Lehigh Football Nation

(Photo Credit: Philadelphia Inquirer) It's time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Penn Quakers. Penn's  game notes were out in good time, and The Philadelphia Inquirer , thankfully, still does a pretty good job in covering the Quakers in an independent way.  Both were invaluable for my analysis. Unusually, Lehigh faces Penn this time around in a game that is not the Quakers' season opener.  In prior years that made it tricky for the Mountain Hawks to sometimes get a full sense of what head coach Ray Priore might be doing, because there would be no true game film to study, only practice film and, if they're lucky, an accurate two-deep. This year, though, Penn has already had their first game, playing Bucknell in a game which they won 34-17 .  It was a strange contest, basically won in the first five minutes thanks to 17 points donated to the Quakers via two Bison turnovers and a blocked punt.  Both teams would only put up 17 poin...

This week, Lehigh makes the short trip down to Franklin Field in Pennsylvania to take on the Quakers of Penn. Kickoff time is at 3:00 PM and if you can't make it to the game, the game is available though a pay service called ESPN+.  This isn't the exact same thing as ESPN the station.  It works basically the way ESPN3 does, except that it requires a monthly subscription of $4.99 per month (though last I heard there was the availability of a free trial subscription available).  ESPN+ also carries a lot of college football games during the course of the season (including all the Ivy League home games), so it might be worth your while.  (Replays of the game I believe are available on ESPN3 for free later.) With a subscription, if you have a Roku box in your home, you can stream ESPN+ directly to your TV from there.  If you have the ESPN App on your phone and Chromecast, you can bring it up on your phone and push the "Cast" button to have it stream dir...

I've never done one of these before after Lehigh's played an FBS opponent.  That's because the last FBS opponent Lehigh played was in 2003, when the Mountain Hawks lost to UConn 35-17. The Lehigh Football Nation blog was in its first year of existence back in 2003, and undoubtedly I wrote about it - but it's not currently in the archives here at Blogger, because I archived those first two years offline.  What I can tell you about that UConn game was that Lehigh faced off against a future NFL player in QB Dan Orlovsky and that QB Chad Schwenk got hurt late in that game, which made it his final game in a Mountain Hawks uniform and effectively threw the rest of that season in some turmoil. Fortunately turmoil doesn't seem to be a part of the report card today.

(Photo Credit: Capital-Gazette) It's time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Navy Midshipmen. I can't tell you how many of these previews I've done where I get game notes late Friday evening, had to play games with Ivy League depth charts to try to divine game plans, and the like.  Some schools Lehigh plays don't have any local media anymore, so finding out more about the starting players and the like is extremely difficult. Not so this week.  For the first time in 15 years, Lehigh plays an FBS team, but not just a regional school, say, from the Midwest - they play Navy, a school with national and international reach.  Game notes were out early and were detailed. The coverage of Navy football isn't just from the local Capital-Gazette - which continues, through tragedy, to be stellar - but from national media, too.  In fact their last two games - against Hawai'i and Memphis - were big-time affairs in the national world of coll...

Even at the time, legendary Lehigh QB Pat Pazzetti had a reputation for doing it all. The Brown and White's dynamic playmaker did a little of everything for the team.  Back in the days when players went both ways and there weren't designated specialists, Pazzetti not only was the quarterback, but he also kicked punts and returned kicks as well. In 1912, after a 35-0 thrashing by national powerhouse Princeton and facing the prospect of playing Navy - who had gone 9-0-1 against Lehigh in their last ten games - things had to be looking bleak for the Brown and White's season, even with a team with some national ambitions. After all, Navy hadn't lost a football game in three years' time.

Game on. Like me, you probably heard that Hurricane Florence was barreling down on the North Carolina coastline, and earlier in the week it looked like a historic rain event could have possibly caused Lehigh's first meeting against an FBS opponent in 15 years to be delayed, or even cancelled. Meetings were had, and the situation monitored, but over the last 24 hours it looks like, at least for Annapolis and the Maryland area, it will be spared the worst of the storm. According to the Capital-Gazette , "if the latest forecast holds Hurricane Florence won’t present any problems for Anne Arundel County, but officials warn residents should remain vigilant for any changes in the storm’s track." The shorter version, for Lehigh fans, anyway: Game.   On.

It's a lot less fun to go through the "Players of the Week" and report card after a loss, but it's still got to be done.  Last week's somewhat humbling 31-9 defeat comes at a point of the season where it's more of a learning experience than a death blow to the season, and also came against one of the very best teams in all of FCS. It wouldn't surprise me to see Villanova win the CAA this season. In any event, here we go.