Covering All College Sports Since 2012
For the Lehigh University Mountain Hawks (1-1, 0-0 Patriot League), playing the Long Island University Sharks (0-2, 0-0 NEC) at Bethpage FCU Stadium, everything about “Shark Week” is new. It’s the first time Lehigh has ever traveled to Brookville, Long Island to play a football game.
The number that kept popping up during Lehigh’s (1-1, 0-0 PL) win over Wagner (1-1, 0-0 NEC) was “2016”, probably the last number any member of Lehigh Nation might have imagined surfacing on a rainy afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium.
BETHLEHEM, PA – From the moment head coach Kevin Cahill stepped onto campus as Lehigh’s head football coach, he’s been talking about making Murray Goodman stadium a true home field advantage. He was right to broach the subject. The last time Lehigh had a winning record was in 2016, when the Mountain Hawks were 9-2,.
RB Luke Yoder capped off a 9 play, 85 yard drive to tie the game at 7 late in the first quarter, but ultimately a deep, physical Army (1-0, 0-0) team led by budding stars QB Bryson Daily and bruising RB Kanye Udoh were too much for the Mountain Hawks (0-1, 0-0) in a 42-7 victory.
BETHLEHEM, PA – I’ve been a Lehigh football fan now for a very long time, and I would like to lead this preview to simply say that this weekend, Mountain Hawk fans will be experiencing something they haven’t experienced since 2002. I don’t mean “play a service academy.” On September 15th, 2018, Lehigh played Navy,.
BETHLEHEM, PA – Over the preseason, Lehigh football revealed a brand-new uniform design that freshens up the kit they had been using over the past six years. For a program that hasn’t had a winning record since 2016, it’s not the only thing that Lehigh Nation hopes is brand new going into the 2024 season..
Richmond’s Rival, William & Mary, was going to be a founding member of the Colonial League, which is now known as the Patriot League. It was almost a done deal.
The number of underclassmen on the field was astounding, even for such a young team as the Mountain Hawks.
Every member of Lehigh Nation wants to put last year’s 2-9 season behind them. In 2024, the Mountain Hawks will do just that with a highly unusual 11 game schedule.
There is this huge diversity of teams lumped in FCS that I’m less familiar with – and that no FCS watcher is familiar with. And that’s exactly the problem.
BETHLEHEM, PA – It wasn’t a surprise, really, but it was a surprise. Coming off a 2-9 season that was “not up to our standard, not up to Lehigh standard”, head coach Kevin Cahill said in his opening remarks, the Lehigh Mountain Hawks were picked to finish sixth in the seven-team Patriot League for 2024..
The rebuilding year of 2023 was not easy, to be sure. But to close observers, among the rough seas were some encouraging signs for the years to come, through changes in culture, changes in expectations, and growing pains that Lehigh Nation hopes point the way to future success.
Like many things in the history of the NCAA, the survival of the Yankee Conference a a football-only construct was an accident.
Richmond, and their Rivals, William & Mary, were medium sized schools in medium sized markets with successful programs for their size and ambitions. Thanks to an entity called the “College Football Association”, or CFA, Richmond and William & Mary’s world was about to tear apart.
Richmond has been a master at surviving – they have been, and continue to be, the spider that cannot be stomped.
How long will 90% of the NCAA’s membership accept less-than status?
It was all fun spring football on a Saturday afternoon – a celebration, a gate swinging open for the 2024 season.
Quietly, on a very cold and wet March 19th at six o’clock in the morning, Lehigh’s spring practice officially began for the 2024 season.
This year marked the first year since forever that the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament wasn’t a big thing for me.
I have a humble proposal to save college football. With all the lawsuits and chaos swirling around the NCAA and member schools, a simple choice needs to be made. One will destroy the sport. The other might save it.
The casual college sports fan might be forgiven if their eyes glaze over Congressional hearings like this. Yet it’s so important, and the points involved so consequential, that it deserves not only an honest debate, but a plain English explanation as to what’s happening.
Assuming you knew about this – and ESPN and the NCAA haven’t gone out of their way to tell people – their broadcast on ABC will be going up against five different NFL games with postseason implications.
The Blue Hens will be exiting the all-sports conference that they called home since 2005, and exiting the football structure now called “CAA Football” since 1986.
