#Rivalry160: A Historic First as the Goalpost Comes Down In Murray Goodman After Lehigh’s Dominant 38-14 Win Over Rivals Lafayette
BETHLEHEM, PA – Lehigh/Lafayette is college football’s most-played Rivalry. At 160 meetings, no two schools have played more college football games against each other than Lehigh University and Lafayette College.
Excitement was high, as it often is, in the playing of The Rivaly at Murray Goodman Stadium on November 23rd, 2024. For the Mountain Hawks, a Patriot League Championship was on the line, and an FCS Playoff berth. Win, and they would be in.
For the team, Lehigh’s dominating 38-14 win over bitter rivals Lafayette was the end of a seven-year climb back to the top of the Patriot League. They navigated the craziness surrounding the Rivalry, playing their game and executing at a high level, and achieved their goal. It was the end of an amazing regular season, story, and achievement.
The title came after a season where the Mountain Hawks were picked to finish sixth out of the seven teams of the Patriot League. It came after a 2-9 season where many were wondering if Lehigh could get back to having a winning record, let alone compete for a title.
It came after last year’s trouncing by Lafayette at home, in the 159th meeting of The Rivalry, a year when Lafayette celebrated on 2-9 Lehigh’s home field, taking pictures of the Murray Goodman scoreboard reading “Lehigh 21, Lafayette 49”.
All of those factors played into a wild post-game celebration that will not be soon forgotten.
In the aftermath of that Lehigh/Lafayette burst of energy, there was one casualty – the goalpost next to the grass banking, which was torn down by elated Lehigh students after their football team had achieved what many had thought impossible before the season.
Then the students did what many thought was impossible – walk four miles into nearby Hellertown, parade the goalpost through South Bethlehem’s streets, and deposit their prize into the historic Lehigh River.
The Rivalry started in 1884. This was the first time this ever happened in Rivalry history. In a game where it’s easy to find parallels with prior meetings and prior narratives, this was, amazingly, a first.
And in order to put this event in perspective, you need to know about the history of The Rivalry. Specifically, the history of Rivalry goalposts.
A Brief History Of Rivalry Goalposts
2024 was not the only time a goalpost has come down in The Rivalry – far from it. In fact, for years, the tearing down of goalposts was a huge part of the tradition of the game for the fans.
Tearing down goalposts is also not unique to The Rivalry – college football history has a long storied tradition of goalpost deconstruction.
According to The Athetic, the earliest documented case of goalposts coming down was during a Harvard/Yale game in 1876. “Yale rooters tore down the goal posts so that Harvard should not be able to kick a goal,” the account said, thus apparently kicking off the tradition of storming the field and tearing down the goalposts.
Back in the days when all goalposts were made of wood, they were easy to take down if a large group of students, or a mob, were determined enough to do so.
These spontaneous outbursts of exuberance would happen from time to time throughout college football’s early history, but definitely didn’t seem like a common occurrence.
In my research for my book about the early Lehigh/Lafayette Rivalry, goalpost deconstruction did not appear to be a major, documented part of the proceedings in the early days.
Fights, yes. Gambling, yes. One time the stands being set on fire, yes. Parades down main street, yes. Serenading the co-eds at Moravian, yes. Ringing the bell at Packer Chapel, yes. But oddly, no reports about the goalposts that I can remember.
Taking a fresh look at early newspapers, the earliest reference I could find to goalposts coming down in The Rivalry was an reference to 1918, though none of the accounts refer to it at the time. It was anonymously referenced as the last time the goalposts at Lafayette’s March Field were taken down by Lehigh students.
In general, though, in print newspapers of the 1900s and 1910s you don’t see a lot of references to the practice of tearing down goalposts. Maybe it was due to the somber mood of the nation, which after all was in the middle of World War I and also suffered through a deadly influenza epidemic, but it’s still striking.
Once you look further at papers into the late 1920s and early 1930s, it’s not unusual to read stories of goalposts coming down in other big football games at other schools, and it’s my belief that it was then when the practice became more popular and widespread, possibly due to the explosion of mass media.
Aside from that 1918 reference, there were no accounts of goalpost storming in the Rivalry in this era that I could find. The reason could be that the 1920s were a time when The Rivalry was at risk of being discontinued because the series was becoming so lopsided towards Lafayette.
