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It is rare that the MVP of the Lehigh/Lafayette game is a kicker, but that’s exactly what happened this afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium as the Leopards beat their bitter Mountain Hawk rivals for the first time in five years in a 17-16 win.
This season, though, there isn’t the same feeling of continuity that permeated many of these other games. Part of that comes from the fact that, unusually for The Rivalry, both teams are packed with young underclassmen, many of them playing in their first Rivalry ever. Normally, The Rivalry is filled with narratives. This season, it feels like the master narrative is waiting to be written with two teams that, even at this late date, have unknowns.
Going into this game, Lehigh’s defense had a serious challenge on their hands – to stop, or a least slow down, the leading rusher in FCS, Sacred Heart RB Julius Chestnut. For three quarters, they did just that, but in the fourth quarter Chestnut would score a pair of rushing touchdowns to lifted Sacred Heart to a 13-6 victory.
It’s highly unusual for Lehigh (4-5, 3-2) and Sacred Heart (6-4, 4-2)to be playing a non-conference game this late in the season, but for both teams, important milestones remain.
It was, depending on your perspective, either the roughest Lehigh offensive performance of the season, or the greatest Bucknell defensive performance of the year.
Most games between head coaches in their first years at a school are ones where the opponents need to feel themselves out, thanks to unfamiliarity. That will not be the case this weekend, as Cecchini and Gilmore have more than two decades of awareness of one another and their tendencies. It should have the feel of a brotherly fight.
For the players of both programs, it was more about demonstrating how much they had improved over that battle of 1-6 teams on a wet, rainy, homecoming game a year ago in Worcester. Both teams showed exactly how much more they were than those teams with losing records last year, and in the end, Holy Cross showed that they were one play better than the Mountain Hawks on this afternoon.
In the final minute, Holy Cross made one more play than Lehigh.
November in the Lehigh Valley is known for potentially frosty temperatures, blazing red and yellow fall colors, and apple picking season.
Don’t expect anything chill at Murray Goodman Stadium this Saturday, where the combined heat of the Holy Cross Crusaders (4-4, 2-0) and Lehigh Mountain Hawks (4-3, 3-0) should be radiating from both teams.
After their 27-24 win over Georgetown – their third conference game won on very memorable final plays – what is the Mountain Hawks’ secret for pulling out these conference wins?
Another week, another nail-biting game with the game in doubt in the closing seconds. Fans of of the Mountain Hawks might have been standing, perhaps cheering, perhaps looking away, unable to watch whether the 27 yard FG goes through the uprights.
Last season, Lehigh football suffered through a bunch of firsts that Mountain Hawk football fans had no desire to experience. One important one came on the campus of Georgetown on October 20th, 2018.
Up until that point, in the modern era, the Lehigh football team had not lost to Georgetown.
Before the biggest game of the year so far for the Lehigh football program, senior WR Dev Bibbens was left off the depth chart for the Fordham game. Two weeks ago, the New Hope, Pennsylvania native was leveled by a vicious hit to the midsection from a Colgate defensive back, and he didn’t return in.
Both teams find themselves sitting tied atop the Patriot League standings, playing for first place, and unlike last year, there will be no shortage of passion on the field at Jack Coffey Field at 1:00 PM this Saturday.
Nobody at Andy Kerr Stadium was sitting down during the last play of the game.
To Colgate fans, Lehigh is returning to the scene of the crime this weekend.
That’s because the Raiders’ last Patriot League conference loss came to Lehigh on their home field, Andy Kerr Stadium, two years ago back on October 7th, 2017.
On a hot, humid late September afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium, Gilmore won his first football game as head coach, finally outlasting visiting Merrimack 10-3 in a game where defense and special teams were the order of the day.
It wasn’t the sort of game for the NFL’s Red Zone channel. It wasn’t for people who love power rushing, precision passing, or turnover-free ball. But it was a win that the Lehigh Mountain Hawks will happily take. The Lehigh Mountain Hawks had six sacks and kept Merrimack out of the end zone, and rode.
