Lehigh Football Nation

If you look at the small picture, it probably looks like it's going to be a banner year for football attendance across all of the nation. In FBS, five schools (Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Penn State, and Alabama) average more than 100,000 fans thronging in their stadiums, and with a bunch of rivalry games yet to go, it looks like there might be more than ten teams that average more than 90,000 fans per game. And in FCS, too, five teams (Appalachian State, Montana, James Madison, Jackson State, and Georgia Southern) are averaging more than 20,000 fans a game.  That's already up from last year, too, where James Madison and Georgia Southern have rejoined the 20,000 club this year. Yet these individual attendance wins obscure a larger picture. For every Michigan or Appalachian State, there is another side of the coin - a college football program that is seeing attendance diminish year to year.  And there are plenty of reasons for this decline.

My "Friday Water Cooler" discussions, when I've had them this year, have been notorious for being unplanned affairs, with the idea for the topic only coming together on Friday Morning. And this Friday is no exception, thanks to an intriguing column in this morning's Asbury Park Press by Stephen Edelson . In the article, Mr. Edelson, whose paper covers Monmouth Hawk athletics (the team which Lehigh opened with this year with a 49-24 victory ), talked about the upcoming matchup between Monmouth and Colgate this weekend , of course - but also talked about the Patriot League and NEC being at a "crossroads". Is he right?  (more)

Foolish me, thinking that conference realignment might be put on hold while actual college football is being played. Almost a week ago today, the ACC made its latest school grab from the Big East, nabbing Pitt and Syracuse in a move that was destined to upend conference apple carts all over the country . The move has caused an earthquake of conference speculation - and set other potential moves in motion.  And those moves open up a lot of questions for anyone who cares about the Patriot League.   (more)

(Graphic Credit: Bogus Megapardus, not-so-proud member of the Any Given Saturday Community) The definition of the word "kerfuffle" is a one-liner: a "commotion" or "fuss". This week, a kerfuffle broke out in the world of the Patriot League: a fuss over broadcast rights in regards to televising a Patriot League football game. Inadvertently, the commotion about the airing of a Patriot League football game highlights a lot more than the situation of the game itself: it also highlights the strange, twisted world of Patriot League football coverage nationally and the differences they have, say, with the television concerns of the big boys.   (more)

Admit it: if you're a Lehigh or Delaware fan, you are having serious fun this week.  The playoffs are always great - but of all the first round matchups, without question no other matchup evokes the animal spirits like the one happening in Newark, Delaware this weekend.  (I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Eastern Washington/Southeast Missouri State hasn't spawned hundreds of pages of smack, and dozens of print articles, on their matchup this weekend.) For Lehigh, Delaware and Villanova, whose Northeast-based fans can enjoy a double-dip of playoff football (Lehigh/Delaware at noon on WFMZ 69, and Villanova/Stephen F.Austin at 3:30 on Philly CW 57 - honestly, are you going to pass that up to discover who wins the Big East?) it's the best of times. But, it's also the one year anniversary of the "worst of times", too, for Northeast football - the announcement that Hofstra, joining Northeastern who had announced their decision a week prior, ha...

If you're in the Bethlehem area, and you want to take in the big game, you have two options. One, you can go to Starters Riverport at about 1:00PM where the South Side Boosters are setting up a viewing party.  "No guarantee of sound as of yet," Lehigh fan ngineer reported , but it's likely that the game will have an ol' AM Radio handy so that the voices of Matt Kerr and Steve Lomangino can be heard calling the game while they carry the live streaming from the NCAAsports.com feed . If you can't make it to Starters in Bethlehem, you can still enjoy the game this weekend - on your big screen. Finally delivering what former Lehigh executive media director Jeff Tourial asked me to do months ago, below the flip find instructions on how to stream the game from your laptop or PC. (more)

I know, I know, as a Lehigh fan I'm not supposed to speculate about the postseason right now.  There's ONE season, and it's LAFAYETTE season right now.  Just win this weekend, and everything that will happen involved with the playoffs will happen. But I can't help it.  I'm a national columnist, and part of what I do is speculate on playoff positioning.  In this column for College Sporting News I do so , prognosticating that Lehigh will host Robert Morris in the first round of the playoffs. (While we're speculating, looking at the picture on the left, I'll speculate that someone photoshopped the heads of Alec Baldwin and Merryl Streep onto somebody else's heads.  No, really, is that all I need to do to get involved in show business?  I've got better cut-and-paste skills - not that that's hard or anything.) So let's say - for the sake of argument - that it's 2:30 PM, and Lehigh is beating Lafayette 50 to 0.  What should a Lehigh fa...

