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North Dakota State didn’t just reclaim the Dakota Marker for themselves with their 13-9 win over archrival South Dakota State – they also reclaimed the top spot in this week’s Gridiron Power Index (GPI).
This Saturday, coming off of a rare double bye week, the Lehigh Mountain Hawks didn’t start with enough momentum, further lost that momentum through turnovers and penalties, and never really were in the game as Lehigh (3-3, 0-1 Patriot League) fell to Yale (3-2, 0-2 Ivy) this past Saturday in the Yale Bowl 38-23.
Lehigh was never meant to have a double bye week in the middle of October. But they did.
The win put Bucknell (3-2, 1-0 Patriot) in first place in the Patriot League, while Lehigh (3-2, 0-1 Patriot) will have an unusually long time to stew on the loss with two consecutive bye weeks before their next football game.
This week, Lehigh (3-1, 0-0 Patriot) will be playing their first league game against Bucknell (2-2, 0-0 Patriot) with a unique dynamic.
BETHLEHEM, PA – “This was a statement game for us,” Lehigh (3-1, 0-0 Patriot) head coach Kevin Cahill said after a hard-fought but clear-cut 35-20 win over Princeton (0-1, 0-0 Ivy) this Saturday at Murray Goodman Stadium. Looking back on a game in front of a big, raucous family weekend of 6,217 fans, it seemed.
This weekend, the Mountain Hawks return to Bethlehem with a strange, new feeling of “being back”, to face Princeton (0-0, 0-0 Ivy League), themselves back from their 5-5 Ivy League campaign last season.
At home last week, the game was over at halftime. This week, the Lehigh Mountain Hawks (2-1, 0-0 PL) had to hold on in the final minute against the LIU Sharks (0-3, 0-0 NEC) to win 20-17.
For the Lehigh University Mountain Hawks (1-1, 0-0 Patriot League), playing the Long Island University Sharks (0-2, 0-0 NEC) at Bethpage FCU Stadium, everything about “Shark Week” is new. It’s the first time Lehigh has ever traveled to Brookville, Long Island to play a football game.
The number that kept popping up during Lehigh’s (1-1, 0-0 PL) win over Wagner (1-1, 0-0 NEC) was “2016”, probably the last number any member of Lehigh Nation might have imagined surfacing on a rainy afternoon at Murray Goodman Stadium.
BETHLEHEM, PA – From the moment head coach Kevin Cahill stepped onto campus as Lehigh’s head football coach, he’s been talking about making Murray Goodman stadium a true home field advantage. He was right to broach the subject. The last time Lehigh had a winning record was in 2016, when the Mountain Hawks were 9-2,.
RB Luke Yoder capped off a 9 play, 85 yard drive to tie the game at 7 late in the first quarter, but ultimately a deep, physical Army (1-0, 0-0) team led by budding stars QB Bryson Daily and bruising RB Kanye Udoh were too much for the Mountain Hawks (0-1, 0-0) in a 42-7 victory.
BETHLEHEM, PA – I’ve been a Lehigh football fan now for a very long time, and I would like to lead this preview to simply say that this weekend, Mountain Hawk fans will be experiencing something they haven’t experienced since 2002. I don’t mean “play a service academy.” On September 15th, 2018, Lehigh played Navy,.
BETHLEHEM, PA – Over the preseason, Lehigh football revealed a brand-new uniform design that freshens up the kit they had been using over the past six years. For a program that hasn’t had a winning record since 2016, it’s not the only thing that Lehigh Nation hopes is brand new going into the 2024 season..
Richmond’s Rival, William & Mary, was going to be a founding member of the Colonial League, which is now known as the Patriot League. It was almost a done deal.
The number of underclassmen on the field was astounding, even for such a young team as the Mountain Hawks.
Every member of Lehigh Nation wants to put last year’s 2-9 season behind them. In 2024, the Mountain Hawks will do just that with a highly unusual 11 game schedule.
There is this huge diversity of teams lumped in FCS that I’m less familiar with – and that no FCS watcher is familiar with. And that’s exactly the problem.
BETHLEHEM, PA – It wasn’t a surprise, really, but it was a surprise. Coming off a 2-9 season that was “not up to our standard, not up to Lehigh standard”, head coach Kevin Cahill said in his opening remarks, the Lehigh Mountain Hawks were picked to finish sixth in the seven-team Patriot League for 2024..
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.
Like many things in the history of the NCAA, the survival of the Yankee Conference a a football-only construct was an accident.
How long will 90% of the NCAA’s membership accept less-than status?
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.
