Covering All College Sports Since 2012
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 – 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.
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.
It was all fun spring football on a Saturday afternoon – a celebration, a gate swinging open for 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Villanova looked like a well-oiled machine with tons of veterans and few weak spots, at least in the first week of the season.
This Saturday at Lehigh, folks will be able to see for themselves the progress that has been made since Cahill’s hiring last December.
This Saturday, Lehigh will kick off the 2023 season, and the Kevin Cahill era, at home against Villanova. And there are a lot of unknowns.
Since I can’t do anything half-assed, here’s a detailed Lehigh fan’s guide to the Mountain Hawks’ 2023 non-conference opponents. There’s no easy win penciled in here, as you will see.
This past Saturday at Murray Goodman stadium, you could hear loud music, the Marching 97 and loud yelling on 3rd down, only the season hadn’t started.
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?
As the biggest Lehigh fan you know, what would I want my son to experience over the next four years? I developed a list of “fan asks” to say exactly what I think would be an excellent way for my son, and indeed anyone in and around the Lehigh football program, to experience.
Ever since the hiring of head coach Kevin Cahill in December – the first true “outsider” to be hired as a Lehigh head football coach in decades – it’s been an adjustment for everyone.
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.
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.
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.
Lehigh won, but beating Colgate was special in a way that many won’t understand.
When Lehigh (1-8, 1-3 Patriot League) faces off against Colgate (3-6, 2-2 Patriot League) this weekend at Murray Goodman Stadium, there will be stakes.
WORCESTER, MA – Watching last week’s thrilling Holy Cross/Fordham game as someone who’s watched a lot of Lehigh football in my life, it was hard to not get flashbacks. The thrilling 53-52 win by Holy Cross (8-0, 4-0) over Fordham (6-2, 2-1) was unquestionably the game of the year in the Patriot League, if not.
If you’re a numbers person, it might be best to skip down to the end, because this Saturday, the Bucknell Bison (0-6, 0-2) will be traveling to Bethlehem to take on the Lehigh Mountain Hawks (1-6, 1-1) in a battle between teams that, to put it mildly, are desperate to get into the win column.
For the Lehigh Mountain Hawks (1-5, 1-1 Patriot) and the Cornell Big Red (2-2, 0-2 Ivy), the final non-league matchup at Schoellkopf field in Ithaca, NY provides a similar opportunity for both teams.
It took all of three plays at the beginning of the second half for Fordham to retake the lead.
College football is a lot like a burlesque show. As the show rolls forward, more and more gets revealed about what your college football team is.
After a promising drive stalled ending with a missed 40 yard field goal attempt, Monmouth (3-2, 1-1 CAA) would score the next 35 points en route to a humbling 35-7 win over Lehigh (1-4, 1-0 Patriot), handing the Mountain Hawks their third straight defeat.
What might have happened to the Patriot League had the Presidents genuinely gave a fair hearing, and accepted, Monmouth as a member?
PRINCETON, NJ – It was a beautiful late autumn day at Princeton stadium, a perfect afternoon for football. And for a half, at least, it was a very good afternoon for Lehigh football as well. The halftime score read Lehigh 10, Princeton 10, and Mountain Hawk fans had every right to be excited. Heavy underdogs.
I do not know whether in this game (slated to kick off at 3pm), in this 62nd meeting of the series, Lehigh (1-0, 1-2) will experience a win or a loss against Princeton (1-0, 0-0). What I do know is there is enough of a rivalry between the two schools that I can tell you a little bit about the ecstasy and agony of these matchups.
