Lehigh Football Nation

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 ...

The parties raged on in the parking garage next to Fisher Field, which were packed with Lafayette fans eager to enjoy a party with plenty of great food and copious drinks. The tiny businesses below Fisher Field, the small bits of capitalism next to the concrete husks of factory jobs that have left ages ago, had plenty of visiting Lehigh fans, enjoying the tailgates and ready to invade the stadium that they hadn't seen in four years. In the line coming into the stadium, a silent protest of hundreds of Lafayette students clad in black, handing out a political statement on a piece of paper and showing some signs that were up seemingly to simply show that these people exist, and are not happy. Somewhere in this mix of people escaping, people expressing and people denying, a football game was played, one that matched an 8-2 team that was headed to the national stage and the FCS playoffs, the other a 2-8 squad that had their fans questioning the tenure of their head coach. It w...

In the most-played college football Rivalry, there was a mild concern of complacency on the Lehigh side. Would they be able to manage the emotions of the Rivalry after a bye week?  Would they come out flat, and let 2-8 Lafayette take away their chance at an outright Patriot League championship, an undefeated Patriot League record, and a 9-2 regular season mark? The Mountain Hawks proved resoundingly that fans needn't have worried. Lehigh rolled to a 17-0 lead before Lafayette connected on a big pass play, then kept the foot on the gas to get to a 45-7 lead before starting to put in the second stringers. It was pretty telling that the biggest outpouring of emotion during the game happened when Lehigh's marching band, the Marching 97, marched off Lafayette's pep band after they went over on their time to play.  It was that sort of day for a joyous Lehigh victory.

In a world that is rocked by the division of ugly elections and the blowing up of the political order, the business of beating Lafayette in the 152nd meeting of The Rivalry offers a rare sliver of personal unity among the people of Lehigh in an otherwise divided country. 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 united fans of Brown and Maroon through a grand total of 34 Presidential elections, some of them bitterly divisive, others not. The current tally of games sits at 151, and the game this weekend, the 152nd, will be played in Easton.  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 ...

All the Rivalry games are memorable in their own way for everyone in attendance, from the seniors playing in their last game to the kids playing on the grass embankment. The there will be four plays that will be remembered the most, the four plays that defined this game for Lehigh and really demonstrated how tough this team was in 2015, and how tough they might be in 2016. Most importantly, though, was the fact that Lehigh finally was able to chuck aside any doubts about winning a big game. Wins against Lafayette are always important for the many Lehigh fans in the near-16,000 people who attend these games.  But winning this particular game was doubly important for this Lehigh squad that seemed to almost desperately need the win in order to demonstrate to the fans in the Valley who they are, who they were, and where they're headed.

We break down the #Rivalry151 - and we give our fearless prediction below the flip. One of the things that makes Lafayette such a dangerous and frightening team is the fact that they're 1-9, oddly enough. As a Lehigh fan, despite the Xs and Os, you have to wonder if Lehigh will come out flat tomorrow, after a h eartwrenching loss last week to Colgate, 49-42 . Coupled with that is the fact that Lafayette has had two weeks to contemplate the end of their football season, to get healthy, to come to terms with the end of their football careers. Sometimes, even in a huge Rivalry game, with a Patriot League championship on the line last week, you wonder if the Mountain Hawks can bring it as intensely as they brought it to Colgate. Despite the breakdown, despite the football side, the question is - can they?

Chuck laid down on the couch, his therapist staring at his pencil.  He focused at a spor on the celing, listing to the pelt of rain on the thin roof overhead. "Do you remember it now?" the balding doctor with the shaggy salt-and-pepper beard asked. "I... I don't remember," Chuck said.  "I have a vague recollection, some faint memories, about being... excited.  About being excited for a football game, but not The Rivalry I expected.  It was being played... in a stadium I didn't recognize.  It was a dream.  A nightmare.  It had to be a nightmare." "Go on," the doctor said.  "This is good.  Very good.  By confronting what.... happened last year, you can finally face up to it and defeat it.  Defeat your nightmare.  Defeat a year's worth of angst.   Defeat it." "I don't know," Chuck said.  "It's all so hazy." "Let's see if we can work this out," the doctor said.  ...