It is, indeed, one where you have to throw out the record books and it’s the game you absolutely have to win, if you’re a Lehigh or Lafayette head coach. It’s great theater every year, no matter what the records are, but this year the theater suddenly ends up on the national FCS stage.
The Mountain Hawks will be going in with an eye of being a spoiler to Colgate’s title and championship ambitions, which suit them just fine. To them, ruining the seasons of Colgate and Lafayette in consecutive weeks would constitute a successful season for a rebuilding Lehigh football team.
Some of the picks will shock you.
Lehigh leaped out to 14-0 , 21-14, and 24-21 leads on Holy Cross in a spirited effort at Murray Goodman Stadium, but the Crusaders would ultimately find a way to beat the Mountain Hawks in a 28-24 victory in front of 3,528 fans on a warm November afternoon.
To the surprise of probably no one, head coach Kevin Cahill had plenty of good things to say bout Lehigh’s next opponent, the Holy Cross Crusaders.
After the game, DB Nick Petelkian cradled the game ball in his arm, but as RB Luke Yoder approached for post game interviews, he said he thought the ball should be split in half.
A very young Lehigh football team finds itself taking a bus this week to Lewisburg, PA to find out about themselves.
Lehigh fans are in uncharted waters as “scary” Georgetown (3-3, 1-0 Patriot League), who recorded a win against Fordham, face off against Lehigh (1-5, 0-1 Patriot League), who recorded a loss against Fordham.
It took three long drives, two defensive stops, and two long field goals – one of them PK Brandon Peskin’s career long of 45 yards – for Fordham (4-2, 1-1) to escape Lehigh’s (1-5, 0-1) upset bid, 38-35
What’s a better metric? What should the definition of Division I, FCS and FBS be?
Ranked as high as 15 in some polls last week, it stands to reason that Fordham will approach their conference game with Lehigh with urgency, to put it mildly.
Instead of moping about their record and their loss last week, they went back out on homecoming and walloped Lehigh 49-7, scoring 42 unanswered points in a quarter and a half.
In an upset, in Easton, Lafayette hung on to beat Monmouth 28-20 in an outcome that really couldn’t have worked out much worse for the Brown and White.
The green Powerade covered Dartmouth head coach Sammy McCorkle after the Big Green pushed around Lehigh 34-17 Saturday afternoon at Memorial Stadium.
This was going to be a tough, physical matchup before the untimely death of Buddy Teevens. Adding the fire and emotion from the moment will add a layer of complication to Lehigh’s task this week as well.
It’s an ingenious idea. But it cannot possibly work in college football.
Cornell (1-0, 0-0 Ivy League) instead would be the team to jump up by three scores to a 17-0 lead on Lehigh (1-2, 0-0 Patriot League), and would be efficient enough to hold onto a 23-20 victory in front of 4,087 fans at Murray Goodman Stadium.
There were a lot of tough, disappointing weekends last year during the Mountain Hawks’ 2-9 season, but taking away the loss to Lafayette, Lehigh’s 19-15 loss to Cornell could have been the toughest one for Lehigh Nation to stomach.
Maybe something about those team building activities, that bus ride to Merrimack and then Harvard, really paid off this weekend for the Mountain Hawks.
After all the storms, delays and rescheduling, Lehigh (1-1, 0-0 PL) would gut together a 14-12 victory over Merrimack (0-2, 0-0 NEC) on a wet, steamy evening in Cambridge that, like that Yale victory last November, would feature a superlative defensive effort to preserve the victory.
I’ll be honest – I hadn’t thought a lot about Merrimack since they left Murray Goodman with that 10-3 defeat back in 2019.
Villanova looked like a well-oiled machine with tons of veterans and few weak spots, at least in the first week of the season.
This Saturday at Lehigh, folks will be able to see for themselves the progress that has been made since Cahill’s hiring last December.
This Saturday, Lehigh will kick off the 2023 season, and the Kevin Cahill era, at home against Villanova. And there are a lot of unknowns.
Since I can’t do anything half-assed, here’s a detailed Lehigh fan’s guide to the Mountain Hawks’ 2023 non-conference opponents. There’s no easy win penciled in here, as you will see.
This past Saturday at Murray Goodman stadium, you could hear loud music, the Marching 97 and loud yelling on 3rd down, only the season hadn’t started.
With the stunning collapse of the Pac 12 comes a golden opportunity to reshape collegiate athletics for the better.
