Lehigh Football Nation

The one thing you can say for certain about the demise of St. Peter's football is that it came at the absolute worse possible time. It came at a time when FCS powers were meeting in Chicago, IL to discuss the future on non-scholarship football in Division I. I'm guessing that the demise of a non-scholarship conference wasn't on the original list of talking points. Forget for a moment that clever MAAC puns (like the not-so-funny one titling this post) are history. Forget that you won't be seeing any matchups like Iona/St. Peter's in 2007. Forget that St Peter's scheduled out-of-conference foes for 2007 in the form of Monmouth, Wagner, and St. Francis (and a bunch of non Division I teams) are now left in the wilderness with extremely slim chances to reschedule games in the next couple of months. (Although this blogger feels confident about Monmouth's chances of rescheduling.) Forget the St. Peter's football alumni. Forget the returning players of th...

"News You Need to Know" sounds like a good blog posting title for a list of those dibs & dabs around the world of Lehigh, the Patriot League, and FCS Football that good Lehigh fans ought to be aware of. Even though kickoff is 86 days away, it doesn't mean that there's no news to speak of. As a matter of fact one huge development could be occurring today in Chicago. Expansion with Bryant? One fact in which there is no doubt is that Bryant University, based in Smithfield, Rhode Island, is beginning an exploratory year where this D-II school out of the NE-10 conference is hoping to join Division I. “Filing this application shows the seriousness of our intent,” Bill Smith, director of athletics, said yesterday. Bryant has had informal discussions with the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), Northeast Conference (NEC) and Patriot League ... “The next step is to continue conversations with the commissioners, athletic directors and presidents. We have to see if...

It's becoming more and more clear that Patriot League schools aren't the only schools among the intellectually elite institutions that are having the debate about athletic recruiting and academics. This article from the San Francisco Chronicle treads a lot of the same ground I did in my "New Realities" blog postings and the College Sporting News article , even though the subject matter is the long-term survival of Stanford in the Pac-10. If anything, it shows that the subjects being tackled by the Patriot League in regards to academic indexes and institutional control are hardly unique to our league. From the article: "They can't keep raising the bar,'' said Dave Tipton, a former All-America defensive tackle at Stanford who served as an assistant coach there for 18 years under five head coaches. He said the admissions standards for football players are "markedly'' higher than they were 10 years ago. "Hopefully it will go back ...

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...