In the end, the matchup this weekend will be a show-me type of game, one that might set the trajectory for both programs.
UC Davis QB Jake Maier had a tremendous evening in the Aggies’ home opener in UC Davis Health Stadium, going 38-for-49 passing for 389 yards in a 41-13 win over Lehigh Saturday Evening in front of 9.908 fans. Maier threw for four touchdown passes, all coming off of long drives of more than 50 yards. .
Last week, Holy Cross stunned many with their 13-10 upset of New Hampshire, the Patriot League’s first win over a CAA school this season. This week Colgate hopes to make it a second when they face William and Mary on the road. NEC, Big Sky, and even a D-III opponent graces the Patriot League schedule this week.
The Lehigh Mountain Hawks (0-2) make a trip to Davis, California to take on the UC Davis Aggies (1-1). It’s a game that promises to be an interesting clash of East Coast vs. West Coast in UC Davis Health Stadium – a Big Sky vs. Patriot League matchup, which is a rarity during the regular season.
The Villanova Wildcats (2-0) surged to a 17-3 halftime lead over Lehigh, and ultimately cruised to a 38-10 win on Saturday evening on the Main Line.
It was a game where the Mountain Hawks (0-2) would make way too many mistakes to pull off the upset on the road of a nationally-ranked FCS football team on the road.
We live in a strange world where people consume things in bites. People consume bites like video clips quickly, and sometimes they love them enough to keep watching them, enjoy them, and share them with their friends and followers.
That’s what happened today with one play out of the 138 plays that were run in the St. Francis (PA)/Lehigh game this Saturday, the first game of the season for both teams.
It was a game a defensive coordinator could love, and it resulted in a thrilling victory for St. Francis (PA) and an agonizing loss for Lehigh when a late 40 yard FG attempt went wide right for the Mountain Hawks, resulting in a 14-13 win for the Red Flash.
Last season, St. Francis (PA) and Lehigh faced off at the exact same time of year (Saturday, Labor Day weekend) at the exact same weekend. But the teams heading onto the field this weekend are not only filled with new personnel – they are also teams eager to put disappointing, losing season behind them in 2019.
Lehigh has just released their game notes for their 2019 Week 1 tilt against St. Francis (PA), and it’s our first look at Lehigh’s starting two deep. Here are my five takeaways from the list.
Much of preseason practice for a football involves building the skills, plays and toughness that’s required for the full grind of a full season. For the 2019 Lehigh Mountain Hawks, it seems to be about more than just that. With new head coach Tom Gilmore, a big theme that has emerged in preseason training camp.
Youth. Questions. Fifth.
Those are three words that haven’t normally been associated with Lehigh at the start of preseason training camp in August.
“Over 40% of our team are first-year players,” Gilmore said. “And we’re excited to see what some of these freshman can do to enhance our roster and push the upperclassmen to be the best version of themselves on the field.”
It may be hard to believe, but there are only 32 days left before the Lehigh Mountain Hawks take the field in their home opener versus St. Francis (PA).
A disappointing 3-8 was salvaged somewhat with a 34-3 win against their long-time Rivals Lafayette. With the win, head coach Andy Coen retired as the winningest head coach in program history.
Lehigh Athletics simply can’t ignore the outside forces of college football and televised sports forever. They need one renovation more than any other – lights in order to open up the possibility of hosting late afternoon or early evening games.
There was no official scoring, but plenty of physical play and competition that made it a fun morning for players and spectators.
The challenges of being a Division I football coach – the recruiting, the staff-building, even the organization of setting up the program the way Gilmore wants it – are clearly something that he relishes, perhaps even a bit more so now.