Head coach Fred Dunlap 's first season at the head of the Engineers wasn't going very well in 1965. "Lehigh has impressed me very much," Dunlap was quoted as saying in The Brown and White .  "They're very warm people with a very healthy attitude in that they think very positively in competing with schools and teams in our league." "Here you can easily get the team up for a big game, while at Cornell where you're dealing with bigger numbers and play the big school, the team is hurt by playing week after week of big games." Nowhere, I think, was Mr. Dunlap's ability to grab the positive from a negative situation more on display than with the 1965 team. Three times, against Cornell, Delaware and Bucknell, Lehigh would give up more than 40 points a game.  Loss after loss mounted, going into the final weekend of the season and the game against their hated Rival to go. But Mr. Dunlap always had a way of being positive in the middl...

In the run-up to the big game at Yankee Stadium I had an opportunity to talk with Lehigh football alum OL Dan Mulholland . One of the great diehard fans, Mulholland runs the "Kings of Tailgates" at Lehigh home games, partially in tribute to his teammate Roger McFillan , who died unexpectedly at the age of 50.  The tailgates in Roger's honor, run by Dan, his twin brother Bob Mulholland and fellow teammate Gus Gustafson , are a Mountain Hawk gameday fixture right next to the Rust Pavillion, and every home game they "grill the opponent's mascot." It so happened I talked with Mulholland about his best work, his blocking for RB Jack Rizzo 's record-breaking rushing performance against Lafayette in 1971.  Rizzo ran for 313 yards, a Lehigh single-game record that still stands today. "Yeah, we'll never see any sort of rushing performance like that ever again in a Rivalry game," I told him mere days before Lafayette RB Ross Scheuerman woul...

Someday I will look back on the 150th meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette as a joyous occasion, one of those times when I remember chucking a football around the parking lot of the Yankees with my son and his friends. At some point I'll think of my time in the open air Yankee press box, two seats down from the New York Times, and smile. Now is not one of those times. Lehigh couldn't get the offense going in the first half, or the entire game, for that matter, but managed to allow Lafayette RB Ross Scheuerman to set a single-game record in rushing for the Leopards, a 60-carry, 313 yard performance. The result was a dominating, humbling, frustrating, overwhelming 27-7 win by Lehigh's bitter Rival on Yankee soil.

There is but one football game in this college football season tomorrow, and it's in New York City at Yankee Stadium.  That means there's but one football game to break down, and it's #Rivalrly150, which will be done below the flip. It's hard to believe that the season is already coming to an end, and that the game that was years in the making is about to happen tomorrow. It made for a weird vibe on campus today, where I went to get my tickets and buy my Rivalry scarves for tomorrow.  I'm used to the Rivalry being in the air on campus, but campus mostly had serious students there, the football-crazed of whom are probably in Manhattan right now, fresh from watching Lehigh's president John D. Simon ring the final bell of the New York Stock Exchange, or attending the sold-out Lehigh/Lafayette swim and dive meet, or listening to Lehigh Choral Arts at Carnegie Hall, or attending the gala with Earth, Wind and Fire . With all the hoopla, it can be forgotte...

I know it's been several years in the making.  I know we are almost at the eve of the biggest edition of the Lehigh/Lafayette Rivalry yet, the one in Yankee Stadium, the 150th meeting, the one I've been waiting for years to arrive. Yet it's one play, one play , that I keep thinking about in the run-up to this game. Bubble screen. I keep seeing that bubble screen in the 149th meeting of Lehigh and Lafayette, the one that put the game out of reach, the one that turned Lehigh's bid for a championship last season become one that fell just short of a championship.

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...

Paul Dashiell “A silver cup has been offered by Mr. R. P. Linderman , Lehigh ‘84, as a trophy of the foot-ball championship of Pennsylvania,” the Lehigh Burr reported in 1889.  “Designs for the cup have not yet been prepared but it will be very handsome, of massive silver, while special care will be taken to secure a design thoroughly artistic and appropriate, and the cup will be fully equal to any college trophy of the kind ever offered.  The [articles and conditions drawn up for the Championship] is not intended to form a foot-ball league, such a thing being deemed unnecessary, but to provide such general regulations as will fairly determine the state championship.” The idea of Lehigh, Lafayette and Penn competing for the "state championship" has as its origins the student newspapers, who had started tallying the records of the games between each other in the hopes of crowning a mythical "champion of Pennsylvania". In 1888, Lehigh and Lafayette played eac...