So much so that in 1928, Lehigh fans went on the field and celebrated spontaneously at the end of their game against Lafayette. Not because they were any threat to beat the Leopards, mind you – then one of the best teams in the East – but because they actually scored points against Lafayette’s reserves, something they hadn’t done against the Leopards in years.
Meanwhile, in 1928 Lafayette weren’t enthused about their tenth straight whooping of Lehigh – they were credibly hoping that they could entice Notre Dame to play a home-and-home with them. There were no reports of the goalposts being threatened by elated Leopard fans. To Lafayette, winning over Lehigh during that decade was merely expected, no goalpost storming necessary, it seems.
1929 however saw one of the best, most thrilling Rivalry games ever – and one which I feel saved the Rivalry.
It was an exciting 13-12 affair that was settled by Lehigh blocking a Lafayette kick and forcing the kicker to have another sail wide right. Three times Lafayette would reach the Lehigh goal line to try to take the lead, and three times the Brown and White stopped them.
“Cherished fruits of victory denied over a period of ten successive seasons were at last forthcoming to a fighting Lehigh University football team Saturday afternoon when the traditional foe, Lafayette, went down to a 13 to 12 defeat, marking a new era in Lehigh football,” The Morning Call then reported. “Scenes such as probably have never been witnessed in the concrete saucer of Lehigh University were witnessed in the hysterical demonstration following the final whistle… Out onto the field rushed the Lehigh partisans, fairly smothering the Lehigh players in their frantic efforts to reach them, and one swaying mass of humanity ushered the players off the gridiron. Staid old grads for the first time forgot themselves to join in the wild demonstration and the steel city was truly a typical college town last night in every sense of the word.”
I looked deeper to see about the goalposts after that game, a rare 17,000 fan sellout of Taylor Stadium at that time, their first in years. From The Brown and White, it appears that there was an attempt to storm the goalposts and take them down that was unsuccessful. “A crowd worked for ten minutes trying to tear down the Lafayette goal posts,” they reported, not telling us whether it was successful or not. (My assumption is that it was not, otherwise one of the papers of record would have said so.)
That was the first real evidence to me that the Rivalry game had grown big enough and important enough to involve an attack on the goalposts to get one as a souvenir.
It was during an unexpected win over Lafayette at March Field in 1934 where Bob Donchez and Todd Davidson, authors of Legends of Lehigh/Lafayette, document a game with the goalposts in The Rivalry coming down, in a game when the teams were celebrating 50 years of playing one another.
In a 13-7 win, they write, “The triumph represented the first opportunity for the Lehigh faithful to tear down the goalposts at Fisher Field. Reports of the day indicated that the posts were not only demolished in record time, but the Lafayette flag was also confiscated and paraded around the ball yard.”
In 1935, it was Lafayette’s turn. In the annual freshman football game, a 33-6 win over Lehigh’s freshmen, according to The Lafayette they swarmed the field, tore down the goalposts and divided the pieces among their members.
It seems like these two games in particular started the trend of tearing down the goalposts in The Rivalry.
It’s important to note that there was an element of school pride and violence to the practice, especially during this early era – during the actual varsity game, the idea was that the opposing team’s mob was to try to tear down the goalposts for souvenirs, and the home team’s freshmen’s job was to defend the goalposts from the fans of the opposing team. Some game would see, say, Lehigh’s fans make a go at Lafayette’s goalposts, and they would remain standing, defended by their students.
Sometimes the goalposts would be successfully defended and not torn down, and other times it was not, but it was primarily one school versus the other.
Some wanted to stop the practice. At Yale in 1935, a Prexy was given the task of trying to find a way for students to stop tearing down goalposts after games, something that was apparently becoming an epidemic during Harvard, Yale, and Princeton games of the era. After all, goalposts coming down cause injuries, and the fights between students can too, of course.
But until goalposts commonly became a mixture of steel and aluminum in the 1960s, wood was the norm, and protecting them required either cops to protect the base, or grease to prevent a good grip. Ironically, materials engineering would provide part of the solution to make it less frequent.
All throughout the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, the old practice persisted in The Rivalry, but at some point, defending the goalposts was no longer the goal, and the mere act of tearing down of the goalposts wasn’t just a celebration of the game – it was the purpose. The fight wasn’t to defend goalposts – it was to acquire parts of the shattered goalpost.
