Quietly, Lehigh Starts Climbing the Mountain to 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.
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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.
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.
Here are the Top 25 FCS rankings based on the Sagarin rankings for the week ending Nov. 18th, 2023 following the Week 12 games–the last regular season week. This will be the final rankings until after the FCS playoffs conclude with the national championship game in January. South Dakota State remains in the top spot.
The final autobids have been determined, and the final games have been played. At 12:30PM on ESPNU, FCS Nation will learn the official bracket for the 2023 FCS Playoffs, and about the only thing that can be said for sure is that there are going to be a lot of teams with uneasy sleeps tonight.
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 final weekend is poised to have a lot of drama – more than most years. Only three out of the ten possible autobids have been positively determined and how those play out will determine how many spare at-large spots will be available.
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.
If the GPI were being used to determine at-large capability outside of the Top 12, it would seem like very good news for Youngstown State (15), Albany (16), UT Martin (18) and Chattanooga (21), who are scoring well in the GPI with only two weekends of regular season football to go.
Using the Sagarin rankings for this week of Nov. 4th, the following would be the field of 24 teams for the 2023/24 Division I FCS Football Playoffs. South Dakota State would be the top seed using the rankings for this week, while Montana State would be the second seed. North Dakota State is the #3,.
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.
We come up with a composite list of 24 teams – teams based on CSJ’s staff picks on who we think will be in the field, not based on a formula, but who we project comes away with it. With the caveat that there is still everything to play for, and plenty can (and will) change, this is the field that we think, collectively, will be the field in November.
If the Gridiron Power Index were used to seed the teams in the FCS playoffs, this week’s rankings seem to indicate that the top seeds would be dominated by Big Sky and Missouri Valley Football conference teams.
Here are the Top 25 FCS rankings based on the Sagarin rankings for the week ending Oct. 28th, 2023 following the Week 9 games. We will will have a final ranking after all bowl games and the national championship game in January. South Dakota State remains in the top spot as the Jackrabbits have started.
The FCS playoff committee released its Top 10 rankings on Thursday, and absent was Southern Illinois, which was ranked No. 7 in the 10/23 release of the GPI this week.
Here are the Top 25 FCS rankings based on the Sagarin rankings for the week ending Oct. 21st, 2023 following the Week 8 games. We will will have a final ranking after all bowl games and the national championship game in January. South Dakota State remains in the top spot as the Jackrabbits have started.
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.
Once again, a shift of power in the Missouri Valley Conference has rocked the GPI this week.
Here are the Top 25 FCS rankings based on the Sagarin rankings for the week ending Oct. 14th, 2023 following the Week 7 games. We will will have a final ranking after all bowl games and the national championship game in January. South Dakota State remains in the top spot as the Jackrabbits have started.
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.
There was shuffling in the Top 10 of the Gridiron Power Index this week, with big movers Harvard, Youngstown State, Central Arkansas and NCCU making moves in the poll.
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
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.
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.
“College football is better for having Roy Kidd on the sidelines, EKU is better for having Roy Kidd on its campus, and we are all better for knowing and working with him,” Roan said.
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.
Holy Cross’ dominance over the last four seasons really means there is only one main question worth asking in terms of a Patriot League preview: Is it an impossible task for the other six teams to have any sort of shot to dethrone Holy Cross?
This Sunday – idiotically slotted against the NFL – the FCS National Championship Game will feature North Dakota State and South Dakota State in what will likely be the least watched ABC National Championship game in our lifetimes.
The leak of the announcement late Sunday, that Yale offensive coordinator Kevin Cahill was going to be the 30th head coach in Lehigh history, was a surprise to many.
Deion’s hopeful legacy at Jackson State is likely to be a lot less lasting and impactful than people thought.
The University of Northern Colorado (UNC) has made drastic changes to their football program in the past 15 days. Ed McCaffrey was fired after three years and two played seasons as the team struggled with a 6-16 (4-12) record. Additionally, there was the “clip-board scandal” at Montana State with Max throwing a broken clip-board at.
Using the Sagarin rankings for this week of Nov. 19th–the final regular season week for the Division I FCS., the following would be the field of 24 teams for the 2022/23 Division I FCS Football Playoffs. South Dakota State would be the top seed using the rankings for this week, while MVFC mate North Dakota.
Below are the Top 25 rankings based on the Sagarin rankings for the week ending November 19th, 2022, the final rankings of the regular season. CSJ will show a final ranking after the national championship game in January. South Dakota State remains in the top position after having a bye week in the last week.
Final Projected 2022 FCS Playoff Bracket
Many have said it’s something you should do at least once in your life. Whether you’re a Lehigh person, a Lafayette person, whether you’re from the Lehigh Valley, whether you consider yourself a college football fan, it’s a pilgrimage, a bucket list item.
It is now at crunch time as we enter the last week of the regular season. The Week 11 results make the MVFC field a little muddled. We do know that South Dakota State is the outright champion of the league and North Dakota State will finish in second in the standings. The Jackrabbits will.
For a long, long time – especially this year – I thought that college football might be dying, especially at the FCS level. But this week, especially, I am starting to realize that isn’t the case. The great Rivalries survive, because that’s what they do.
It all comes down to this.
We’re now officially a week away from Selection Sunday, and Samford, with their win over Chattanooga, is officially in the field. Other than that, it’s a big heaping helping of chaos that means a ton can still happen on the last day of the regular season!
Lehigh won, but beating Colgate was special in a way that many won’t understand.