Lehigh Football Nation

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

(Graph Credit: Chronicle of Higher Ed) It's amazing to me how statistics are so frequently presented to attempt to "shock and awe" the viewer. Today, it's the Chronicle of Higher Ed's turn to mislead using statistics : If you haven’t seen it, you should check out Libby Sander and Andrea Fuller ’s piece this week highlighting the spending patterns in lesser-known Division I programs. The story found that nearly a third of the 125 athletic departments that compete just below the NCAA’s elite level increased their expenditures by more than 40 percent during a recent five-year period. Public universities, many of them grappling with overall financial cuts, had some of the fastest-growing athletic budgets. It sounds shocking - until you analyze the situation for, say, about five minutes.  (more)

Say this about Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany - he knows how to get an audience.   Yesterday, Delany put himself front and center once again after picking up a topic that two NCAA commissioners, the late Myles Brand and Mark Emmert , had floated but never pushed - the idea that scholarships to play collegiate sports should include the "full cost of attendance". Currently, the "full cost of attendance" of an athletic scholarship includes tuition, dorms, classroom materials and other expenses. But Delany's endorsement of the proposal to include transportation and a stipend for personal expenses as scholarship money turned a whole lot of heads for a lot of different reasons. (more)

Last week, I wrote a piece detailing a series of articles about Title IX by Katie Thomas of the New York Times . It is a series of pieces with "revelations" - some new, some old - that Division I schools play games in order to satisfy the proportionality prong of Title IX compliance. The debate about over Title IX enforcement rages on, and will continue to do so as long as activists on both sides of the issue continue to feel passionately about it. But the debate on Title IX compliance - if you look hard enough - is also at the core of the Patriot League presidents' vote on football scholarships, too. (more)

Yeah, I'll admit it's, um, a bit presumptuous to start a blog post with "Saving the Patriot League".  And to follow it with a photo of Benjamin Franklin goes beyond audacious. But I am coming to the inescapable conclusion that the Patriot League is in deep trouble.  And a Mr. Franklin, whose political skills were instrumental in the founding of our nation, would certainly be welcome in helping forge an acceptable compromise between the different world views of the Patriot League presidents. I'm going to split this blog post into two parts: my analysis of what I think happened last week; and then I'm going to do my best, pale imitation of Mr. Franklin to attempt - nay, plea - for a compromise solution that all interested parties can accept. Consider it... my Patriotic duty... to try to do something. (more)

Excerpt from The Morning Call : November 18th, 2012 Special to the Morning Call It was a scene that few could have predicted two years ago: the end of "The Rivalry", after 148 meetings. While the 63-13 victory by the Mountain Hawks was not totally unexpected - after all, Lehigh has already ramped up their scholarships to the NCAA-mandated maximum, while Lafayette chose to remain true to the ideals of the now-defunct Patriot League - you get the feeling that it didn't have to end in this way. Lafayette's facilities - still the best in the Patriot League in 2012, thanks to the Bourgers - saw more than just the final Patriot League game, and the final game in Lehigh's and Lafayette's season. They saw the sad, final chapter to one of the greatest rivalries in all sports. (more)

The day that Patriot League watchers have been waiting for is nearly upon us. Whether you think merit-based aid for the Patriot League in football is a good idea or not, the Patriot League presidents are getting together in the Lehigh Valley this week to discuss the possibility of allowing athletic aid for football that is not based entirely on need - in layman's terms, to allow the same sort of unrestricted athletic aid that is offered in a multitude of different Patriot League sports, from men's and women's basketball to softball. It's quite possible that today, the Patriot League will vote on the matter, with a possible press conference to announce the decision today, or in the next few days. Before they announce the results, let me offer my own analysis of the situation. (more)

Some breaking news - and some quick opinion - on a revelation from Lafayette's student newspaper that president Dan Weiss will vote "no" on allowing conventional scholarships to be offered in the Patriot League. In the article, Weiss said, "increasing our commitments to athletic scholarships is not consistent with the mission and vision of our college," and that the institution is better suited using additional resources in other areas. "I wasn't satisfied that it can be done without incremental cost and I don't think that it's appropriate at this time in the life of this college to be putting more money into football when there are other programs and needs that are more pressing," he said. You can bet there's more. (more)