The proximity of Lehigh and Lafayette made it easy for both all-male institutions to prank the other in the run-up to the big Rivalry game. As documented in Legends of Lehigh/Lafayette and elsewhere, students didn’t wait until Saturday to get to the opposition’s goalposts – they’d make the short drive in the dead of night to the other school’s campus, break in and steal the goalposts and bring them back to their campus, sometimes practice field goalposts, sometimes the actual goalposts. After all, the best way to tear down goalposts is when they are undefended.
As the pregame rowdiness grew, eventually the schools tried to curtail some of the excesses that had grown organically from The Rivalry, but the goalpost tradition remained mostly intact.
In the 1950s, there used to be a “Freshman Tug-Of-War” at the halftime of the freshman football game between Lehigh and Lafayette that was staged in an effort to dispel some of the exuberance of game week. It came to an abrupt end in Easton when the freshmen tied the rope to one of the goalposts, toppling it, then toppling the other, several flagpoles, and a baseball scoreboard. One student got hurt, and Lafayette discontinued it right after.
Special wooden goalposts were brought in for the main game many times, even well into the 1970s and 1980s, when metal goalposts were the norm.
There are documented cases where the wooden goalposts were torn down before halftime. There was one Lehigh/Lafayette game where the teams could not kick extra points, so each team had to go for two if they scored a touchdown.
Oddly, out of all the accounts I could find, there was never any documented evidence of any goalposts ever being dumped in the Lehigh river, either from the pregame raids, practice field raids, a postgame fracas, or otherwise.
This practice of dumping goalposts into the river has happened at other schools, most notably at Penn in the 1960s when the goalposts were torn down after every game and the posts dumped in the Schuylkill river. Penn’s case was an outlier; soon the students simply tore down the goalposts and thrown into the river when they won the Ivy League.
It also happened again very recently: after Vanderbilt upset Alabama 40-35, students tore down a goalpost and threw it into the Cumberland river. Notably, it didn’t result in an epidemic of goalpost-chucking every time the Commodores win – it was a special moment, a singular moment, when it happened.
While not usually thought of alongside the word “goalpost”, the Fahy Bridge also did play a role in the Rivalry for Lehigh/Lafayette as the site of the pregame “Pajama Parade”.
At one time, it was a penny (and later a nickel) toll bridge, but during Lehigh/Lafayette week, the all-male Lehigh freshmen wore pajamas and marched over the Fahy bridge to Moravian to serenade the all-female Moravian co-eds, singing a song called “We Pay No Tolls Tonight”.
(In the 1950s the practice of the pajama parade faded away after some incidents of vandalism at Moravian from overexuberant freshmen, and Moravian became co-ed in 1954, changing the relationship somewhat between the schools. Plus, times were obviously changing.)
While the Fahy bridge had been an oddly integral part of The Rivalry over the years, there were no reports of goalposts, or anything else, going into the Lehigh river over the Fahy bridge during Lehigh/Lafayette week.
That would have to wait until 2024.
The Brief War Against Tearing Down Goalposts at Murray Goodman
From the 1910s to 1987, Lehigh played their home games in Taylor Stadium, at the lower edge of campus where Rausch Business Center now stands.
Four miles away, on the other side of South Mountain, Murray Goodman Stadium was opened in 1988, and then-president Peter Likins presided over Lehigh at the time, in the middle of his fifteen year tenure.
A one-time wrestling and football captain, he was integral for the University during a critical time, expanding the campus, connecting all the dorm rooms with modems and the internet (a rarity in those days), and expanding athletics across South Mountain.
He loved football, and was a key mover and a shaker in the foundation of the Patriot League. And Murray Goodman Stadium was a key part of the overall vision for athletics, and for I-AA football at that time. A 16,000 seat stadium, with room for temporary seating for Lehigh/Lafayette, was as much a part of his vision as anyone else’s.
“Construction began on Goodman Stadium in February 1988 and was completed in just over eight months,” Murray Goodman Stadium’s facilities page notes. “In fitting with the natural bowl shape of the landscape, the sides of the stadium were built into the bankings surrounding the field surface. The stadium brought tradition and style and used the goalposts that once stood in Taylor Stadium, which served as the home for Lehigh football from 1914-1987.”
In 1988, the stadium was a great marvel. Built in a natural grass bowl, with gorgeous views of Mountaintop in fall visible, with a stadium size under 30,000, it cemented Lehigh’s identity as a I-AA football institution. (In order to be an FBS school, a stadium size of over 30,000 fans was the norm. Murray Goodman was always intended to be less than that.)
