Lehigh Football Nation

One of the nice things about having done this for long is that at my fingertips I can summon up the definitive account of the last five meetings of The Rivalry through my game recaps of the time.  Here's a quick summary of the last five times Lehigh faced off against Lafayette in the most important game of the season.  And heck - it's Throwback Thursday somewhere, right?

All WR Troy Pelleite r and OL Zach Duffy ever wanted was a shot at the NFL. After the NFL Draft concluded this past Saturday, they learned that they both would be getting a chance. Troy, whose name is plastered all over the Lehigh record books, was invited to minicamp with the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles.   And Zach Duffy, the fiery leader of the Mountain Hawk offensive line, was invited to minicamp with the Indianapolis Colts. Lehigh Nation is thrilled that these two great Mountain Hawk football players will get their shot to play in the NFL.

(Photo Credit: Alec Turner c/o Lehigh Athletics) For those that care about these things, Lehigh entered the first round FCS playoff matchup 21 1/2 point underdogs. And if we're being fair, that was probably the right number. The Seawolves were 9-2, nationally ranked with seven conference wins in the tough CAA and one of their losses coming to a very strong FBS team in South Florida.  In contrast, unranked Lehigh came into the game 5-6 and only were here because they upset Colgate 41-38 on the road and won enough Patriot League conference games to win the autobid. Yet a young Lehigh team was game to put their best foot forward and to have a heroic sendoff for potential NFL prospect senior WR Troy Pelletier , and in that, the game was a rousing success. With junior QB Brad Mayes expertly picking apart one of the top defenses in FCS, time after time he'd find Troy for reception after reception, each one highlighting his impressive skill set as an audition for the nex...

For the first time all season, it was a dark, wet day for a Lehigh football game. It was not at all ideal for the more than 15,000 fans, and countless tailgaters that made it to the tailgates but not in the stadium, partying and tailgating outside the gates of Murray Goodman. It was also not at all ideal for Lehigh's high-powered passing game, and during a disastrous second quarter with three turnovers, it felt like the wheels were coming off the Mountain Hawks' chances at successfully defending their Patriot League title. It seemed like everything that could go wrong, was actually going wrong.  Three fumbles resulted in three Lafayette recoveries.  A third down conversion incompletion by Lafayette QB Sean O'Malley became an unexpected first down, thanks to an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that kept their drive alive.  A 14-7 first quarter lead became 17 unanswered points, leading to a 24-14 deficit against the best defensive team in the Patriot League. In thi...

Like I did last year, I compiled a list of a "greatest hits" of some of the published articles on all of the Lehigh football seniors.  They are below the flip. All of the players below are listed as seniors or 5th year players on the current Lehigh roster.  Some may choose to return for 5th year medical redshirts. The articles that are clipped are from a variety of sources: The Brown and White, The Morning Call, and LehighSports.com.

Senior OL Zach Duffy could have chosen to talk about any number of career highs when he reflected this week in The Brown and White about his time as a football player at Lehigh. He could have talked about building the program up from a 4-7 team into a Patriot League champion, crushing the sweet dreams of Lafayette last year in Easton in the 152nd version of The Rivalry, 45-21 , or perhaps he could have waxed philosophic about the last time Lehigh squared off against Lafayette at Murray Goodman Stadium, the time when QB Nick Shafnisky threw aside a Lafayette defender and the Mountain Hawks blew the doors out with a 49-35 win. But that's not what he talked about at all. He went right at the "agony of defeat" moments instead, talking about the loss to Lafayette in 2013, the infamous " it's supposed to suck, and it's supposed to hurt " game where an 8-2 Lehigh team faced off against a 4-6 Lafayette squad that ended up going to the FCS Playoffs ...

After the Bucknell victory, senior OL Zach Duffy said something that cut through the entire 2017 Lehigh football season. "We have 14 days to stay locked in and do whatever it takes to win another championship," he said to the team. And it's true.  It really doesn't matter what happened Week One, Week Five, or even last week.  When this Mountain Hawk team goes to bed, and wakes up again during the next six days, they are in the Patriot League Championship race.  If they win, and stay locked in for the next fourteen days and win two football games, they will win the Patriot League. It will require being locked in for fourteen days.

