LEHIGH 2023 SEASON IN REVIEW: Growing Pains In 2-9 Season of Refocus

BETHLEHEM, PA – Late in 2021, Kevin Cahill was introduced as Lehigh’s 30th head football coach.

He inherited a team that had just gone 2-9 and lost to Lafayette on the final week of the season.

In that press conference, he said the following:

“You’ve got to win … We’re going to be judged from the outside by the scoreboard and our record. That won’t be our focus as a program. That’s not our focus, but we understand that’s how we’ll be judged.”

If you look at the numbers from 2022 to 2023 – judging the scoreboard and the record, as he said – you come up with identical numbers as last year.

Kevin Cahill’s first season on South Mountain ended at 2-9, with a loss to Lafayette on the final week of the season, just like Tom Gilmore’s last season in 2022.

What was interesting, though, was the other part of what he said.

“That won’t be our focus as a program.”

Looking back on a sometimes painful 2023 Lehigh football season, it’s clear that the task that Kevin Cahill had was not only to get wins out of the group of athletes here at Lehigh already, but to build a program and develop a culture on South Mountain that had lost its way for some time.

Seen through that light, this 2-9 season has to be seen as necessary hard work for potential Lehigh success in 2024 and beyond.

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.

Culture

Some people think “rebuilding” a college football program means floating into the job, getting a bunch of renegade players to transfer to your school, get some financial crooks, thieves and charlatans to provide a slush fund of NIL money, and flashing a winning smile.

That was never how it was going to work at Lehigh.

The 2023 season appeared first and foremost to allow coach Cahill to develop the football culture at Lehigh and to develop a modern vision for Mountain Hawk football and who they will be as a program, not necessarily just pursuing wins.

Rebuilding at an academic powerhouse like Lehigh is rebuilding a college football program the old fashioned way – through recruiting, developing relationships, gaining trust and confidence, and not running away from uncomfortable realities.

NIL exists. It may end up being a part of what happens at Lehigh in terms of recruiting and retaining athletes. But irrespective of that, the Mountain Hawks’ Ivy-level academics and high standards will always make it harder to recruit there. Money won’t change that.

For a first-time head coach, that means you’re not just recruiting players – you’re also selling the existing players. It means establishing quite directly what you’re trying to build, the culture you bring to the school, and to a degree the Bethlehem and Lehigh community, too.

At Lehigh in 2023, this was not an easy task.

Cahill seemed to go out of his way to set a new way – his way – to run a program. For the first time in a long time, you couldn’t draw a direct line from Hank Small through the coaching staff to the head man, and Coach Cahill didn’t see that as a handicap – he saw that as an opportunity to breathe new changes into the program that hadn’t really been seen for more than a decade.

What that meant was that there was genuine excitement in what was new in the program. Nobody knew if there would be more wins, a Championship run, or a shocking upset of, say, Villanova going into the season, but what they did know is that fresh thinking was going to go into it, and it brought excitement. Expectations were low, but excitement wasn’t, especially with the athletes.

This permeated the program from the get-go, and it meant that feeling of newness and excitement propelled the team through the offseason into the next year. The future looked bright, and different. It looked different than a 2-9 season.

Pains

Coach Cahill didn’t sugar coat.

I think that was probably one of the most interesting things about covering coach Cahill week to week.

If you asked him the simple question “What happened?” after a particular agonizing loss, he would tell you unsparingly in his own way what needed to be done by the team, but wasn’t.

For example, I don’t think he ever actually uttered the words “Cornell doesn’t care about Lehigh’s problems” before or after the Cornell game, but that was the energy he brought, before the games and after.

And make no mistake, if you really dive into the 2023 football season you start to see the vision of a team that worked hard and seemed like they were making cultural improvements – but, frustratingly, not seeing that translate into wins.

One of the games where it seemed like the developing Lehigh culture seemed to have been an asset was head coach Kevin Cahill’s first win as a head football coach, a 14-12 win over Merrimack.

It’s hard to imagine a less glamorous way to get your first win – a win played in a sparsely attended Harvard Stadium, the game only contested there because Merrimack suffered a campus-wide power outage due to a powerful storm blowing through campus. It was played despite several inclement weather delays, and the facility not totally cleaned out from the last Division I game played there, last season’s Harvard/Yale game. There was only a closet to change in, as the locker room at Harvard wasn’t accessible to the whole team before the beginning of their season.