But it wasn’t at all clear how The Rivalry would unfold in that stadium.
Fisher Field, built in 1926 in the center of Easton, was still the urban-ish home of Lafayette, adjacent to campus, and wasn’t going anywhere. The traditions of goalposts pouring out of the stadium and being carted to fraternities could remain.
But Murray Goodman Stadium in every way is a suburban stadium. It meant some new wrinkles to the Rivalry that weren’t there before.
On the plus side, it meant a large grass tailgate area to accommodate tens of thousands of tailgaters, potentially. No more game day tensions with the citizens of South Bethlehem, especially with the excesses of Rivalry Week. No more parking issues in town, or traffic snarls.
But it also came with some big drawbacks. Fans and students would need to bus, or drive, from campus to get to the game and back. As most people know, drinking and vehicles are a lethal combination.
Peter Likins also took it upon himself, not without good reason, to change a lot of the drinking culture around Lehigh has well, especially wanting to curtail the culture of excess around The Rivalry, and the postgame fracas that ensued about the goalposts. Lehigh’s social policy was changed, much to the consternation of students and alumni.
For the Rivalry, the goalpost storming and fighting was seen by the athletics office and the administration as a distraction taking away from the game, which was undeniably true. As an undergrad, sure, someone like myself was pouring over QB Mark McGowan‘s throwing stats and noting how Towson RB Dave Meggett was a force to be reckoned with in the Colonial League, but that wasn’t what most Lehigh undergrads were worried about. They went to one game a year, and just wanted a piece of the post.
Going into the 1989 game, the only thing that was clear was that the Rivalry would be changing. It would still be fun, would still be a seminal and unique experience, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Even so, they brought the wooden goalposts in – once.
The 1989 game in retrospect was a strange one, a Rivalry meeting wedged between two eras.
While the traditional tearing down of the goalposts did indeed happen – possibly ones that dated from the Taylor Stadium era – the stadium was also swarming with security.
“The security force at the football game included 15 Lehigh University policemen, 25 Bethlehem policemen, six uniformed security guards, and 54 guards hired from Burns International Security Service,” The Brown and White reported.
From a football perspective, the game played out as planned. Lafayette QB Frank Baur, whose face graced the cover of Sports Illustrated that August, won the MVP in a 36-21 game. The Leopards would cap off a somewhat disappointing 5-5 season (all things considered), and Lehigh would lose their last four games to finish a disappointing 5-6, their vaunted Air Lehigh offense ground to a halt to end the year. Injuries played a big factor in Lehigh’s late struggles.
The playing area around the grass bankings were surrounded by a chain link fence, and with about two minutes to play, the outcome of the game not in doubt, students started pushing and shaking the chain link fence. I remember because I saw it with my own two eyes, etched in my memory. With 1:19 to play in the game, I saw the flimsy chain link fence break and the fans swarm the field, and down went the goalposts – fast. I’d say the grass level goalposts took all of ten seconds to come down.
In an eerie sign of what was to come a couple of years later, The Brown and White reported some students getting hit with mace as they were on the field, even though there were no arrests. But tradition had been upheld – they came down.
It would be the first and only other time a goalpost came down at Murray Goodman.
In 1991, the tradition of taking down the goalposts was essentially announced in The Brown and White to be at an end.
“When students stare past the police on the field in Goodman Stadium Saturday at the 127th Lehigh-Lafayette game,” The Brown and White reported, “they will be greeted by sun glinting off the new metal goalposts that were specifically designed for this game. The instructions given to the engineers who designed the post: make goalposts that cannot be torn down by the student body.”
That they did, creating an H shape goalpost with its legs in cement.
The article seemed to be placed in an effort to deter fans from storming the field, and as a undergrad at the time, it worked for many. The security presence, already quite large in 1989, was announced to be even bigger. Additionally, it was said that the police were there to protect the goalposts from being torn down.
It seemed somewhat senseless to storm the field if there was no goalpost piece to procure. (Besides, I already had sliver of one, from Fisher Field in 1990.)
It did not work.
I did not storm the field on that fateful day in 1991, but I did watch the whole scene unfold.
It was a sellout and then some, an announced attendance of 19,110, and Lehigh would conclude their football season with a 36-18 record, a 9-2 record, and a bright future on the edge of the I-AA Top 25.
