Lehigh Football Nation

I've written a lot about Lehigh/Lafayette history so much over the years.  I've written a book about the early Rivalry between Lehigh and Lafayette , and I've blogged and recapped many Le/Laf games over the course of my life. Lehigh and Lafayette have met on the football field over 150 times, and each meeting is its own story.  I know many of the stories well. I've found during "Rivalry Week" for Lehigh and Lafayette that with the sheer volume of games, it's possible to find prior meetings that seem to match similar, but not exact, "vibes".  There are narratives of titles on the line, teams with losing records upsetting teams with winning records... pretty much everything under the sun. This week, 2-8 Lehigh will face off against 8-2 Lafayette.  If the Leopards win, they win no worse than a co-championship with Holy Cross, win the Patriot League autobid to the FCS Playoffs, and - probably the best part of all - they get to celebrate a victory on ...

It was a surprise.  Well, to me, anyway. Most people assumed that Lafayette head coach John Garrett was safe as the Leopards' head coach.  Though his five year record wasn't great, he had beaten bitter Rival Lehigh in two out of the last three Rivalry games, despite a tough 17-10 loss to Lehigh the final week of the year. Listening to the post-game press conference, I also didn't pick up on some of the signs that his job security might be in jeopardy.  Garrett was a bit prickly, but it was understandable - he had just lost a game to Lafayette's Rivals.  "The future is bright for Lafayette football," he said, not letting on that he might not be a part of that future. But by Monday, the announcement was made - after five years leading the Leopard football team, "Lafayette College will not renew the contract of head football coach John Garrett," a short press release stated.  "A national search for his replacement will begin immediately.  Defensive...

The Patriot League could very well be in a huge bind assuming the Ivy League goes forward with their college football restart plans. According to Mark Blaudschun of TMG Sports, the Ivy League is considering two plans for their 2020 college football season - neither of which allow for any out of conference games. 13 out-of-conference games involving Patriot League teams would be on the chopping block, and when you add to it the Patriot League presidents' guidance to not fly to games , every single member of the Patriot League is affected.  If you add to that the fact that the opening of the college football season is going to at best start in late September (yes, you read that correctly), the Patriot League would count as one of the most deeply affected by Covid-19-influenced delays and decisions in the entire college football landscape. It is a bind to be sure - but not one that should see the Patriot League cancel the 2020 football season. If we start with the assumption that t...

Below, we're going to do a quick once-over of Lehigh's game notes and possible injuries, then we'll dive right into 5 things to look for with Sacred Heart, my Keys to the game, and the cherry on top will be my Fearless Prediction. You can read my College Sports Journal preview of #155, complete with TV and streaming information, here. Keith Groller of The Morning Call headlined his piece " Lehigh’s defense has been its best in years, but it hasn’t translated into a winning season ".  Additionally, Paul Reinhard of The Morning Call headline his preview " Lafayette football has more than just bragging rights on the line vs. Lehigh ". Lehigh's Davis Maxie (95) tackles St. Francis punter Ryan Oliver (33) after Oliver fumbled his punt attempt in the Mountain Hawks season opener at Goodman Stadium on Aug. 31. (April Gamiz/The Morning Call) Game Notes There is some good news and some bad news in the game notes . Last week, RB Rashawn Allen ...

LFN: So it must be interesting being back here coaching in The Rivalry.  Tom Gilmore: It is. I mean, you know, when you step back and you think this is the most played game in college football, that's pretty neat. And it's such a big rivalry. It's been around so long. The proximity is schools, the proximity of our alumni bases, it just makes this a special thing. And regardless of how the rest of the season goes, good or bad, or you always have that big game left at the end of a regular season, that's really special. No one else in our league has it. A lot of the Ivy League doesn't.  Only Harvard/Yale or Ohio State/Michigan, Cal/Stanford is anything like this. We have something really special here.  Adding to that is title implications.  Both teams have to hope that Holy Cross loses to Georgetown. But at the same time, if that does happen, if we win the game, we tie for the championship and if Lafayette wins the game, they win the championship. Having t...

LFN: Did you have a pretty busy class schedule this year? S Sam McCloskey:   I got here late today as well. Tuesday through Thursday is pretty busy. Monday and Friday, actually, I'll have class. LFN: What are you studying now?  And how has that been integrating with football? SMC: An MBA type of technical entrepreneurship. There's definitely a lot to it, a lot of hours.  So at times it's actually been tough, you know, kind of balancing football practice and whatnot. But it's completely different than undergrad programs, really hands on. I like it a lot.  We get to work on our own venture. So I'm trying to work on that and we'll see where that goes. LFN: Do you have anything lined up for the future? SMC:  Probably end up in construction or real estate, something like that. That's where my interest has been, you know, throughout college. So that's cool. LFN: How do you manage the Rivalry distractions?  What do you tell the younger player...

