Lehigh Football Nation

I know, it's not fair to take a vacation and leave everyone in the lurch concerning the scholarship debate (hint: you could read my elaborate piece on College Sporting News summing up my five blog postings on the matter), but even if it is a vacation involving family reunions, mountain hiking and meeting a legend, it will (fortunately? unfortunately?) mean that I'll be incommunicado for the next week and a half. Yes, I do know that Matt Dougherty's last Sports Network column ranks senior C John Reese as one of the best linemen in all of FCS . Congratulations to John, who will be hiking off to one of the top QBs in all of FCS, senior QB Sedale Threatt. What you may not have known is that Mr. Dougherty is on his way to be the media director of the Patriot League starting, oh, in a couple of days. The latest on the message boards involves a recruit which has committed to Lehigh. Don't believe everything you read. And finally, there's a lot of speculation regardin...

No, seriously, could anyone really blame the Dayton Flyer for looking this smug? After all, as was reported by me on College Sporting News, Dayton's Pioneer Football League (or PFL for short) is now the one-stop shop for non-scholarship football. Their commissioner, Ms. Patty Viverito, has gladly taken the leadership for Division I non-scholarship football coast-to-coast, and has shown more than half a dozen other Division I schools (that don't currently have football) the benefits of playing at that level. Here in the East, the message is clear for those schools in the MAAC who in 2008 have found themselves without a conference (Marist, Iona, and LaSalle): Step up to our vision of non-scholarship football, be willing to travel, and compete to win, and we'd be happy to have you. From my perspective, it looks to me like none of the three programs are planning to drop football altogether. LaSalle has just finished $2.5 million in football stadium improvements, and Marist h...

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...