Lehigh Football Nation

I have this vision. It's the weekend of the home opener at Murray Goodman Stadium, Labor Day weekend.  It could be a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. And it's 6:00 PM. In 2018, the Lehigh football team will open the season with a big celebration of the football program - at Navy, Lehigh's first game against an FBS team in over a decade. In 2017, why not, as a one-off opportunity, try to have one Lehigh football game, the home opener, be the first-ever night game at Murray Goodman Stadium? Will it cost money?  Yes.  Will it be easy?  Probably not. However, is it doable?  I've got to believe the answer is "yes".

Stop me if you've heard this before: As a reward for being the surprise outright winner of the Patriot League football championship, the reward is a trip to New Hampshire, the winner headed to seeded James Madison for a second-round game.  And somewhere, Sam Houston State looms on the horizon. This is the exact situation that Colgate found itself last season, and this year, Lehigh is poised to run through the exact same gauntlet and the exact same teams. Sunday morning, Lehigh found out their opponents for the FCS Playoffs; the New Hampshire Wildcats.  The game will be played at New Hampshire at 2PM EST, and will be available to watch on ESPN3 on your computer and possibly ESPN Gameplan Pay-Per-View on your TV.

You don't have to have attended more than twenty-five years of Lehigh football games to know it's a completely different world out there for your friendly neighborhood sports fan. When Lehigh's Murray Goodman Stadium was opened in 1988, there were only about a dozen channels on the small, eighteen inch black and white TV we had in our dorm room.  Only two channels might have had "major college football" games on at the same time a Lehigh football game was being played live over the mountain.  (Notre Dame, the only school who had all their games televised, almost always played their games at 3:30 PM.) Nowadays there's way more entertainment options on a typical college weekend than ever, and it's very logical to think that the increased amount of competition might not just keep students away from attending football games, but local fans as well. It's not an issue confined to Lehigh - in 2014, home attendance at all FBS games dropped to their low...

It wasn't a typical Lehigh weekend for me as I headed to Murray Goodman. With my family, including my mother and father visiting Murray Goodman stadium for the first time in a long time, I spent most of the game experiencing most of the game in a place where I haven't been in a while: the "stands". When you cover a team, it's a bit too easy sometimes to take refuge in the press box, hermetically sealed from the rest of the fans out in the fresh air.  Too often, too, that's what I do: plop in the press box, not to emerge until after the clock reads zero. This time around, though, I had the incredible experience once again to enjoy most of the game in the stands, thanks to my family, and it couldn't have been a better one, thanks to the best efforts of the other fans. The picture above was taken on my phone, from where I was sitting on Saturday.

No, Virginia, I didn't know that "Athletic Turf News" really does exist. But it does: and yes, they are showing the big news that Lehigh is upgrading the natural grass that has been in place since even before Murray Goodman Stadium existed. (Actually, those lazy reporters over at ATN actually just cribbed the report from Lehigh's website.) An entire photo gallery of the renovation lives here (and that's where I got the great shot to my right). Cheer up, Lehigh fans: you don't need to renew your subscription, here's the scoop right here: "This project is part of our University's ongoing commitment to facility maintenance, and had been planned for some time,” Lehigh Dean of Athletics Joe Sterrett ’76 explained. “Goodman Stadium is a distinctive setting for football, however, the grass turf and subsurface had reached the end of a long (40 years-plus) life.” He continued, “The availability of modern irrigation and drainage systems and the compar...

No, I can't say it's particularly... well... original, but with Lehigh's Brown/White game completed , it's time to catch up with with some of the (shudder) buzz - or rumors, and the like - that's hovering around the Patriot League and the Lehigh program. (Why do I feel, well, dirty after writing that? Is it only because "buzz" feels ...so... so... 1996?) We'll start with the NFL Draft, make a side trip to the Lehigh Athletics Hall of Fame, "The Rivalry", and end up with new plans for Murray Goodman Stadium' new (natural) turf. And I'll try to do so without making a single reference to Independence Day . Let's start with Don Bostrom's Morning Call column today talking about the number of local Lehigh Valley athletes that have been NFL draft picks, including hall-of-famer Chuck Bednarik. That doesn't interest me as much as the fact that he lists Lehigh football players that have been draft picks over the years... and (...

The biggest news out of this weekend was not the issuance of my new T-shirt line for the Lehigh/Villanova game , the new poll for Murray Goodman's 20th Anniversary (scroll down on the left-hand side) here on the blog, or the impending issuance of the College Sporting News football preview issue. Without a doubt, the big story was concerning the injuries after the first week of practice - some minor dings, but at least one big one that shakes up the depth chart. Placed innocuously in Keith Groller's latest blog posting on the Morning Call , he drops this bombshell: Most notable were injuries that sidelined both tailbacks Matt McGowan and Josh Pastore. McGowan's injury was more serious, a torn hamstring. It's expected to keep him out of the Sept. 8 opener against Villanova and could hamper him for weeks beyond that. The former Hazleton star was set for a breakout season and this injury is not a good way to get things started. So starting tailbacks #1 and #2 were held out ...

Think you'd get this at Ohio State? In a busy week for Lehigh athletics, yesterday marked a first: a season ticket pickup event where holders could chat with coach Coen, assistant coaches, and the captains of the 2007 squad: senior QB Sedale Threatt, senior DB Ernest Moore, senior C John Reese , and senior DB Brannan Thomas . It took place at the Lehigh Athletics Hall of Fame (at Taylor Gymnasium in the middle of campus) and sounded like a fun event - I'd love for stuff like this to be an annual thing which emphasizes the personal and familial nature of Lehigh football. What better way to get folks excited than to talk to the players and coaches? (You can still buy season tickets if you click here .) In other big news, our men's basketball coach Billy Taylor was hired away by Ball State this week, leaving the Lehigh basketball program in (what seemed to me) some disarray. The Morning Call report made it sound like Lehigh was somewhat caught flat-footed by the departure, w...