There is something about Eastern Pennsylvania that keeps drawing people back. I see it all the time - from expats who move across the country, but still watch the Eagles on Sundays.  Once you've been to the Lehigh Valley, warts and all, it seems like some sort of gravitational pull yanks you back to the area.  You can live in the Yucatan, but a part of your heart remains in the Valley. It's a strange thing, too, because the Lehigh Valley has never been a paradise on earth.  Even from the times of the English and German Moravians setting the area in the 1600s, it's been a place of contrasts - the well-to-do living and working next to manual laborers.  The prosperity of Bethlehem and Easton ebbed and flowed, but what always was true was that both were cities that were a big mix of different types of hard-working people. Lehigh University reflected Bethlehem, a town built on iron and steel, a town that wanted to pretend that you could go from the foundry to the ...

All season I have done a statistical breakdown of Lehigh's opponent, position by position.  As a change of pace, I'm going to do something different this week with the "Game Breakdown" and do a head-to-head comparison of both teams - doing a stat breakdown of both teams still, but doing more of a "Tale of the Tape" to compare both squads to see who might reign supreme in this huge football game. Something that sometimes gets lost in The Rivalry is the importance of seniors on both sides.  For so many of these seniors, it's not only their final college football game, it is also their final time wearing a football helmet and a jersey.  I've found that seniors find it in themselves to play the best games of their careers.  So seniors in the starting lineup are of great weight to me.

We're approaching the end of 2017, and it's been an interesting year where Lehigh football fans have experienced a multitude of emotions: anger; sadness; redemption, and, finally, joy. As you all know, the Mountain Hawks came back from the precipice of a disastrous season to come back and win back-to-back Patriot League championships and back-to-back FCS Playoff appearances. In that vein, I thought I'd share the best and most-read LFN pieces from last season, from No. 10 to No. 1. Going through all my stuff from the past year, these were the pieces that really stood out to me.

(Photo Credit: Steve Hockstein/NJ Advance Media) With this year's early signing period in December, along with traditional signing day in February and additional signing of recruits up until May, it felt like the right time to resurrect the Patriot League Commit Tracker for the class of 2022. This is intended to be a rolling list, updated as we go, as student-athletes going to any Patriot League school sign National Letters of Intent. We don't know the whole story yet behind each school's recruiting class.  But this post is intended to put in one place what we know so far. As I learn more, I will add more names to each list.

You may not be aware that this year the NCAA has not one, but two, signing day periods this year. Coined " Show Your Cards Day " by Arizona director of personnel Matt Dudek , Sports Illustrated calls it this "because programs and recruits now have to make their intentions clear to one another while the programs and the recruits still have time to make other arrangements." Here at LFN, we agree that "Show Your Cards" day is an accurate way of describing the brave new world of football recruiting.  And, like all NCAA rules, this affects the Patriot League as well as the Big 10, Pac 12 or any other Division I conference. For Patriot League programs, what cards are likely to be revealed?  What are the recruiting needs of each school going into early signing day?  Here at LFN, we take a stab at predicting what might be revealed this week.

For the first time all season, it was a dark, wet day for a Lehigh football game. It was not at all ideal for the more than 15,000 fans, and countless tailgaters that made it to the tailgates but not in the stadium, partying and tailgating outside the gates of Murray Goodman. It was also not at all ideal for Lehigh's high-powered passing game, and during a disastrous second quarter with three turnovers, it felt like the wheels were coming off the Mountain Hawks' chances at successfully defending their Patriot League title. It seemed like everything that could go wrong, was actually going wrong.  Three fumbles resulted in three Lafayette recoveries.  A third down conversion incompletion by Lafayette QB Sean O'Malley became an unexpected first down, thanks to an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that kept their drive alive.  A 14-7 first quarter lead became 17 unanswered points, leading to a 24-14 deficit against the best defensive team in the Patriot League. In thi...

We break down #Rivalry153 - and we give our fearless prediction, below the flip. I have always felt like these Rivalry games are first and foremost about the seniors.  It seems like for the most part, it's the seniors who really answer the call and compete to their fullest potential in this bowl game at the end of the regular season.  Guys like Lehigh QB Nick Shafnisky last year, who won the MVP award, or Lafayette RB Ross Scheuerman , who dominated a certain game in the Bronx that shall not be named. When you take away The Rivalry, when you take away the emotions, when you take away the craziness, the energy - what do we have?  When you look at the Xs and Os, what do you have? Certainly, this game, like every Rivalry game, will be dictated and informed by emotion.  You can count on the fact, as a Lehigh fan, that Lafayette will play out of their minds.  That shouldn't stop us, though, from looking over the Leopards and seeing what they'...

Senior OL Zach Duffy could have chosen to talk about any number of career highs when he reflected this week in The Brown and White about his time as a football player at Lehigh. He could have talked about building the program up from a 4-7 team into a Patriot League champion, crushing the sweet dreams of Lafayette last year in Easton in the 152nd version of The Rivalry, 45-21 , or perhaps he could have waxed philosophic about the last time Lehigh squared off against Lafayette at Murray Goodman Stadium, the time when QB Nick Shafnisky threw aside a Lafayette defender and the Mountain Hawks blew the doors out with a 49-35 win. But that's not what he talked about at all. He went right at the "agony of defeat" moments instead, talking about the loss to Lafayette in 2013, the infamous " it's supposed to suck, and it's supposed to hurt " game where an 8-2 Lehigh team faced off against a 4-6 Lafayette squad that ended up going to the FCS Playoffs ...

I thought a fun way this season to show off the historic nature of Lehigh and Lafayette's football Rivalry might be to do a jump through the decades. (If you want to learn more about the Lehigh and Lafayette Rivalry, read my book: The Rivalry: How Two Schools Started the Most Played College Football Series, available in both paperback in Kindle versions. ) Lehigh and Lafayette's Rivalry in football started in 1884, when Lafayette student manager (and founder of the football team) Theodore Welles approached the founder and student manager of Lehigh football, J.S. Robeson , and challenged them to a game of "foot-ball", a ground-based game that resembled more of a cross between rugby and soccer than the modern game of today. Let's turn back the clock 130 years, and proceed decade by decade, and you'll see how many times Lehigh and Lafayette have played over the years, and hopefully get an appreciation on how the game changed and evolved over time.

It's something you ought to see once in your life, if you can, because it's unique, it exudes its own special energy, and it has an emotion and spectacle that many bowl games would dream to have. The short version of the tale of the football Rivalry between Lehigh and Lafyette is simple: It's the most-played college football Rivalry in the world. It's been waged every year, with only one interruption since 1884. And the two schools, in competition in pretty much everything since the founding of Lafayette (1826) and Lehigh (1865), eventually coalesced around football as the main driver of The Rivalry between them. I've spent a good portion of my adult life being around The Rivalry.  I've studied it, blogged about it, and even written a book about it .  The world has changed, and football has changed, a lot since 1884.  What hasn't changed, I think, is the weird and particular chemistry that seems to happen when these two teams get together for...

I know, I know, it's strange when there's no Lehigh football game result to pick apart.  That doesn't mean that the rest of college football stood still during the Mountain Hawks' bye week. Lehigh's bye week came during a time when Penn State football, already rabid at the best of times, was at peak foaming-at-the-mouth after Happy Valley hosted ESPN College Gameday on Saturday morning and Michigan on Saturday night. In case you've been living under a rock, Penn State RB Saquon Barkley has a local connection: he went to Whitehall at the same time a guy called QB Nick Shafnisky was under center.  Now, Barkley is the odds-on favorite to win the Heisman with the Nittany Lions after a 263 yard, 3 TD effort against the Wolverines as Penn State coasted to a 42-13 win. Completing the return to 1986, Notre Dame also went to 6-1 after their own resounding 49-13 win over USC Saturday night as well, surprising in the ease in the way RB Josh Adams carved through ...

(Photo Credit: Harvard Magazine) Last weekend, Lafayette traveled up to Harvard to play the Crimson up in Cambridge.  It was the 19th meeting between the Leopards and the Crimson, a series that started in 1966 and has been a frequent event since the early 1990s. It was a pretty historic game, too: the 700th football game contested at Harvard Stadium. In years past, you might have found members of the local Lehigh Valley media making a trip up to Boston to cover the game from an independent Lafayette perspective, and you would have seen a recap online and some postgame quotes from the postgame press conference in there as well, as well as seeing an article or two about the game in the Sunday paper. This weekend, though, there was nothing. The recap in The Morning Call was not the great work of Paul Reinhard , who freelances for the paper - they didn't pay him to go up to Cambridge to take in the game and ask John Garrett about the progress of the team.  Instead, s...

This week, Lafayette plays Harvard up in Cambridge, where the 2-4 Leopards are expected to lose to the 2-2 Crimson.  I say expected to lose because with one exception since 2000, that's what's happened every time Lafayette has played Harvard: they have lost 12 out of their last 13 to the Johnnies, and have a lifetime record of 3-19 against them. The expectation among Patriot League football fans is that football scholarships were supposed to change all of that.  Simply offer conventional football scholarships, add to that a chance to play in the FCS Playoffs, and suddenly football recruits choosing between Harvard and Lehigh for business would start choosing Lehigh. It hasn't worked out quite that way. Through five games in 2017, the combined record of the Patriot League is a mind-boggling 8-21 outside of Patriot League contests.   And of those eight wins, only one has come against a team from the Ivy League - Colgate's 21-7 win over Cornell.  Collective...

Frank Tavani always made sure the Patsies were celebrated in downtown Easton. Perhaps it was the Bourger Field House needing an event to host in February when the men's wrestling team was out of town, or that field hockey practice was finishing up - the shindigs that Bourger fielded back in those days were great. All that steak, not overcooked, was barbecued outside, filling the Eastonian air with charred meats usually only present during Lafayette/Lehigh week.  Many students would come up - giving up their vegan diets, maybe just this one time - to eat beautiful steak sandwiches, and to sip delicious Coke under huge cardboard cutouts of their beloved head coach. Today, Lafayette has a new head football coach, and so far there's no Coke billboards with head coach John Garrett on them.  And there was no smell of steak as the Committee got the folder filled with the printouts of Lafayette's Patsy Ratings class.