Lehigh Football Nation

This week for Lehigh football included an interesting announcement about the particulars of the Mountain Hawks' 2019 football schedule. Set aside for a moment the point that it will be the first time since the early 1980s that Lehigh won't have a single Ivy League team on the schedule (something I've been assured is an anomaly, not a trend). What's most interesting is that the Mountain Hawks will be headed to the West Coast to face off against UC Davis, making their first trip to California since 1998, when Lehigh played St. Mary's (CA). In recent years, Lehigh hasn't played a lot of games that require a flight - the last game that did was when the Mountain Hawks traveled to James Madison in 2015.  They also haven't played many games outside of the Eastern time zone - the last time they did that was in 2011, when Lehigh had to travel to North Dakota State in the FCS Playoffs after pulling off a shocker against Towson 40-38 in the first round.  T...

(Photo Credit: Morning Call) "When’s enough, enough?" Sometimes the game narratives can fall into something that seems like a cliche - the old halftime pep talk about "winning one for the Gipper", or something like that.  But this one feels different. Head coach Andy Coen talked about it, and junior QB Brad Mayes talked about it - about Brad taking control of the locker room at halftime with a team full of long faces. Going into that locker room, Brad had just before rallied on a broken play to fire a perfect pass to junior RB Dominick Bragalone to cut the two-touchdown deficit to one, and after a special teams touchdown for Colgate was called back on a penalty, the defense stopped Colgate cold to end the half. But despite the momentum, gloom was still in the locker room. “As a quarterback, you have to be a vocal leader," Brad told Keith Groller of The Morning Call this week.   "I’ve done it in the past when I was younger and in high s...

The latest disco music was available right off campus at "Records and Things".  A young Phillies pitcher named Steve Carlton wins his second Cy Young Award.   Debbie Boone 's "You Light Up My Life" topped the charts, spending 10 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard .  Rocky was still in theaters.   Billy Joel would tour Bethlehem and the valley, perhaps setting the stage for his later hit Allentown. In local news in 1977, Lehigh was also in the running for an invitation to the football postseason. Coming into the 113th meeting between the Leopards and Engineers, as they were commonly known at the time, never before had been so much on the line for Lehigh.  In front of an expected sellout crowd of 18,000 people, a win would in all probablility give them the Lambert Cup, given to the best team in the East, and an invitation to the Division II playoffs. But a loss to the team that beat them last year would see all of Lehigh's opportunities fade away, the chanc...

Lehigh head football coach John Whitehead knew Colgate head football coach Fred Dunlap well. Very well, in fact.  Whitehead, the offensive coordinator for the 1973 Lambert Cup-winning Lehigh squad, was the architect of Lehigh's "Wing-T" offense, under Dunlap, that had driven the Engineers to new heights. Under both Dunlap and Whitehead, Lehigh struggled mightily in the late 1960s.  But the Engineers had a major resurgence in the 1970s when Lehhigh went from doormat to Lambert Cup champions.  By the end of Dunlap's time at Lehigh, he guided the Engineers to their final "Middle Three" championships and for good measure put Lehigh in the Division II playoffs, their first postseason berth of any kind. In September of 1979, Whitehead would, for the first time, coach against the same man who taught him how to be a head coach.  For Dunlap had taken the opportunity to coach at Colgate, his alma mater, where he'd go to become head football coach an...