"We're looking for positives," Steve Degler of Lehigh Sports Central said several times. And coach Andy Coen did mention a few positive things, like the play of junior RB Dominick Bragalone , and the improved play of Lehigh's defense. But he also mentioned how important it was to "educate his players" about the rivalry Lehigh has with Colgate as well - how playing up in Hamilton is never easy and this game is a rivalry game. "Next to the Lafayette rivalry, I look to Colgate next," Andy said.  "We have to educate our young players that this rivalry is a very, very tough one, and I know Colgate view themselves as the toughest guys going, and we need to prove they are tougher than they are."

The media in the run-up to the Wagner game has been more upbeat than one might think considering the Mountain Hawks' 0-4 start. That's not to say that head coach Andy Coen is at all happy with how things have started, but his answers to this week's media questions were not what some fans may have expected. “I’m disappointed, I’m not going to lie,” he told Keith Groller of The Morning Call . “But again, this is a funny game. It’s never easy. It’s hard to win a game. It really is. At times last year we made it look really, really easy. Right now, we’re making it look really hard.” On Lehigh Sports Central this week, he said he felt like Lehigh was more competitive against Penn than they were against Yale. "We just continue to make mistakes," Coen said.  "We got the ball first, and turned the ball away.. we've got to get away from all of that stuff, and start playing better football."

Spotlight On: Brandon Short and Zach Duffy Somewhere after the end of the 2016 season, senior OL Brandon Short and senior OL Zach Duffy announced that they would be enrolling in graduate school at Lehigh and playing their final years of eligibility, which had to make offensive line coach Andy Merino and head coach Andy Coen high-five each other.  Short and Duffy, along with senior OL Tim O'Hara , gives the Mountain Hawks a rock-solid center and bookend tackles with loads of game experience that helped carve the way for Lehigh's astounding offense last year.

There's a pretty good chance that senior WR Troy Pelletier , who made the Patriot League's preseason all-Conference team and is on the Walter Payton Award watch list to start the year, will be the starter in the season opener vs. Villanova. It's also not a headline that junior RB Dominick Bragalone , also on the Patriot League's preseason all-Conference team, is likely to -shocker! - be a starter on September 2nd. But that doesn't mean that there still aren't plenty of questions as the Mountain Hawks enter into their fall training camp for fans to think about.

(Photo Credit: New Hampshire Union-Leader) It's easy to tune in to college football coverage at the beginning of fall practices, to see the accolades like preseason all-America teams and preseason all-Conference teams and not think about all the hard work that has been put in to prepare for the upcoming season. Try telling that to the family of senior WR Troy Pelletier , though. "My family is in New Hampshire and my parents are able to make almost every game," he told me my email.  "[But] with my summer job and my commitment to the offseason workout program, I have only been able to spend four days at home since the past Christmas break." Football players "appreciate the recognition" of preseason awards and nominations,  senior OL Zach Duffy told me last week , but they also understand that most fans also don't see or appreciate the amount of work it takes to become the best football players they can be when there's no crowds, no repo...

(Photo Credit: Brown and White) With this year's Patriot League Media Day being a Patriot League Media Conference call instead, the opportunity is there for media folks to tweet out things like preseason all-Conference lists and the preseason polls. When the league posted their preseason all-Patriot League team, unsurprisingly there were seven Lehigh football players on it, one of whom was senior OL Zach Duffy . I sent out a tweet congratulating the seven - Duffy, junior RB Dom Bragalone, junior P/K Ed Mish, senior OL Tim O'Hara, senior WR Gatlin Casey, senior WR Troy Pelletier, and senior DE Tyler Cavenas - and almost immediately Zach responded. No congratulations are needed since we haven't accomplished a single thing yet. Sorry if that sounds sour. We appreciate the recognition. — Zachary John Duffy (@ZachDuffy72) July 27, 2017 In the span of a tweet, Zach established immediately that re-reading one's press clippings from the 2016 season is not s...

Is it already time to ask Santa for a bag filled with new Lehigh recruits? Since the conclusion of Lehigh's championship 2016 football season, head coach Andy Coen and all of his assistant coaches have been on the trail recruiting the next great Lehigh football players.  While it's a "quiet period" now, as per the NCAA, the Mountain Hawks have been busy. But what, exactly, does Lehigh need in regards to the offseason? I forgot; that's why you're here.  Let me share what I think.

