Lehigh Football Nation

(Photo Credit:  Chris Shipley / The Morning Call ) Below the flip, enjoy this week's "LFN Players of the Week" for the Georgetown game. You'll notice that there's a lot of nicknames below after last weekend's 45-24 win over Georgetown.

The term being bandied about the season in regards to the 2013 Mountain Hawks was the "Cardiac Kids". Every week, the Mountain Hawks would fall behind.  Every week, there would be hiccups, issues, and heart-stopping moments, but most often would end up in Lehigh victories. Most fans wondered: Could it be possible, would it be possible, for Lehigh to put the pedal to the metal against an opponent, to surge to a huge lead, go for he jugular early, and never look back? This Saturday, the Mountain Hawks answered. Lehigh scored the most points they'd scored in the first half since 2002, scoring on seven of their eight drives of the first half and narrowly missing the eighth.  They'd cruise to a 38-3 halftime lead before the second stringers would make the final score look a lot closer. In short, it was exactly what most of the 9,866 fans in attendance were looking for in the first Patriot League conference game of the season.  Never trailing.  Making the game...

(Photo Credit:  Matt Smith / The Express-Times ) Below the flip, enjoy this week's "LFN Players of the Week" for the New Hampshire game.

(Photo Credit: Matt Smith /The Express-Times ) It's pretty remarkable how routine it's all getting. To Lehigh watchers, this come-from-behind 34-27 victory resembled all the others.  They'd seen this movie before. Fall behind early, by double-digits if possible.  Regroup.  Mount a comeback.  Make huge defensive stops.  Win. For the fourth straight game, Lehigh came from behind to win. For the third time this season, Lehigh overcame a double-digit deficit to win. It's as if all of Lehigh Nation simply expects the Mountain Hawks to fall behind in the first half, and recover in time to win.  You could feel it in the crowd of nearly 9,000 people at Murray Goodman Stadium.  Amazingly, down by 16, the game never felt out of reach. But this particular come-from-behind win was different in one very important respect. In beating the 7th-ranked New Hampshire Wildcats this weekend, the Mountain Hawks finally got to silence the critics across th...

(Photo Credit: David DiFrancesco /Brown and White via the Express-Times) Here at LFN, I'm always looking for something to keep things fresh, and this year the plan is to keep things fresh by combining the "LFN Players of the Week" with something new: the two-minute drill. In the past, I used to have a "press roundup" with links to all the recaps and interesting articles that would emerge concerning Lehigh football.  In a world without Twitter and Facebook, this type of content curation was great not only for people who liked my blog, but for me, too, when wanting to refer back to a particularly memorable game or moment. But we live in a world of Twitter and Facebook now.  I can post links to the recaps on my Facebook page , my Twitter feed , and they can even be pulled into a type of newspaper delivered to your email called Paper.li .  All are great tools, all feature content that I myself read, and, frankly, are the way people consume news now. But th...

It looked pretty grim - so grim, in fact, that many of the announced attendance of 6,386 had already left the stadium by th beginning of the 4th quarter. Central Connecticut State, behind a monster offensive performance by RB Rob Holloman , was methodically beating up the Lehigh defense. There the Blue Devils were, driving to start the 4th quarter, a Lehigh facemask penalty keeping their drive alive, and finally reaching 1st and goal at the Lehigh 9. It was the end of that drive, unbeknownst to all, that would be the difference between winning and losing their home opener.

(Photo Credit: Lehigh Valley Live) It's 48 days until the start of the 2013 season.  It also means we've just hit the under-six week mark for opening weekend as well! At no. 48, we find  senior FB Sean Farrell  as our highlighted Lehigh football athlete in today's countdown.

Last Friday, the first step of Lehigh's quest for the threepeat began . The two-time Patriot League champions showed up for the first spring practice of the year a week ago, signalling the end of the 2011 victory laps in the form of banquets, awards, and even pro days. Though the beginning of the spring season was kicked off with some fun with the team - a strongman competition to show off the team's offseason weight training gains - the truth of the matter is this will be the most challenging and eye-opening Mountain Hawk spring season of the last three years. That's what happens when you need to replace four of the top players in the Patriot League last year, including the Walter Payton award runner-up, QB Chris Lum , and two more all-Americans.

With only 11 days until "signing day", it's starting to get interesting in the world of college football recruiting.  Even though Lehigh doesn't announce their incoming class of 2014 exactly on "signing day" (historically, Lafayette announces theirs, and Lehigh announces theirs a week later in order to maximize local press coverage), there's still plenty of buzz on who the new football members might be.  (Even though, technically, we're in a "quiet period" in recruiting right now.) Like the Ivy League, the Patriot League recruits nationally, due to their requirements for high academics.  There are a lot of football athletes out there, but not a lot of them can boast 3.85 GPAs and high board scores.  While Patriot League schools can and do tap players from the local area, in recent years they've gone all over the United States to find the type of student-athlete that fits the bill.  It's sometimes hard to think of an eastern Penns...