GAME FIVE, LEHIGH AT PENN: An Odd Series, And A Possible Trap, At Historic Franklin Field

BETHLEHEM, PA – A huge regular-season win streak on the line. A tricky trip to Philadelphia. Two undefeated college football teams. National implications for both the Patriot and Ivy League.

You’d think I was talking about this weekend’s game, one where the No. 6/No. 7 rated Lehigh Mountain Hawks (4-0, 3-0 Patriot) are taking on the Penn Quakers (1-0, 0-0 Ivy) at historic Franklin Field.

Incredibly, Saturday’s game will not the only time a historic regular season winning streak involving Lehigh will have been played in Franklin Field.

Back in 2002, the nationally-ranked Mountain Hawks entered Philadelphia with a 26 game regular season winning streak – the longest in program history,

They would lose that game.

In a way, Penn stopping Lehigh’s regular season winning streak on a chilly night in September 2002 was very much on brand with the weird history of the Lehigh/Penn football series. While there have been moments of triumph for the Mountain Hawks, Lehigh’s historic record shows a more harsh reality and perhaps a sobering view of the challenge ahead – Penn has won 47 times to Lehigh’s 16.

This Weekend’s Matchup

“This is what we look forward to all season,” Penn DB Josh Narcisse said this week. “This is why you come out here in the winter when it’s 6 a.m. and nobody sees you working. You’re rolling around the snow. This is why you do that, right? For opportunities like this to shine when the lights are the brightest.”

Certainly the lights at Franklin Field will be shining this weekend – not least because of the potential of a Nor’Easter off the Schuykill river this weekend. The weather won’t dampen tht intensity on the field much.

“They want to run the football,” Lehigh hed coach Rich Nagy said this week. “They have a true freshman at quarterback, but he’s very talented. They were able to control the ball and control the tempo against Bucknell,” he said of the Quakers’ impressive 20-7 win over the Bison, where the Penn defense held Bucknell to six first downs, and limited their offense to 20 minutes time of possession and 124 total yards.

While Penn has only played one football game, QB Miles Teodocki had a very strong debut. Known as “the QB who chose the Ivy League over the Power 4” (he originally committed to Kansas State before a coaching change opened up the chance to go to Penn), the 6’3, 215 lb Texan pased for 197 yards and 2 TDs while adding a third TD on the ground, rushing for 87 yards.

Of course new Penn head coach Rick Santos is quite aware of the abilites of the Lehigh Mountain Hawks, too.

“With [Lehigh] running the ball as much as they do, they like to control the clock, so that’s going to be something for us is to sustain drives, ” he said this week. “We got to make this a four-quarter game.”

With QB Hayden Johnson out for “the forseeable future,” according to Nagy, Lehigh’s starting QB will be QB Derek Morgan, who played a very good game in last weekend’s 24-21 win over Dartmouth. But any conversation about Lehigh lately centers around RB Luke Yoder. who leads the nation in rushing touchdowns (11), total touchdowns (12) and scoring (18 ppg.). Yoder ranks second nationally in rushing yards and rushing yards per game, while Lehigh’s rushing offense leads the nation, averaging 291.8 yards per game.

“[Yoder] never gets tackled by the first guy,” Santos said, “So we need to wrap up. We need to rally the football. Stopping the run has to be our No. 1 priority this week.”

In a way, Lehigh’s game against Dartmouth serves as good preparation for their game this weekend at Penn as both teams have physical dual-threat quarterbacks that try to hog time of possession through sustained drives and ball control. If the Penn rush defense is as stout as they showed last week versus Bucknell – holding them to 40 yards rushing on 19 attempts – the Moutnain Hawks might have their hands full.

History provides a guide as to what could await at Franklin Field.

The warning of 2002

Back in 2002, The Mountain Hawks, with second year head coach Pete Lembo were riding high.

Lehigh had gone 11-0 in the regular season 2000 under then-head coach Kevin Higgins, went 10-0 in the 2001 regular season under Lembo, and won their first three games in 2002, adding to their two-game regular season winning streak to end 1999. (Fun fact: that loss to Colgate in Hamilton in 1999 broke up a 20 game regular season winning streak prior to that.)

Before heading to Franklin Field in late September, there were signs that there were some chinks in the Lehigh armor.

Then-QB Chad Schwenk had to rally from behind to beat Princeton 31-24, with the Mountain Hawks taking the lead for the first time with 13 seconds left to play in the game. The expectations for the Mountain Hawks were sky-high, as they always were at that time, and the expectation was that Schwenk could ride the momentum from that and beat Penn.

But under legendary coach Al Bagnoli, Penn may have been in it’s heyday. Ivy League Champions in 2000, the Quakers were 9-1 in 2001, their only blemish a loss to Harvard the second to last week of the season. WR Rob Milanese and RB Stephen Faulk paced Penn on offense, and the Quakers defense was very, very tough.

“I had hoped we had learned a lesson last week,” Lembo said, “when we played sloppy for a long time, but found a way to win. We knew we weren’t going to beat Penn making those same kind of mistakes.”

It was a thrilling game under the lights in Franklin Field – I know, because I was there.

Schwenk, under immense pressure most of the evening, threw three interceptions, and fumbled the ball. Down 24-7, Lehigh seemed out, but somehow summoned some magic and rallied in the fourth quarter.

RB Eric Rath blocked a punt, and returned it into the end zone to make ti 24-14, and backup QB Matt Shiels, in relief, guided the Mountain Hawks to a score with just under 5 minutes left to cut the deficit to 24-21.

And Lehigh would get the ball back in the waning minutes of the game, hoping to get it to overtime, but PK Brian Kelley’s kick would have the distance, but sailed just wide.

“We talked all week about challenging them for 60 minutes,” Bagnoli said afterwards. “When you win that many games in a row, and you have players with that kind of confidence, they’re not going to quit. We had to stay aggressive and try to make some plays and hope we made enough. When the smoke cleared, we made one more play than they did.”

Lehigh would continue to be a very good football team, but losing to Penn, then, as they did, took a bit of the luster off the amazing dominance of the late 1990s. The Mountain Hawks would end the season at 8-4 in 2002 – seen as disappointing at the time.

Meanwhile, Penn would partially ride the momentum of that win to a 9-1 season – losing only a thriller, 17-3, to Villanova the following week – and win the Ivy League Championship for the second time in three years. In a lot of ways, the 2002 game announced that Penn was back, and set Lehigh back (even if it was only slightly).

Trap at Franklin Field?

Could Penn trap the Mountain Hawks almost twenty-four years to the day they did so in 2002?

Historic Franklin Field is a great place to watch a football game – a temple of college football, honestly – but it’s been the site of the 2002 defeat as well as the venue where Lehigh was last shut out (2021). In fact, Lehigh is 1-3 at Franklin Field in their last four tries.

The Mountain Hawks will have to work hard to make sure hidotry doesn’t repeat itself this weekend.

NO. 6/NO. 7 LEHIGH MOUNTAIN HAWKS (4-0, 3-0 Patriot) AT PENN QUAKERS (1-0, 0-0 Ivy)
Franklin Field, Philadelphia, PA, Saturday, Sept. 26th, 1:00 PM
LIVE STATS
BROADCAST: NBC Sports Philadelphia (available to stream on NBC Sports App)
STREAMING: ESPN+: PxP – Joe Tordy, Analyst: Joe Valerio, Sideline: Anna Camden
RADIO BROADCAST (Lehigh – Fox Sports Radio 94.7 FM/1230AM): PxP – Matt Kerr; Analyst – Jim Guzzo; Sideline – Connor Brown