Lehigh Football Nation

One of the quirks of being a Lehigh fan is that generally, the Mountain Hawks play an Ivy League team in their season opener.  This year, that team is Yale. This sets the Mountain Hawks up in an odd situation - Lehigh is in their third game, and Yale is an unknown quantity.  It's something that all teams playing against Ivy League teams face, but at times it feels like something that the Patriot League has to deal with more. Over the years, there's been a back-and-forth debate: who benefits more, the team that's had two weeks to work out the kinks, or the team that has the element of surprise? “I’d like to believe we have the upper hand," head coach Andy Coen said this week, "because we have played two games and you’d hope that Yale will make some first-game mistakes and we’ll be able to take advantage of them.” Yale's sophomore QB Kurt Rawlings had a different perspective. “Being able to go in and have two weeks rather than [against] most teams [...

It was days later, and head coach Andy Coen was still frustrated with last week's loss. That was the takeaway from the two pieces that came out in the local media this week, one from Lehigh Sports Central, and the other from Keith Groller of The Morning Call . "Still a lot of frustration there," he told Steve Degler.  "You know there are going to be some mistakes in that first game, but veteran guys, new guys, we made too many mistakes, and gave Villanova too many opportunities.  It was very tough to take." In last week's post game press conference, and this week's media meeting, the theme was "cleaning up the mistakes". “We’re really excited and want to put that first ‘W’ in the win column,” junior LB Matt Butler said. “We left a few plays on the field against Villanova; plays we’d like to have back. We had a few mental errors that cost us. We need to clean that up this week.”

It's different when you're returning champions. That much was clear when sifting through all the preseason print pieces and videos covering the Lehigh Mountain Hawks. Expectations return - you're no longer the "hunter", as head coach Andy Coen explained, you're the "hunted". Managing those expectations has been almost as important for this Lehigh football team as the regular conditioning and X and O's drills of camp. The common thread with the many print and video pieces and the many interviews is a sense of maturity and a businesslike ethic around this team, especially amongst its leadership.

Anyone at all worried that it's just a wee bit too quiet from Lewisburg?  I am. The narratives coming out of Bethlehem this week - emphatically, me included - are ones of possible Patriot League championships and how the offense is "clicking" and has been very, very good. That's not usually a very good recipe for a big game for the home side, especially since word out of the Bucknell camp is very, very quiet, even though the Bison still are very much alive in the conversation of winning the Patriot League title and making Lehigh sit at home Thanksgiving weekend. Last week, Bucknell traveled to the No. 9 team in the country, Charleston Southern , and proceeded to put up a very good fight in a game that didn't affect Bucknell's title chances one way or another.   Though the final tally was 49-28, Bucs, the Bison didn't go away quietly against Charleston Southern's triple-option attack, staying within a touchdown most of the way until the home tea...

Junior WR Troy Pelletier seems to want the game to start now.  Like, yesterday. When you read and hear the interviews with him at media day this week, he seems to want the game to start right after the interview, to go on the field and get the game over with right now. Though he knows he and teammate junior WR Gatlin Casey are on top of the total receiving yardage list in FCS, that's not what he wanted to talk about on Wednesday. "I haven't really put much thought into it," Pelletier told Greg Joyce of Lehigh Valley Live . "I just know good things are going to happen if we prepare the right way. We focus on each day to get better. We're confident if we put ourselves mentally and physically taking care of our body, good things are going to happen." There was lots of "focusing on getting better, taking it one game at a time" talk from both Pelletier and head coach Andy Coen this week, as you might expect.  But their body language sa...

Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Florida.  South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia. No, this isn't a list of Power 5 opponents that are suddenly going to be hosting Lehigh and Holy Cross in football the next few years. It's a list of just a few of the many states across the country that will be carrying the TV broadcast of the Lehigh/Holy Cross clash. It's going to be airing on something called the American Sports Network, which isn't a network in the broadcast sense but more of a network in the Internet sense: a network of interconnected stations, some over-the-air broadcasts, some local cable stations, that will be carrying Lehigh football over their airwaves. If you live in PA, all you need to know is the game is going to air on CSN-Philly, CSN-MidAtlantic+, WHP-2 Harrisburg, WPNT-2 Pittsburgh, or WSWB-2 Wilkes-Barre.  If you live somewhere else in the lower 48 states, a full list of broadcast outlets can be found here . It adds to the tension of what is a...

