehigh football team is for real. Or maybe it was all of them; I have no idea, but I know it required a whole lot of planning and a huge amount of ...

You don't have to have attended more than twenty-five years of Lehigh football games to know it's a completely different world out there for your friendly neighborhood sports fan. When Lehigh's Murray Goodman Stadium was opened in 1988, there were only about a dozen channels on the small, eighteen inch black and white TV we had in our dorm room.  Only two channels might have had "major college football" games on at the same time a Lehigh football game was being played live over the mountain.  (Notre Dame, the only school who had all their games televised, almost always played their games at 3:30 PM.) Nowadays there's way more entertainment options on a typical college weekend than ever, and it's very logical to think that the increased amount of competition might not just keep students away from attending football games, but local fans as well. It's not an issue confined to Lehigh - in 2014, home attendance at all FBS games dropped to their low...

It wasn't a typical Lehigh weekend for me as I headed to Murray Goodman. With my family, including my mother and father visiting Murray Goodman stadium for the first time in a long time, I spent most of the game experiencing most of the game in a place where I haven't been in a while: the "stands". When you cover a team, it's a bit too easy sometimes to take refuge in the press box, hermetically sealed from the rest of the fans out in the fresh air.  Too often, too, that's what I do: plop in the press box, not to emerge until after the clock reads zero. This time around, though, I had the incredible experience once again to enjoy most of the game in the stands, thanks to my family, and it couldn't have been a better one, thanks to the best efforts of the other fans. The picture above was taken on my phone, from where I was sitting on Saturday.

I somehow don't think that the Lehigh experience for freshmen will be anything like the 1979 not-so-classic movie (starring, posthumously, the very talented Leslie Blalock, who was clearly shafted of the Oscar from Sally Field in Norma Rae - union organizer, shmunion organizer - could she skate like that? I think not!). But as the incoming Lehigh freshmen come to South Mountain today, find out their residences, go over their class lists and textbook lists, and find out about fraternities and sororities, it's time to have them get to know about what's REALLY important: being a Lehigh football fan. I never had a primer like this when I went to Lehigh back in the day. So to you, incoming Lehigh freshman, I present a list of what it means to be a Lehigh football fan. * Know the Nation. Know first that of all the college fan nations out there, Lehigh's fan nation was the very first. Sure, while Gator Sports Nation , Nova Nation and all those Johnny-come-latelies are ...