“I’m just happy for these kids,” Cahill said after that game. “They’ve been through a lot this week, and we battled. I said this to the staff, if we can come out with a win here. It shows the true grit that we want to have as a program. It was just a lot of things going on with the day and everything and nobody complained. Everybody just played.”

As Cahill himself admitted, it wasn’t the cleanest game, but the result also showed hints of that gritty team he is looking for, with Lehigh scoing on two TD passes from QB Brayten Silbor to WR Connor Kennedy in a 35 second span, and a gutty performance on defense with LB Mike DeNucci’s 10 tackles and critical sack late in the game to preserve the victory.

It was after this game that I thought that the 2023 Mountain Hawks really look like they’re going to be a team that won’t have anything handed to them. I remember thinking, “Whatever they are able to accomplish, they’ll have to earn it. They won’t get many breaks.” Certainly they got no breaks in Massachusetts, but won the game anyway.

A perfect contrast to the thrill of beating Merrimack was the frustration of the loss to Cornell the following week. Unfortunately, that game more than many of the others really sticks out to me.

The Big Red, playing in their first game of the season, was supposed to start out slow as they “adjusted to Division I game speed”. I, and the coaching staff for sure, was preaching for the Mountain Hawks to make a fast start.

Instead, the opposite happened. Cornell came out like a Big Red Machine jumping to a 17-0 lead, forcing Lehigh to play from behind and ultimately see their comeback attempt fall short in a 24-21 defeat that was there for the taking.

It was a reminder, after the win at Merrimack, that Lehigh still needed to learn how to win.

“Thinking ‘okay, great, we fought hard and we lost by three, that’s awesome,’ in my opinion, is a loser’s mentality,” Cahill pointedly said after the Cornell game. “Nobody in the locker room has that mentality. There’s not one guy in the locker room that’s excited about what just happened.”

Learning Not To Lose

It got no easier in the coming weeks.

Dartmouth’s 34-17 win over Lehigh showed a Mountain Hawk team that was pushed around by the Big Green, a game defined by a defensive pick six by DB Logan Jones, a gift-wrapped Lehigh touchdown pass to RB Jack DiPietro after a blocked punt, and a smothering performance by Dartmouth’s defense and special teams, which only allowed 167 total Lehigh offensive yards and gave up their own blocked punt that was the real killer in the game.

“I don’t think we came out to compete in the second half,” Cahill said after that game. “We killed ourselves. You can’t turn the ball over and you can’t have a punt blocked. That’s a recipe for how to lose a football game, and it came true. We’ve got some young kids that have to grow up a lot faster than they are. We’ve got to get back to business, clean it up and find out who really wants to battle.”

Juggling a multitude of injuries made it even more difficult to contend. By the time Monmouth walloped Lehigh comprehensively 49-7, the injuries started mounting and more and more freshmen were lining up in game situations. For the fifth time in five games, there was a different lineup on the offensive line.

“We’re growing, but we have to continue to grow a lot faster than we are,” Cahill said after that game. “We have some guys in situations for the first time in their college careers. We don’t have time for them to grow up. T hey need to do it now…. Every single one of these kids could quit right now and pack it in for the season, but they’re not going to do that. They’re continuing to learn, continuing to come in and they’re continuing to develop. We have to continue to build the culture and we have a lot of fixing to do.”

The pain of those losses paled in comparison, though, to coach Kevin Cahill’s first two Patriot League league games away at Fordham and at home versus Georgetown.

From the beginning the Mountain Hawk football team in the Bronx looked like a different team than the one that left West Long Branch. Jumping out to a 21-7 lead, a big touchdown run by freshman RB Luke Yoder and touchdown passes to WR Dylan McFadden and WR Geoffrey Jamiel would give Lehigh a 21-7 lead midway through the 2nd quarter.

After Fordham cut the deficit to 21-17 by halftime, Lehigh would lose the lead 24-21 before freshman LB Will Parton forced a fumble recovered by freshman DL Jadin Nelson. That set up two quick touchdowns, one a TD pass to Jamiel and a Silbor touchdown run to give Lehigh a 35-24 lead with 11 minutes to play.

The Mountain Hawks, however, couldn’t close it out, giving up a touchdown, a two point conversion, and a pair of field goals to PK Brandon Peskin, including a career-long 45 yard field goal as time expired to win the game.