This Sunday, C.J. returns to Stabler Arena to see his Number 3 raised to the rafters during halftime of Lehigh’s contest against Holy Cross. C.J. is the first – and only – Mountain Hawk basketball player that has gone on to play in the NBA with the Portland Trail Blazers, and, in the process, been an outstanding ambassador for Lehigh as a school.
It’s a news item in the Lehigh Valley when there isn’t an Ivy League team on the football schedule.
Five home dates, including the 155th meeting of college football’s most-played rivalry and the program’s first west coast trip in more than 20 years, highlight Lehigh’s 2019 football schedule, formally unveiled Thursday.
January 9th was finally the day when Lehigh fans finally got to see and meet their new head football coach: Tom Gilmore.
In November, the Mountain Hawks seemed to figure out some of the answers to their questions just in time to win two of their final three games, and in so doing having retiring head coach Andy Coen tie Bill Leckonby for the all-time head coaching wins record at Lehigh.
Christmas isn’t for another month, but for a day, people associated with the Lehigh football program felt like they’d received a bunch of presents. The first present from the gods of football might have been the one that set the tone the best for Lehigh’s 34-3 win over their archrivals in the 154th meeting between.
It wasn’t the season any Lehigh fan envisioned, a tumultuous 2-8 season that featured a lot of frustration and discord. So you might have forgiven Lehigh fans a little bit of cynicism when they came to Easton this afternoon about their prospects for a win against their bitter Rivals Lafayette. Instead, on the very first.
It kind of goes without saying that the Rivalry between Lehigh and Lafayette is the biggest game on the Mountain Hawks’ and Leopard’s schedules. Eighteen miles separate the two campuses in Easton, PA and Bethlehem, PA, and the football teams have faced off 153 times over the span of 134 years. When the two schools started.
With 9:43 left in the second quarter, it happened. Lehigh QB Brad Mayes worked his way loose from the pressure of Colgate’s defensive front, and threw a pass where only WR Ray Falcone could catch it in the right corner of the end zone. The long streak of consecutive quarters without yielding a touchdown –.
For a team ranked 8th in the country, the Colgate Raiders (8-0, 5-0) don’t really have a face, a singular person on which they rely every single week to win football games. What they do have is a defense that has smothered opposing offenses like a big red blanket all season. Sure, Colgate has LB.
It’s a situation that neither the Georgetown Hoyas or the Lehigh Mountain Hawks usually find themselves in Patriot League play. The Mountain Hawks, at 1-5 with a resounding 43-14 conference loss last week, desperately need a win against Georgetown to avoid a second consecutive losing record and to stay alive in the Patriot League title.
In retrospect, the game was lost at the opening coin flip. Two sets of captains made their way to midfield. Lehigh won the toss, and deferred. The Fordham captains came back from the coin toss, and chest-bumped the rest of the team – even though, technically, they lost the toss. Lehigh’s captains slowly walked back.
Last year, on a beautiful, hot, late October day, a 2-5 Lehigh football team traveled to the Bronx to take on a 2-6 football team, the Fordham Rams. To a Patriot League outsider, this game might have seemed like nothing much to get excited about. But the Mountain Hawks, with a 2-0 conference record and.
The Lehigh football team lost to the Princeton football team 66-7 at Powers Field in Princeton, New Jersey. The Mountain Hawk defense yielded 773 yards of offense to the Tigers – a Princeton record – allowing starting QB John Lovett to rush for 111 yards and pass for 288 more, making him responsible for 4.
In Princeton’s game notes, their game with Lehigh is billed as a “local rivalry”. It is true that the campuses of Princeton University and Lehigh University are reasonably close to one another, separated by about an hour and a half by car. And though Princeton and Lehigh have never shared a conference, this will be.
“We’ll fix it.” That was the overriding message coming out of the Lehigh postgame press conference at Penn this Saturday. It came out of the mouth of head coach Andy Coen, and also, in so many words, from starting QB Brad Mayes and the current leader in tackles on defense, LB Mark Walker. And it.
