Lehigh Football Nation

It's finally time for the "Know Your 2016 Opponents" series! In parallel with College Sports Journal, I am doing a full Patriot League preview (among others).  Today we cover No. 7: Georgetown, whom Lehigh plays on October 15th. This preview will encompass what is written there , but also will have extra content that Lehigh fans in particular need to know about the matchup for the upcoming season. Let's put it this way, in terms of Lehigh: Though Georgetown is picked to finish 7th, there is plenty to be scared of about this team that finished within a touchdown of Lehigh, Fordham, and Colgate last year, while knocking off Bucknell as well.

Where does it ever end? That's the question I keep asking myself lately. It seems to have added up for me from six months of lunacy, one where collegiate athletic departments have been caught up with such a large number of horrifying incidents. There's serious allegations of rape by athletes at  Baylor  and Vanderbilt .  Louisville hiring prostitutes to lure in potential recruits.  The case of the Stanford swimmer who got off with a slap on the wrist after raping a young woman.  They are literally everywhere, with new twists and turns coming in so fast it's hard to keep up with it all. Even past scandals involving college athletes don't seem to keep themselves out of the news lately, either.  The Penn State Jerry Sandusky story that never seems to die got a new lease on life when alleged abuses were revealed as far back as the 1970s .  The when-will-it-ever-end revelations of  sham classes at North Carolina .  The continuous tric...

As we hit the 92 day mark before the 2016 Lehigh football season officially starts, it's time to take a look at the overall schedule - and opponents - the Mountain Hawks will be facing. Every Lehigh football fan knows that their Rival of Rivals, Lafayette, is only 18 miles away from Bethlehem. What fans may not know is that, by drawing a circle around Lehigh on Google Maps, you can surround seven of the Mountain Hawks eleven 2016 opponents.  (The site NCAA Savant has an interactive, zoomable map that shows the schools quite clearly.) The only FCS programs within the circle that Lehigh doesn't play are Delaware, Wagner, and Columbia. Lehigh will be hosting Monmouth, Bucknell, Fordham, and Princeton, all of whose fan bases are within two and a half hour's drive, and will have "road trips" to Penn, Villanova, and Lafayette, which couldn't be easier for Lehigh football fans. However, if you wanted to earn frequent flyer miles supporting Lehigh footba...

(Photo Credit: The Oregonian) Even though Lehigh isn't taking on any FBS teams this season, it's not too early to take a look at the 2016 college football schedule and look at some of the games that pit FCS teams vs. FBS teams and look for potential upsets. Recently, Craig Haley over at Stats p icked his Top 15 FCS vs. FBS matchups .  All around the college football landscape, college football prediction season has begun, analyzing way-too-early Top 25s , and projecting positional battles in preseason camp. There's even a preseason ranking based on existing or current corporate sponsorships , a blog posting I thankfully don't have to do for the Patriot League.  (That's because it's obvious.... everyone knows Lehigh is a Pepsi town, while Lafayette represents a Coke city.) For the overall world of the FCS, though, leading into the season there are few things more exciting than a Jacksonville State putting The Fear Of The Big Guy Above into Auburn, or P...

In the news last week came, essentially, four new claims of abuse that happened at the hands of Gerald Sandusky while he employed as a linebackers coach at Penn State. All are, at a bare minimum, troubling, and they invite the question "who knew what, and when" in terms of these allegations. Three of the allegations, however, are worthy of further examination because they could demonstrate that the administrators at the time, which would include former athletic directors Ed Czekaj and Jim Tarman , violated the law. It also could eventually - though nothing has surfaced yet - implicate Joe Paterno . With the very important caveat being we don't know everything, we do seem to have enough to bring some context to the goings-on inside Penn State's athletic department during the last 40 years.  The only clear fact was that child sex allegations weren't handled with the respect they deserved.

The crimes committed by Gerald Sandusky continue to be a band-aid that is re-applied, and continuously ripped off, the arms of those of love Penn State. Already convicted by a court of law, Sandusky has what is effectively a life sentence, while others who were in power at Penn State during the 1998 period where sex crimes were reported internally, Graham Spanier, Gary Schulz and Tim Curley , have still not faced any sort of trial and are still at-large today . Last week, with an interesting sentence appearing deep in an insurance lawsuit involving a Sandusky victim settlement, the band-aid was once again ripped off. The details of the lawsuit claim that Joe Paterno  chose not to act in 1976 when one victim reported abuse by Sandusky, while Sarah Ganim , the hero reporter who broke the Sandusky story wide-open five years ago, added a second story of abuse in the 1970s where Paterno pressured one of Sandusky's victims over the phone in the 1971 to not press charges agai...

Recently, I wrote an entire article about how the way the NCAA allows schools to become FBS is broken. It turns out I had no idea exactly how broken until I was guided towards the Idaho Vandals Football Consultant report, helpfully posted in full on the University of Idaho's website . In that report, one of the possible avenues that Idaho was mulling over was to join the WAC. I was confused - the WAC had stopped sponsoring FBS football long ago, a couple of years after then-commissioner Karl Benson finished his uncanny impersonation of Baghdad Bob in regards to saving FBS football for that conference - only to leave his job to take over at the Sun Belt Conference. But it turns out, after a fresh read of the NCAA rulebook, it is indeed true. Like a bad horror movie, the zombified WAC football conference could indeed resurrect itself - and, in the process, shows how royally screwed up this system of FCS and FBS movement really is.