(Photo Credit: William Bretzger/ The Wilmington News-Journal ) Before the season started, I was hugely skeptical about Delaware QB Pat Devlin . I didn't even have him listed as a top three quarterback in my preseason FCS all-America team. I felt that he had some good statistics last year - playing on a losing football team - but I thought there were better quarterbacks around FCS. Say, Appalachian State QB DeAndre Presley , who is the current signalcaller for the Mountaineers' spread-option attack, or Stephen F. Austin QB Jeremy Moses , who ran the Lumberjacks' pinball, pass-happy offense. But I became quite the believer in the frigid Delaware press box this Saturday. "Devlin" is an appropriate season-ending "Word" for Lehigh for two reasons - reasons that you'll have to see below the flip. (more)

If the folks at Yale have their way, their football staff will be celebrating a lot like the folks pictured here to my left. Originally posted at the New Haven Register and reprinted in the American Chronicle , Yale athletic director Tom Beckett and current head football coach Tom Williams came out last week with a whopper to the rest of the Ivy League: that not only do they want an 11th game, played one week earlier than their current mid-September kickoff, but they want to count towards a bowl victory should they choose to use that game to schedule an FBS opponent. There's a problem with their proposal, however. The Ivy League is - in theory - "non-scholarship". Under current NCAA rules, only schools with at least 56 1/2 scholarships are to cound as "bowl counters". That means that they'd have to apply for an exemption from the NCAA to "count". In other words, Yale is "non-scholarship", but not really. (more)

Before I get to the serious, serious business of this Sunday's "Word", I just have to pat myself on the back a little.  I never dreamed that I could possibly link together football, Lehigh, the Patriot League and the end of fashion week all in one "Word", but it appears that I was successful. The sound of me cheering my own cleverness, however, is about the only sound you'll be hearing from fans at Lehigh, Colgate, Holy Cross and Lafayette this Sunday - the four teams picked to be Patriot League title contenders by almost everyone but the most rabid of Bucknell and Georgetown fans. The dismal performance by the Mountain Hawks, Crusaders, Leopards and Raiders shows so clearly a new expanse between the top teams of the Football Championship Subdivision and the Patriot League this year.  A "gap".   (more)

Media Day for the Patriot League was - somewhat surprisingly - a packed affair this year at the Green Pond Country Club. Thirty media members - including a large contingent of radio and local TV media - were on hand to cover their local Patriot League teams. It's promising to be another very interesting year in the Patriot League - it seems like every year it's a wide-open race, and this year is no exception - but this year's media day was as much about what was being talked about when the microphones were off as well as on. Hanging heavily in the room was the "S" word - scholarships. (more)

It's unusual that scheduling enters into my thinking during the course of a regular season, but with Fordham's decision to offer scholarships there seems to be something afoot that needs to be discussed. This week, there have been no less than three matters of Patriot League scheduling that have come up in papers around the Northeast. All three point towards a possible shift towards individual Patriot League teams scheduling more non-Ivy League teams in the future. The first comes from the Hampton Roads Daily Press , where colunmist David Teel talks about the fact that William & Mary seems to be abandoning local rivalries in favor of FBS games and others. Teel has his own feelings about Patriot League competition that he doesn't bother to hide: Hampton Roads is home to four Division I college football programs [William & Mary, Old Dominion, Norfolk State, Hampton] hailing from two conferences [the CAA and MEAC]. Which logic says would create natural, interleague,...

(Photo courtesy Fordham Athletics) Once again I made the trek up to Patriot League media day to scare the living bejeezus out of the football players of all seven Patriot League teams. You can almost see the thought bubbles of the players here, looking at me as if I was twirling nunchucks or something while talking to them. But the questions I asked weren't too bad - or at least I thought so until seeing this picture from the proceedings. (Just kidding, by the way, Fordham senior OL Robby Reis and Fordham senior DL Darzell Wright , who don't need to email and remind me they could very easily crush my head like an olive. Just a joke, Darzell and Robby. Right? ... Right? ... Guys?) You can read my full conference report at College Sporting News , which includes exclusive quotes from the executive director of the Patriot League. In addition to the report I filed there (and the upcoming blog exclusives with junior QB J.B. Clark , senior DT B.J. Benning , and coach Coen) , I ...