Although you see big, bright smiles on the faces of senior CB Brandon Leaks and senior WR Trevor Soccaras  when talking about the performance over the last four football games, their focus has understandably been on Georgetown and guarding against a possible letdown. Such thought is undeniably warranted, especially if they caught the college football scores from yesterday. There was only one college football game being contested Thursday night, which was Monmouth vs. Presbyterian. The Hawks, who already beat Lehigh on opening weekend and also beat Fordham last weekend, had a short week to prepare for their Thursday game.  But few people thought they would struggle against 1-4 Big South leaguemate Presbyterian, who had already lost to a Division II school (Florida Tech). Instead, the classic letdown game happened - a 17-13 loss that almost certainly doomed any chance Monmouth has to not only win the Big South, but also to qualify for any sort of at-large postseason b...

There's no question that this weekend's Colgate and Lehigh game is an enormous game for both sides.  There's also a bit of a quarterback "controversy" on the Lehigh side as to who will come out for the first series, award-winning sophomore QB Brad Mayes or award-winning senior QB Nick Shafnisky . One thing that has gone a bit unnoticed is the impact of Hurricane Matthew on the game this weekend. Not so much the impact of the southerly weatherly system on the weather at Murray Goodman, which is still on target for a mostly cloudy, 65 degree day, with a small chance of showers in the late afternoon, but the impact on the Lehigh and Colgate players, many of whom call Florida their home. Added to the already-challenging coaching twists centering around 4 O'Clock exams, something that head coach Andy Coen reminded me of last week, is the concern that the fourteen Lehigh football players from Florida, including Mayes, senior LB Colton Caslow, junior WR Ga...

Maybe it was the choice of senior OL Brandon Short as one of the student-athletes interviewed this Wednesday, or maybe it was the mention from junior DE Harrison Johnson  that this game could be your last. This Lehigh football team clearly remembers September 21st, 2014, the last time the Mountain Hawks went to the Yale Bowl. It is true that it wasn't the last time the Mountain Hawks played Yale.  There's last year, too, that 27-12 dud that Lehigh put up against the Bulldogs, too. But the loss last year to Yale at Murray Goodman isn't the reason why senior QB Nick Shafnisky is calling this another "motivational game".  It's more about the 2014 game, and the lost season for Brandon Short.

I hinted at this #NarrativeStreet in yesterday's Game Preview, but the narrative that keeps jumping to the forefront in the run-up to the game this weekend is the "disaster" - head coach Andy Coen 's words - of last year's game at Princeton. There were other losses in the 2015 Lehigh football season. There was James Madison, where the eventual playoff-bound Dukes impressively blew the Mountain Hawks out of the water, 55-17.  The 59-42 loss to Fordham where QB Nick Shafnisky was lost to injury right before halftime.  The Colgate game.  The Yale game. But there was something about the loss at Princeton that really got under coach Coen's skin that was different than the other losses - an anger at the way it happened, the way that things seemed to come apart in the second half after matching the Tigers score-for-score in in the first half. All the narratives seem to point to last year's "disaster", and hoping that the team has learned from...

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.

We break down Monnmoth after the flip. Going into the first game of the season there are oodles of storylines on both teams. One important storyline from Monmouth coming from Hawks coach Kevin Callahan is that Monmouth has a brutal eight road games in the 2016 season, thanks to construction being done on their home field, Monmouth Stadium. With all the focus on defense in the run-up to this game, senior OL Zach Duffy also talked a bit about that the offense is raring to go as well. "It's the most productive camp I've been in the past four years I've been here,, he told Keith Groller of The Morning Call .  "We were put in a position to get a lot of good [strength and conditioning] work in.   We have a lot of experience with a lot of guys returning and that's especially important up front where we have three guys returning including myself.   And then we have junior WR Troy Pelletier , Shaf [ senior QB Nick Shafnisky ] and sophomore RB Dom Bragalo...