Only one football coach ever led both Lehigh and Lafayette to victories in the Rivalry. In 1898, suffering through Parke Davis ' final season, the head coach that had led Lafayette to the heights of natonal prominence brought in four different coaches to find a way to beat Lehigh in their second meeting at the end of the season. One of those great football minds Davis brought in was Dr. Sylvanus P. Newton , a former Penn football player, Phi Beta Kappa scholar and expert football strategist. Dr. Newton played a critical role for Lafayette in a slushy ice bowl in 1898, using the talents of their kicker, Ed Bray , and an ingenious way to deliver free kicks. "Captain Best, the holder, and Bray, the kicker, scraped away the four inches of slush and snow so the ball could be placed on the ground for an attempt," the book Legends of Lehigh/Lafayette tells us.  "The visibility [on the 35 yard field goal] was so poor that the crowd at first was silent, not knowing ...

Brown and White, 1957 Everyone had heard of the Lambert Trophy on the campuses of Lehigh and Lafayette. Awarded to the most outstanding college football team in the East, it was routinely won by some of the legendary big-school programs of the time.   Jock Sutherland 's Pitt teams and Earl "Red" Blaik 's Army teams dominated the Lambert Trophy balloting in the first couple of decades of the award. In 1957 the Lamberts and their board members, including Kermit Roosevelt , son of Teddy Roosevelt,  decided that there ought to be a Lambert Trophy for smaller schools in the East as well - schools that played against "major colleges", but didn't play the majority of their games against those schools. It gave an extra jolt of excitement to the Rivalry.

Bill Leckonby, The Hill School "72 aspirants greeted Lehigh's new football coach, Bill Leckonby, on the first day of the six-week spring training session," a Lehigh Alumni Bulletin inauspicously announced in the spring of 1945. It was reflection as to how low the Brown and White football team had sunk that the announcement didn't come with more fanfare. After all, Lehigh was in the middle of a nine-year stretch where they had only been able to muster one tie in the span of eleven contests with their bitter Rivals. Six times they were shut out.  Only once did they score more than 7 points against the Leopards. It probably didn't register that hiring of the former St. Lawrence University star, and former pro football player for the AAFL's Brooklyn Dodgers, only a few years removed from military service in World War II, would forever change the direction of Lehigh athletics. Few probably realized at the time that the inauspicious announcement would ...

Express-Times File Photo, Lehigh 20, Lafayette 13, 2010 It was destined to be a day of defense, and any number of hard-hitting inside linebackers could have been the MVP of the 146th meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette. Lehigh's defense was on the field thirty-six minutes, and never let a tough Lafayette run game wear them down. Almost right out of the gates, Lehigh's defense seemed to want to put their mark on this game. The first three defensive plays featured three straight tackles by senior LB Al Pierce, pounding Lafayette's   RB Alan Elder  and hurrying  QB Ryan O'Neil  into throwing the ball out of play. And it only got better from there.

It didn’t initially seem conceivable that war in Europe would affect the daily lives of American boys and men playing college football in Pennsylvania. Before World War I broke out, or the Great War as it was then called, President Woodrow Wilson pursued a strict policy of neutrality in regards to the trench battles in Belgium and France, echoing popular opinion. But when World War became inevitable, it naturally affected the campuses of Lafayette and Lehigh in the seasons of 1917 and 1918. Through the seriousness of war, the Rivalry continued where other college football seasons were halted, complete with much of the same pageantry. In tough times, the Rivalry provided a much-needed escape though the seriousness of the times.

Going into the 1912 season, the Rivalry was at a point when Lafayette was a dominant force over the Brown and White. In an era where Princeton, Yale, and the Carlisle Indian School all competed for the top, Lafayette was right there alongside the top teams in the nation. And soon, Lehigh would be in the conversation once again as well. In 1911, Lehigh announced their seriousness to vault back into contention by signing four key transfers, including a future Brown and White hall-of-fame quarterback, QB Pat Pazzetti , from Wesleyan. "The Pennsylvania college is pulling strongly for a record-breaking football team this year - hoping to put one on their old rival, Lafayette - and is doing all in its power to get the athletes in the institution," The Lafayette reported.