I suppose it's natural to think this way. I know, I know. Georgetown is much improved. Lehigh cannot fall asleep against the Hoyas - they have come so far, and can't get stopped now. All that is true. But if you haven't at least mulled the possibility of Lehigh hosting a game in the playoffs - should they win this weekend, of course - you either don't know how the playoffs work or you had better check your pulse. Should Lehigh win this weekend, what other results might be friendly to a potential first-round matchup at Murrray Goodman? We'll look at them below the flip. (more)

(Photo Credit: Colgate Connect) I talk a lot about "hating the 'Gate" during this week. On my Facebook page , I'm listing 27 reasons why I "hate the 'Gate", and it's a good-natured ribbing of Colgate from a guy who actually respects the Raiders the other 51 weeks out of the year. It's fun, it fires up the Lehigh and Colgate fans, and it gets folks to come out and see a really good football game where a pair of high-academic, solid football programs are facing off in spirited competition. Or so I hope. Attendance for non-Lafayette football events has been in serious decline over the past few years. Some of that is due to the fact that Lehigh hasn't been Patriot League champions since 2006 - and even that year, where Lafayette pounded Lehigh 49-27 and earned the autobid to the Patriot League playoffs instead, hardly felt like a championship - and it's clear that the bandwagon fans turn out for a winner in big games. But that folk...

Polls have been a part of college football almost as long as there's been college football.  In a sport where teams are spread out across the country and don't play each other, it's a way to gauge the relative merits of one team against another. And fans of college football have always had a love/hate relationship with polls, too.  When they are kind to your team or conference, they're great; when they're not, they're biased, unfair, or voters are stupid - or some variation on that theme. The Sports Network recently revealed the complete list of their voters in their Top 25 poll - in an effort to provide some accountability to some of their more questionable teams making cameo appearances in the "Others Receiving Votes" area. Their revelation, however, has raised more questions than answers. (more)

(Photo Credit: Campus Media Group Blog) It's an old story, but still a great one: at a classic meeting of Harvard and Yale - you know, that Game where the Crimson and Eli try to catch up to Lehigh and Lafayette in terms of most played college football rivalry - a group known as the Yale Pundits convinced many Harvard fans at halftime that their poster boards would spell out "Go Harvard" - but instead spelled out the words you see to your left. As old as the prank was, it never fails to make me smile. Less obvious that the truism that the Pundits exposed on that fateful November day is a dirty little secret: that there are an awful lot of folks who have passed through Cambridge and have been screw-ups. Behind that demeanor of faux-competence, over-confidence and just flat out arrogance, Harvard folks screw up a lot. This matters, too: for if I screw up on my blog, maybe a dozen people are offended, and never hurt. When one of these yahoos screws up, the entire gl...

(Photo Credit: Time) Spike Lee , probably the most famous New York area sports fan, seems to will willing to hang out with a graduate of Fordham, even if it is Denzel Washington , probably the most famous graduate of Rose Hill since the Seven Blocks of Granite. But unless you're one of my five readers from New York City - or have some sort of linkage back there - doesn't this picture make you want to heave? Two showbiz guys, battling over their wish to root for two of the richest sports franchises in sports history? To pretend to be regular people? It couldn't be any more phony if it were Ben Affleck and Jimmy Fallon doing the ribbing at a Celtics game. (Well, OK. Maybe that is a bit worse then Spike and Denzel.) But it's scenes like this, though, that make me hate the Big Apple. And all their sports teams. (Yes, including the New York Liberty.) How do I hate them? Let me count the ways. (more)

If the folks at Yale have their way, their football staff will be celebrating a lot like the folks pictured here to my left. Originally posted at the New Haven Register and reprinted in the American Chronicle , Yale athletic director Tom Beckett and current head football coach Tom Williams came out last week with a whopper to the rest of the Ivy League: that not only do they want an 11th game, played one week earlier than their current mid-September kickoff, but they want to count towards a bowl victory should they choose to use that game to schedule an FBS opponent. There's a problem with their proposal, however. The Ivy League is - in theory - "non-scholarship". Under current NCAA rules, only schools with at least 56 1/2 scholarships are to cound as "bowl counters". That means that they'd have to apply for an exemption from the NCAA to "count". In other words, Yale is "non-scholarship", but not really. (more)

(Graphic Credit: VUHoops.com ) What is it about the week before a Lehigh game that makes schools want to make major, earth-shattering announcements? Ever since a tumultuous summer where rumors were flying fast and furious about the Big East losing schools because of football , another rumor has been picking up steam that the Wildcats, fresh off their FCS national championship, might consider joining the Big East in football as well. The day before today's game at Lehigh, Villanova's president, Father Peter Donohue, sent out a letter that was reprinted by VUHoops  that confirms that, no, Temple will not be the team to fit into the map of Big East football, and yes, a feasibility study is under way to determine if Villanova football is right for the Big East. Just in case this game on Saturday for Lehigh wasn't big enough , it's now, suddenly, become about beating a team that might be going to the Big East.  All of a sudden, it feels like Lehigh is hosting an FBS...

This just in: the Internet is great.  Really. Aside from all the wonderful, informative content it gives us (e.g. cat videos, the latest on Katy Perry 's choice of hair color, policy debates on the gripping issues of the day for example, do Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver think that the Alien movie franchise is scarier than Halloween oeuvre?) it gives college football fans a whole lot more than that. For those of us that aren't in the Lehigh Valley, it gives us a way to see everything online that you would be able to see on TV if your house happened to be a block from the Goosey Gander.  Some of the content is free; some of it isn't.  But the quality of the offerings has improved remarkably, even from just last year.  That's why I think it's well worth a season pass for the Lehigh Stretch Internet package .   (more)

When folks in the future look back a round college football in 2009, they're going to see a banner year in attendance. Folks complain about their being so many distractions for college students these days - including those outmoded concepts "homework" and "study" - to explain a decline in attendance, not to mention the availability of college football games on TV. In some ways, it's easier to follow games at home than at the stadium itself. The average attendance of FCS games in 2009 shows the usual suspects at the top of the list - notably Montana, Appalachian State, Delaware and South Carolina State averaging more than 20,000 fans per game - what's striking is that many of the big "Rivalry Week" games that have yet to be played will probably skew these numbers even higher for schools like Harvard ("The Game"), Richmond ("The Oldest Football Rivalry of the South"), and plenty of others that could be sellouts. It's po...

So there I was, minding my own business yesterday, when I started up our relatively-new quad-core computer. And that's when the agony began. The computer would not come up - it would not recognize the drive. I pretty much tried everything to make it come up - including, tonight, the dreaded last-ditch "put it in the freezer for twenty minutes" trick - and it didn't work. I have some other tricks up my sleeve to try to get at the data - but now I have to face the probability that a year's worth of photos - irreplaceable - are gone forever. Four Lehigh games, gone. My son's first day of school, gone. God knows what important documents on the computer - gone. Gone! I could have taken backups, or performed some sort of RAID backup for my hard drive. I even could have kept all me media on a networked drive. But, of course, I knew soooo much more than everybody else. I was too good for backups. It was always something that I was going to do after the seaso...

(Photo courtesy switched.com) I'm sure this won't be appreciated by the latest famous freshman to attend an Ivy League school. No, no, I'm not talking about Brooke Shields, I'm talking about Emma Watson, the actress who is best known for her turn as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies. We always knew there was something, well, different about kids who went to Harvard - a bit of an upturned nose, perhaps, annoying arrogance, or maybe even some Brahmin-ness while we're at it. Turns out, though, that some students were up to something more sinister: stalking Ms. Brown University at the Harvard/Brown game last weekend, as reported by the New York Post : Page Six reported on Tuesday that the "Harry Potter" starlet and Brown University freshman looked "quite shaken" on Saturday as Harvard beat Brown 24-21 in Cambridge. Watson was reportedly flanked by security guards to protect her from gawkers. But her discomfort was actually the result of...

(Graphic courtesy WKYC) Ten years ago today, I was late to a football game. It was a picture-perfect night for football. While I wasn't a blogger about Lehigh football at that time, I still was a crazy Lehigh fan, and despite the fact I lived in Connecticut I had somehow convinced my friend Matt to go to the first night game at Palmer Stadium in Princeton with me. He was coming back from the Yankee game earlier that day, and I drove down to meet him in central New Jersey to pick him up to head to Princeton. That day the Yankee game fatefully ran later than usual, and we got to Princeton after dark. So we found ourselves wandering around the Princeton campus, after listening to the first quarter on the radio. It's then when we met Kim and a friend of hers. Kim wasn't a Princeton alumna, nor had she ever seen a college football game before that day. She had been volunteering for the Red Cross and was helping recovery efforts from Hurricane Floyd that had passed through...

So what are you doing during Lehigh's bye week? So there I was, trying to make plans to travel up to Holy Cross to watch the Crusaders take on Harvard. I then get an email asking me if I could use an extra ticket to the Eagles' home opener. Fortunately, he got to me before I could figure out the price of hotel rooms in Worcester, Mass. So I changed my plans for the weekend, instead staying local to take in the other great Patriot League game in the area: Liberty taking on Lafayette, two teams which could make a case for the Top 25 when the game is over. As some of you may know, going to an Eagles/Saints game for me is such a mixed thing since I am a fan of both teams. Growing up I was a rabid Saints fan - I've seen the Saints play in New Orleans, saw them take on both the Jets and Giants in Giant Stadium, and I've even high-fived WR Quinn Early in a game against the New England Patriots almost a decade before they became the most Hated Team In America. And I've...