By most football-related accounts, the postgame should have been a celebration about an amazing football season. Lehigh, playing without scholarships, only finished second to Holy Cross that season, who still had their football scholarships grandfathered in. It was an amazing achievement eclipsed totally by what had happened next.
I remember the toilet paper thrown onto the field near the end of the game to celebrate Lehigh’s win. I think to some that was meant as not only a possible new tradition instead of goalpost storming, but also a clever thumbing of the nose at the police presence.
And that increased security presence was hard to miss – I didn’t know if they were police or just security, but what I did know was with a few minutes left, the end zone markers, benches and other possible items were all gathered up and removed, giving souvenir hunters one less reason to storm the field.
When the game ended, as promised, a large police force, some in riot gear, surrounded both goalposts, and some groups of students wandered onto the field, ended up massing at midfield, then made a run for the goalpost, the police protecting and guarding them.
“The police stood their ground until a person reached down to grab the only weapon available, the muddy turf,” The Brown and White 100% accurately reported. “The rest of the frustrated crowd followed suit. and began to hurl bits of earth at the police. The police, showered with grass and dirt, could find no shelter on the open field and began to shrink back. When the crowd advanced, the police drew their Mace and began to spray the closing ranks.”
It was a truly ugly scene.
One student was maced on one of the goalposts and fell off, miraculously escaping serious injury. A cloud of mace drifted onto Lehigh president Peter Likins, who was on the field to give out the MVP trophy. A huge hole from the ripped turf was in the middle of the field as cops used force, chasing kids all over the field.
The goalposts stood, but the energy of the riot spilled over into the larger crowd. Some students went to the nearby rugby practice fields and tore down their metal goalposts, far away from the police. Others allegedly toppled a WFMZ 69 van there to cover the football game. Some students even vandalized Peter Likins’ house.
In a world without cell phones and social media, it may have all played out differently, but it was a scary scene that had a huge impact on everyone that was there.
I think everyone was shaken by the riot – the police, the students, the administration and the players. It was clearly unorchestrated, the spontaneous actions of a mob gone wild, a beloved, dangerous tradition turned away, and the panic that happens when control is lost.
But the goalposts stood, even if the students and the schools were shaken.
“… And they’re finally down!”
In the end, the war for the goalposts at Murray Goodman was brief. 1991, for good or ill, was the official end of the goalpost rushing era and tradition.
And for many years at Murray Goodman, they stood, through Patriot League Championships, field stormings, unlikely wins over Lafayette, and even I-AA playoff games. They just never came down.
Part of that was due to a culture change. The bullfight-like energy of two all-male institutions fighting over bits of goalpost sort of withered away as the focus of The Rivalry started definitively pointing towards Patriot League Championships and, eventually, the FCS/I-AA Playoffs.
The partying remained, the tailgating remained, but after all Lehigh and Lafayette were now co-ed institutions. Everyone likes a party, but maybe serenading women at Moravian and giving opposing schools’ fraternity brothers black eyes didn’t need to be a part of it anymore. Times change.
Happily, field storming after the game returned eventually as the students got to swarm the field after thrilling wins, shocking upsets, and Patriot League titles. There is nothing like celebrating with the student body on the field when the team wins the game of the year.
Then in 2024, the Lehigh football team did something incredible – they won a Patriot League Championship with a 8-3 record, one season removed from 2-9.
There were rumors among the students of something being planned about taking down the goalposts if Lehigh managed to win, but the outcome was far from a certainty. After DB Mason Moore got a pick six to essentially seal the game midway through the fourth quarter, the students could enact their plan.
The students swarmed the field, celebrating the win, and then shortly thereafter surrounded the goalpost next to the grass banking, which were essentially undefended. And after a few minutes, it became clear that the intent was to take down the goalpost.
The main question was not when it would come down, but if. It took a while for the students hanging from the post, shaking and moving, to take it down, folks filming the action on their ubiquitous smartphones, phones that were not around in 1991.
It took a while, and there was a point where the students’ determination might have faltered. Lehigh’s Marching Band, the Marching 97, played a quick rendition of “I’m Still Standing” when it seemed like the posts might not actually come down.
But come down they did. “And they’re finally down!”
Chuck has been writing about Lehigh football since the dawn of the internet, or perhaps it only seems like it. He’s executive editor of the College Sports Journal and has also written a book, The Rivalry: How Two Schools Started the Most Played College Football Series.
Reach him at: this email or click below:
