Lehigh Football Nation

"Oi... My Good Heavens man. What are you THINKING? Loyola in the Patriot League in All Sports... including a football team?" That's what St. Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Society of Jesus) seems to be saying in the picture to my left - and I think there are a fair amount of people out there who might agree with him. But is it really as outlandish as all that? The rumors are flying on messageboards that Loyola might be looking for a new conference. The Greyhounds currently reside in the MAAC in all sports - and despite the fact that they don't currently sponsor it, football may be part of the equation. So what's the truth? Could there be any truth to the rumors? Let's look at a tale of the tape and see what we can figure out. The Tale Of The Tape Loyola College is a private Jesuit school located in Baltimore, Maryland of approximately 3,500 undergraduates. As a Jesuit school, they fit perfectly in the Patriot League on several levels: they are a...

Every once in a while I like to talk about Patriot League expansion, especially in terms of football. With eight basketball members and seven football-playing members (including two, Fordham and Georgetown, who are in the league only in football), I think expansion of the league ought to be one of its top priorities. To that end, I had proposed Marist as a very solid candidate in Patriot League expansion in all sports. Marist appeared to fit the bill as a Patriot League school as a small, high-academic private school; its non-scholarship football program had played a lot of football against Patriot League opponents; its conference, the MAAC, finally ceased to exist for football last year; and its men's and women's basketball programs promised to provide great respect for the Patriot League from years to come. (Last year, Marist's women's basketball team proceeded to make the Sweet 16, and have parked themselves in the Top 25 nationally this year.) Last Friday, Maris...

No, seriously, could anyone really blame the Dayton Flyer for looking this smug? After all, as was reported by me on College Sporting News, Dayton's Pioneer Football League (or PFL for short) is now the one-stop shop for non-scholarship football. Their commissioner, Ms. Patty Viverito, has gladly taken the leadership for Division I non-scholarship football coast-to-coast, and has shown more than half a dozen other Division I schools (that don't currently have football) the benefits of playing at that level. Here in the East, the message is clear for those schools in the MAAC who in 2008 have found themselves without a conference (Marist, Iona, and LaSalle): Step up to our vision of non-scholarship football, be willing to travel, and compete to win, and we'd be happy to have you. From my perspective, it looks to me like none of the three programs are planning to drop football altogether. LaSalle has just finished $2.5 million in football stadium improvements, and Marist h...

The one thing you can say for certain about the demise of St. Peter's football is that it came at the absolute worse possible time. It came at a time when FCS powers were meeting in Chicago, IL to discuss the future on non-scholarship football in Division I. I'm guessing that the demise of a non-scholarship conference wasn't on the original list of talking points. Forget for a moment that clever MAAC puns (like the not-so-funny one titling this post) are history. Forget that you won't be seeing any matchups like Iona/St. Peter's in 2007. Forget that St Peter's scheduled out-of-conference foes for 2007 in the form of Monmouth, Wagner, and St. Francis (and a bunch of non Division I teams) are now left in the wilderness with extremely slim chances to reschedule games in the next couple of months. (Although this blogger feels confident about Monmouth's chances of rescheduling.) Forget the St. Peter's football alumni. Forget the returning players of th...

My wife and I are old movie buffs, and Turner Classic Movies is one of our favorite TV channels. As we were watching The Heroes of Telemark last night, we saw a classic campy 1965 tale of how playboy nuclear scientist and part-time Norwegian spy for the British Kirk Douglas basically singlehandedly thwarted the Nazi's attempt to create a nuclear bomb. Douglas played a character who could ski like Jean-Claude Killy (complete with Jean-Claude's choice in sweaters), could expertly sabotage the Nazi nuclear program like a Navy SEAL, could decimate half the Nazi empire with perfect marksmanship (must be all that biathlon training), and for good measure could save a bunch of Norwegian kids from sinking on a ferryboat. Basically, he's the perfect candidate for thwarting the nuclear aspirations of the Nazis. Richard Harris, playing the Norwegian underground resistance leader Knut Straud, certainly looked like someone who could probably have wiped out a battallion of Nazis hims...