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....

This week, Lafayette plays Harvard up in Cambridge, where the 2-4 Leopards are expected to lose to the 2-2 Crimson.  I say expected to lose because with one exception since 2000, that's what's happened every time Lafayette has played Harvard: they have lost 12 out of their last 13 to the Johnnies, and have a lifetime record of 3-19 against them. The expectation among Patriot League football fans is that football scholarships were supposed to change all of that.  Simply offer conventional football scholarships, add to that a chance to play in the FCS Playoffs, and suddenly football recruits choosing between Harvard and Lehigh for business would start choosing Lehigh. It hasn't worked out quite that way. Through five games in 2017, the combined record of the Patriot League is a mind-boggling 8-21 outside of Patriot League contests.   And of those eight wins, only one has come against a team from the Ivy League - Colgate's 21-7 win over Cornell.  Collective...

No college football coach wants to face a team boxed in a corner. In that way, Harvard was stepping into a purple hornet's nest last weekend when the nationally-ranked Crimson came to play the wounded Crusaders. After their injury-riddled team failed to hold onto a win against Bucknell, ultimately falling 21-20, Tom Gilmore 's team needed to make a stand against a really good football team in order to keep their season from a limp to the finish. Even if they didn't win, they had to keep things close - few pundits gave Holy Cross much of a chance against the better bankrolled, historically dominant Harvard team that hadn't lost a road game a non-conference game in their last sixteen tries. Cornered like rats, Holy Cross responded in a big way.  Six sacks and a second-half shutout later, the Crusaders would notch their first win over a nationally-ranked opponent since 2009, thus turning things around at the exact right time for them and the exact wrong time for ...

Weren't scared enough of a opening weekend trip to Des Moines to face off against a team featuring an NFL prospect on the defensive line?   Not intimidated by playing against last year's national champs ?  Think it will be easy to knock off a nearby rival that has owned us in three of the last four meetings?  Or perhaps you think a game on the road against a team that was nationally ranked in 2004... and hasn't left the Top 25 since , will be a good shot at a Lehigh win? You'd think the schedule would get easier after that tour of the Theatre of Pain . But you'd be incorrect. The schedule originally had Lehigh getting a bye week, and starting off a nice long homestand against Harvard on October 9th. But a scheduling snafu meant instead that Lehigh would be spending the week after their break going back to Cambridge to face off against the Crimson, who have beaten them three of their last four attempts. This New England trip won't be any easier than the...

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,...