For those folks that don't know, every Sunday during the football regular season I write an opinion piece called "Sunday's Word" - the word that best sums up the past week. I decided to kick off my Sunday pieces tonight with the one word that has dominated the Patriot League offseason, and it should come as no surprise to anybody. Patriot League Media day is coming up on Tuesday of this week. In years past, media day has been a way to get excited about the season - to think of what records Holy Cross senior QB Dominic Randolph might be able to shatter, say, or if senior QB John Skelton can bring Fordham back to the top of the League this year, or if senior DT B.J. Benning and the rest of the Mountain Hawks can make a run at this thing this year. But that's not the big topic of conversation this offseason. Instead, it's focused on - you guessed it - "Rams". The 2007 champions that struggled to a 5-6 season in 2008 have made all the headlines wit...

There's a lot going on in the news these days: the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, the potential bankruptcy of CIT, the accidental hazardous chemical spill at Lehigh (with no casualties, thankfully), and - most importantly to a lot of people - Hermione Granger (I mean, actress Emma Watson's) choice to attend Brown University . (One can only hope she follows in fellow Ivy Leaguer Brooke Shields' (Princeton) footsteps.) With all this going on, it would have been real easy to miss two very interesting NCAA news releases released in the dead of summer regarding potentially momentous changes into the way financial aid is accounted, especially in regards to the Patriot League and athletic aid. The first involves an article from the NCAA News regarding Fordham's move to scholarships featuring quotes from the executive director of the Patriot League, Ms. Carolyn Femovich. While official statements have been made before, this interview goes more into detail on what is ha...

No word if this unidentified person actually is associated in any way with Fordham University, but I wouldn't be surprised if she had this same reaction going through all the press reports about Fordham's Friday announcement that they are going to start offering merit-based aid in football starting in 2010 . While Fordham football frequently has to battle for any coverage of their football team in New York City (where they have as competition two pro baseball teams, three pro hockey teams, and two pro football teams, despite the fact that half of them play in New Jersey), the June announcement did admittedly get their school in the paper. But with coverage like this, who needs coverage? Start with the AP report : Fordham will award football scholarships next year for the first time since 1954, hoping to compete with the top schools in its division. Fordham is a member of the Patriot League, which does not offer football scholarships. The AP, whose report was reprinted...

It started out innocently enough as an article from New York Newsday 's Steven Marcus - a brief, 201-word report, quite frankly, not reporting on much. The headline read: Hofstra explores parting ways with the CAA , and mostly offered the writer's opinion, a cryptic official comment, and an unquoted anonymous source. Hofstra will explore moving its intercollegiate athletic program out of the southern-based Colonial Athletic Association, persons familiar with the athletic program said Thursday. Hofstra did not say what has prompted its exploration, but it appears the university would prefer to have more of a northeast profile. The Atlantic-10 is Hofstra's first choice, those close to the situation said, but no openings currently exist in that New England-based group. ... Hofstra apparently has no interest in returning to the America East. ``We have not had any conversations with representatives from the America East Conference regarding conference affiliation,'' Hofs...

In a weird sort of way, it's like a Twilight Zone episode for followers of the Patriot League. Fordham has laid down the gauntlet , threatening to leave the Patriot League in football and become an FCS independent starting with the 2010 season - or not. There's a fierce internal debate on the matter - or there isn't. The Patriot League athletic directors are planning to say "bye" to Fordham - or not. There's a decisive up-or-down vote on the matter tomorrow - or there isn't. Welcome to the world of Patriot League football - where the discussions are behind closed doors and the fans that live and die by the crumbs of information thrown on the internet message boards are busy tearing each other apart. It's incredibly odd. It seems like something out of the Marx Brother's classic movie Horse Feathers . Why? Because aside from one secondhand comment by Fordham's head football coach and one specific comment from the Patriot League offices, t...