Thought I'd put together this multimedia "presentation" of all the seniors that will be playing in #Rivalry152 tomorrow.  All the content here, pictures, videos, etc. are mostly courtesy of LehighSports.com, The Morning Call, Lehigh Valley Live, and The Brown and White. If nothing else it will go you something to do while waiting for tomorrow's game. Enjoy.

It is an easy narrative to point at the 150th meeting of The Rivalry as the turnaround for the Lehigh football program, where the Mountain Hawks got together after that bitter, bitter loss and decided that enough was enough, and that they were going to not allow their team to be a cellar-dweller.   For Lafayette, though, you need to go back further, past some very enormous wins over Lehigh, and wonder.  "I can't believe I typed it, but there it is," I wrote back in 2006 after a crushing 49-28 loss where Lehigh was dominated on both lines of scrimmage.   "We've lost three straight to Lafayette. and I've got some news: We're no longer the hunted. The sooner we realize that we now have to be the hunter, the better off we'll be." The co-championship they shared with the Leopards that year had the feel of the worst consolation prize imaginable.  For the second straight year, Lafayette had stolen the FCS Playoff bid right from under the...

When Lehigh players, coaches and fans went to bed on Friday night, they probably had visions of the Mountain Hawks' powerful offense attacking, and overwhelming, Bucknell to coast to a share of a Patriot League Championship and the conference's FCS Playoff bid. About ten minutes into the game, the 7,049 fans in attendance had probably figured out that if Lehigh was going to win a championship, it wasn't going to be won like that. It was going to have to be earned.  It was going to have to be grabbed from Bucknell, smashing them in the mouth the same way they were smashing us. It cannot be emphasized enough how Lehigh had to earn every single inch of this Patriot League victory, how not easy this win really was. How the Mountain Hawks fell behind, clawed and scratched back to get the lead.  How they had to stop the Bison stampede at key spots, get crucial turnovers, and fire up critical, difficult field goals by sophomore PK Ed Mish .  Even extra points, normall...

Anyone at all worried that it's just a wee bit too quiet from Lewisburg?  I am. The narratives coming out of Bethlehem this week - emphatically, me included - are ones of possible Patriot League championships and how the offense is "clicking" and has been very, very good. That's not usually a very good recipe for a big game for the home side, especially since word out of the Bucknell camp is very, very quiet, even though the Bison still are very much alive in the conversation of winning the Patriot League title and making Lehigh sit at home Thanksgiving weekend. Last week, Bucknell traveled to the No. 9 team in the country, Charleston Southern , and proceeded to put up a very good fight in a game that didn't affect Bucknell's title chances one way or another.   Though the final tally was 49-28, Bucs, the Bison didn't go away quietly against Charleston Southern's triple-option attack, staying within a touchdown most of the way until the home tea...

We break down Monnmoth after the flip. Going into the first game of the season there are oodles of storylines on both teams. One important storyline from Monmouth coming from Hawks coach Kevin Callahan is that Monmouth has a brutal eight road games in the 2016 season, thanks to construction being done on their home field, Monmouth Stadium. With all the focus on defense in the run-up to this game, senior OL Zach Duffy also talked a bit about that the offense is raring to go as well. "It's the most productive camp I've been in the past four years I've been here,, he told Keith Groller of The Morning Call .  "We were put in a position to get a lot of good [strength and conditioning] work in.   We have a lot of experience with a lot of guys returning and that's especially important up front where we have three guys returning including myself.   And then we have junior WR Troy Pelletier , Shaf [ senior QB Nick Shafnisky ] and sophomore RB Dom Bragalo...

The 2016 Mountain Hawks will be leaning on their offense to carry them in the early going on the season. That's because they return eight starters from last year's squad, which was one of the more prolific offenses in all of FCS. Looking over the stat sheet from 2015, there's plenty of athletes carrying over that makes Lehigh Nation drool.  The return of a sophomore that was a 1,000 yard rusher as a freshman.  The return of an experienced quarterback that has started games each of the last three years.  The return of a deep threat receivers that invokes fear in opposing defensive coordinators. There's not a lot of drama on the offensive side of the 2016 Lehigh football depth chart.  But there's a lot that has Lehigh Nation extremely excited about the potential for this year.