Lehigh Football Nation

In this week's copy of ESPN the Magazine, Bill Simmons published a great article on " the depreciation of sports memories " that almost makes me forgive him for the hatchet job he wrote on the Patriot League after the NCAA tournament. Its subject matter is really the NBA, but it's really the subject of sportswriting and sports memories that is the subject matter. One of my favorite books is Wait Till Next Year, in which a sports columnist (Mike Lupica) and a Hollywood screenwriter (William Goldman) trade chapters about a particularly crazy year in New York sports. Writing as a fan, Goldman submits an impassioned defense of Wilt Chamberlain's legacy, called "To the Death," which is one of my favorite pieces. He argues that great athletes fade from memory not because they're surpassed by better ones but because either we forget about them or our memories are tainted by things that have nothing to do with their career (like Bill Russell's being a ...

It's not easy to follow the five blog-postings about the state of the Patriot League, but I think I finally found the perfect NY Times piece to do so. It's an article about "Jack", or more accurately, recent Amherst graduate Tony Jack - in " Elite Colleges Open New Door To Low-Income Youths ". The piece is admittedly a back-patting sort of piece on how elite institutions are doing a better job at admitting folks from everywhere. But Mr. Jack's story is worth telling, and his love of Amherst is a delight to read. It also, however unwittingly, exposes some of the problems of our academic index system in recruiting athletes - and exposes some of the unpleasant truths about demographics in private, high-academic colleges. It's almost the best possible follow-up to the "New Realities" piece. Concerned that the barriers to elite institutions are being increasingly drawn along class lines, and wanting to maintain some role as engines of soci...

I know the image to my left will strike fear in the hearts of some of the regular readers of my blog as I deliver Part V (and the final part) of my analysis of the "New Realities" of the Patriot League. In a lot of ways, the NESCAC (the "New England Small College Athletic Conference") represents what some critics feel the Patriot League desperately wants to become - a Division III school that strictly adheres to the dogma of pure amateur sports, including a self-imposed ban on the D-III playoffs for its athletes. In my research, I didn't see any evidence of a league that wanted to drop into D-III. I saw a league that is currently trying to figure out where it belongs in the Division I world. On all campuses, there is a pride that their school is Division I in football and able to compete nationally for championships. All of the folks I talked to seemed not to mind holding athletes to some form of standards to ensure that they're academically representa...

It's becoming a pretty wild and wooly world out there for college recruiting. Websites like the one to my right have been springing up everywhere, in an effort to match up athletic scholarships and schools that offer them. The NCAA r ecently banned text-messaging between coaching staffs and potential prospects since some coaches seized on text messaging as a way around the NCAA laws limiting communication between coaches and prospects. In many ways, it feels like a wild west out there. Some might say that the whole source of the problem is athletic scholarships. With industries devoted to matching up recruits and coaches, and technology being abused for the purpose of bending recruiting rules, the solution appears easy: just get rid of athletic scholarships, and see the process chance. This approach dates all the way back to to 1945, when the Ivy Group Agreement declared their disapproval of athletic scholaships. “No student shall be eligible who has received financial supp...

It's funny: as soon as I'm just about ready to unveil my blog posting on academic indexes, the New York Times scoops me. With their article " Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet To Next Tier " (which highlights Lehigh as the prototypical school of this "next tier", right below the Ivies), Alan Finder reports that it's harder than ever to get into schools like Lehigh. A subscription is required to get the full text, but a key snippet of the article follows: At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said. ... The result, said Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., is that many classmates perceive...

One of the dirty little secrets of college admissions is that for athletes in many Division I schools, the admissions process is different than the maze in the picture right here. Athletes get treated, well, differently. A FBS school like Ohio State has a coach and athletic department who wants a certain player, and he goes out and gets that player. He goes through a special admissions process. It's a different process than a non-athletic out-of-state student might have to negotiate admissions, financial aid, and so on. In the first "New Realities" piece, I went through a bit of history on how the Patriot League's structure came about. One important part of that structure is "Presidential Control", but what it really boils down to is "the separation of athletics and admissions". That's what I'll be talking about in today's posting. Separation The 1945 Ivy Agreement formally enshrined the separation of athletics and admissions. It...

Three months ago, I started a series of blog postings called " The New Realities " that attempted to talk a little bit about the issues facing the Patriot League and football in particular. It wasn't bad for what it was - a Lehigh perspective on the challenges of the Patriot League and a possible direction going forward. After starting this impossible task, I quickly realized that I was tackling a subject over my own head. I had opinions on what was right, but this subject deserves a hell of a lot more perspective than that. It deserves a discussion around the league, about what is working, and what ought to be looked at again for 2007. It deserved hours of phone calls, days of research, complete looks into history - a complete job. Without further ado, here's something that can be done in today's day and age with blogs: a relaunch of the same series I started months before - this time, only better. The "New Realities" are back, tackling the basic ...