“What happened at the end of the game can’t happen,” Cahill said. “We have to learn how to close out a game and that game should’ve been closed out. Today is the day you step forward and say, ‘We lost.’ We have to deal with that. But I’m proud of the way the kids battle.”

After the heartbreak at Fordham, though, was the agony against Georgetown.

The 17-7 loss was the first time that Georgetown had beaten Lehigh at Murray Goodman Stadium, a span of of games over the course of more than twenty years. The Hoyas held onto the ball for more than 40 minutes and outgained Lehigh 457-337. Additionally, Georgetown’s defense shut out Lehigh in the second half.

“We have to finish drives,” Cahill said after the game. “The word finish comes up multiple times per game for us. We’re just not there right now.”

Underclassmen Get Experience

There were exciting flashes of a bright future ahead, some with true freshmen getting thrown into the fire, and others who established themselves as building blocks for 2024 and beyond.

In Lehigh’s second win of the season, a 27-19 victory at Bucknell, freshman RB Luke Yoder (138 yards, 2 TDs), senior LB Mike DeNucci (9 tackles, 1 tackle for loss, 1 blocked FG attempt) and sophomore DB Nick Petelkian (7 tackles, 2 pass break-ups, 82 punt return yards, 1 TD) all were big keys to the victory. All three return to the Mountain Hawks this fall – most notably DeNucci, who was able to take advantage of a medical redshirt for an additional year in 2025.

Yoder, who led the team in rushing, and WR Geoffrey Jamiel, who tied for the team lead in receiving touchdowns (4), return on offense – Yoder a sophomore, and Jamiel a junior.

Against Holy Cross, Lehigh put up a spirited effort to try to eliminate the Crusaders from title consideration when they visited Bethlehem, leaping out to 14-0 , 21-14, and 24-21 leads, but Holy Cross would ultimately find a way to beat the Mountain Hawks in a 28-24 victory.

In that game, the team played with grit and with a chip on their shoulders that kept them in the game until the end.

“We just try to listen to the guys in our room,” LB Tyler Ochojski told me after that game, “but I’d be lying to you if I said that every time I opened my phone and looked at an article, it didn’t piss me off. I think there’s a competitive nature in this team, and we emphasized about playing with an edge all week. I think we came out and did that today. We haven’t really cared about what people said about us and we’re not going to.”

On defense, 7 out of 11 starters return, including Ochojski (64 tackles, 4 TFL), LB Brycen Edwards (50 tackles, 2 TFL), and DL Matt Spatny (40 tackles, 8 TFL). Lehigh’s top four leading tacklers return.

The biggest experience of all for the underclassmen last season – and the biggest agony of the season, too – came against last year’s Patriot League Champions, the Lafayette Leopards.

For a half, it looked like head coach Kevin Cahill’s first head coaching victory at Murray Goodman had the potential of being a great one.

Matching Lafayette touchdown for touchdown, QB Dante Perri‘s 2 yard touchdown pass to WR Connor Kennedy gave Lehigh a slight 21-14 lead at halftime in their effort to derail Lafayette’s title ambitions.

But then the wheels came off completely in the second half.

Lehigh’s first drive of the second half resulted in an interception, as Saiku White stepped in front of a Perri pass at the Lehigh 46 in a critical turnover. With that gift, five plays later Lafayette QB Dean DeNobile hit TE Dallas Holmes in the end zone for a 13 yard TD grab to tie the game at 21.

The Leopards seized that momentum and went on to score on their next four drives, stuffing Lehigh’s offense each time. It was a painful watch as Lafayette would celebrate a well-earned Patriot League title in Lehigh’s home stadium, 49-21, and the biggest growing pain of all for this young team, knowing that for a half, they were toe to toe with their Rivals.

“It really was a tale of two halves,” Cahill said after the game. “The two turnovers killed us. You can’t let a team that scores as often as they do have short fields. We did it too often and they took advantage of it. We didn’t finish. It was a similar outcome to what we’ve had throughout the year. We have a lot to grow from and learn from.”

In a way, the painful lessons from the Lafayette game were indeed a microcosm of the season – competitive play in spots, some grit keeping the Mountain Hawks in games – but not being able to sustain the momentum and carry that success all the way through the game.

It will be coach Cahill’s goal, and the Lehigh football team’s goal, to take those lessons and have them result in success in 2024.