Lehigh Football Nation

During the football season I frequently do a mash-up of the press releases regarding Lehigh's games and give my own commentary. At this time of year in the Lehigh Valley, though, sometimes the coverage gets lost in the spectacle of Musikfest and the day-to-day goings on at Eagles Training Camp at Lehigh . (Both of which are free admission, by the way - my wife, son and I went to both on Sunday and had a fantastic time.) As I wait for the full text of Sedale's media day speech to become available somewhere, I offer a mash-up of the media day events and the big league news that came out of there. One of the issues I have was that too many local papers didn't even have a proper write up of the event. (The Utica Observer-Dispatch has to take the cake for the smallest-ever press release on the event - and that's more than New York City, Washington, DC, the Worcester Telegram-Gazette, and Daily Item, Bucknell's local paper, had!) It's a real shame - and they ac...

It's becoming more and more clear that Patriot League schools aren't the only schools among the intellectually elite institutions that are having the debate about athletic recruiting and academics. This article from the San Francisco Chronicle treads a lot of the same ground I did in my "New Realities" blog postings and the College Sporting News article , even though the subject matter is the long-term survival of Stanford in the Pac-10. If anything, it shows that the subjects being tackled by the Patriot League in regards to academic indexes and institutional control are hardly unique to our league. From the article: "They can't keep raising the bar,'' said Dave Tipton, a former All-America defensive tackle at Stanford who served as an assistant coach there for 18 years under five head coaches. He said the admissions standards for football players are "markedly'' higher than they were 10 years ago. "Hopefully it will go back ...

It's not easy to follow the five blog-postings about the state of the Patriot League, but I think I finally found the perfect NY Times piece to do so. It's an article about "Jack", or more accurately, recent Amherst graduate Tony Jack - in " Elite Colleges Open New Door To Low-Income Youths ". The piece is admittedly a back-patting sort of piece on how elite institutions are doing a better job at admitting folks from everywhere. But Mr. Jack's story is worth telling, and his love of Amherst is a delight to read. It also, however unwittingly, exposes some of the problems of our academic index system in recruiting athletes - and exposes some of the unpleasant truths about demographics in private, high-academic colleges. It's almost the best possible follow-up to the "New Realities" piece. Concerned that the barriers to elite institutions are being increasingly drawn along class lines, and wanting to maintain some role as engines of soci...

I know the image to my left will strike fear in the hearts of some of the regular readers of my blog as I deliver Part V (and the final part) of my analysis of the "New Realities" of the Patriot League. In a lot of ways, the NESCAC (the "New England Small College Athletic Conference") represents what some critics feel the Patriot League desperately wants to become - a Division III school that strictly adheres to the dogma of pure amateur sports, including a self-imposed ban on the D-III playoffs for its athletes. In my research, I didn't see any evidence of a league that wanted to drop into D-III. I saw a league that is currently trying to figure out where it belongs in the Division I world. On all campuses, there is a pride that their school is Division I in football and able to compete nationally for championships. All of the folks I talked to seemed not to mind holding athletes to some form of standards to ensure that they're academically representa...

It's becoming a pretty wild and wooly world out there for college recruiting. Websites like the one to my right have been springing up everywhere, in an effort to match up athletic scholarships and schools that offer them. The NCAA r ecently banned text-messaging between coaching staffs and potential prospects since some coaches seized on text messaging as a way around the NCAA laws limiting communication between coaches and prospects. In many ways, it feels like a wild west out there. Some might say that the whole source of the problem is athletic scholarships. With industries devoted to matching up recruits and coaches, and technology being abused for the purpose of bending recruiting rules, the solution appears easy: just get rid of athletic scholarships, and see the process chance. This approach dates all the way back to to 1945, when the Ivy Group Agreement declared their disapproval of athletic scholaships. “No student shall be eligible who has received financial supp...

It's funny: as soon as I'm just about ready to unveil my blog posting on academic indexes, the New York Times scoops me. With their article " Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet To Next Tier " (which highlights Lehigh as the prototypical school of this "next tier", right below the Ivies), Alan Finder reports that it's harder than ever to get into schools like Lehigh. A subscription is required to get the full text, but a key snippet of the article follows: At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said. ... The result, said Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., is that many classmates perceive...

One of the dirty little secrets of college admissions is that for athletes in many Division I schools, the admissions process is different than the maze in the picture right here. Athletes get treated, well, differently. A FBS school like Ohio State has a coach and athletic department who wants a certain player, and he goes out and gets that player. He goes through a special admissions process. It's a different process than a non-athletic out-of-state student might have to negotiate admissions, financial aid, and so on. In the first "New Realities" piece, I went through a bit of history on how the Patriot League's structure came about. One important part of that structure is "Presidential Control", but what it really boils down to is "the separation of athletics and admissions". That's what I'll be talking about in today's posting. Separation The 1945 Ivy Agreement formally enshrined the separation of athletics and admissions. It...

Three months ago, I started a series of blog postings called " The New Realities " that attempted to talk a little bit about the issues facing the Patriot League and football in particular. It wasn't bad for what it was - a Lehigh perspective on the challenges of the Patriot League and a possible direction going forward. After starting this impossible task, I quickly realized that I was tackling a subject over my own head. I had opinions on what was right, but this subject deserves a hell of a lot more perspective than that. It deserves a discussion around the league, about what is working, and what ought to be looked at again for 2007. It deserved hours of phone calls, days of research, complete looks into history - a complete job. Without further ado, here's something that can be done in today's day and age with blogs: a relaunch of the same series I started months before - this time, only better. The "New Realities" are back, tackling the basic ...

Last week, I talked a little bit about some of the realities in regards to athletic recruiting in the Patriot League in today's world. If you hit the link above, you'll see an in-depth talk about the Academic Index (or AI) used by the Patriot League (modeled after the Ivy League's own AI), as well as a talk about the shrinking pool of athletic recruits available to all Ivy and Patriot League schools, and some of the idiosyncrasies that scholarships offer Patriot League institutions in our sports that allow them. Today I'll talk more about the Ivy and Patriot League's AI system, and how it fits in with the big world of football recruiting on a national level. But first, it's worth talking about donuts. Donuts, Chuck? What the Hey!?! Not only are donuts tasty (and against all odds are a popular breakfast "food"), the best way to describe athletic recruiting in terms of the Ivies and Patriot League teams is using the analogy of donuts. Let's think...