The Sudden End of the Kevin Cahill Era

The picture above came from Bethlehem, PA, at Kevin Cahill‘s introductory press conference as Lehigh head football coach back in 2022. It holds a special place in my heart because at that moment he was looking at me, after I asked him a question about Lehigh dropping 63 points on Yale back in 2016 in an amazing 63-35 win at the Yale Bowl, a game which I saw in person. It drew that smile out of him, and gave the rest of Lehigh Nation their first glimpse of their new head coach – something that connected the man to the place instantly, I think.

Is it wrong to think of college football head coaching tenures as an “era”?

If it indeed is wrong, for sure, I am probably the guiltiest offender on the planet.

Maybe it is something that is an occupational hazard of being a Lehigh football fan – the idea of a college football coach leading and running a football program over many many years, or decades.

By any measure, Lehigh football has had some amazing head football coaches – perhaps why, in my won mind, I coined them “eras”.

Kevin Higgins, Pete Lembo, Andy Coen, and yes, also Tom Gilmore – all of them spent a lot of time on South Mountain. All of them felt like “eras”.

They didn’t only spend long periods as Lehigh head football coaches – all of them were extremely successful assistants at Lehigh at one time before becoming head coach, winning Lambert Cups and Patriot League Championships.  Even if they were head coach for only four years, as Pete Lembo and Tom Gilmore were, they were a part of so many prior championship teams that they felt like much longer “eras” than they actually were.

As a result of that, almost immediately after his hire in 2022, I had started calling it the “Kevin Cahill Era”. 

It was super presumptuous of me, of course – Lehigh had just come off of a tough 2-9 season, and the Mountain Hawks hadn’t had a winning season since 2016. There was no guarantee that this longtime Yale assistant coach from Massachusetts – he had been there for more than a decade, after all – would come in and have an impact.

But even from his opening press conference in December of 2022, it felt like coach Cahill was bringing a big breath of fresh air into a program that, for whatever reason, was infected with doubt and frustration at that time.

Even though I’ve been doing this for a long time, I guess I, too, got caught up in it right away as well, as I’m wont to do. As far as I was concerned, the Kevin Cahill Era had begun.

Cahill’s hire broke a hiring trend that saw Lehigh hire an existing or former assistant Lehigh coach that dated all the way back to 1986, when a 39 year old offensive coordinator from Brown named Hank Small was hired by the Engineers to replace the retiring National Championship-winning John Whitehead. (Hank Small, even though he wasn’t an assistant at Lehigh, spent eight years as head coach of the Engineers – certainly long enough to be considered an era as well. Whitehead before him served nine seasons.)

When it was announced he was to be Lehigh’s next head coach, people came out of the woodwork to tell me about him. To a person, every Yale person that me and my family came across at that time were extremely sad to see Cahill leave Yale, and told me that we were getting a great head coach.

Back then, I didn’t see that as a sign.

Act I: Reforming The Culture

Even during that tough first year it felt like things were going in a positive direction, even if it didn’t the record didn’t show it.

“Looking back on a sometimes painful 2023 Lehigh football season,” I wrote, “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.”

Cahill’s first win as an FCS head coach came against Merrimack, won 14-12 at a neutral site – of all places, Harvard Stadium.  

“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,” I wrote.  “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.”

After that game, Coach Cahill told me, still on the whiteboards in the recently-powered-up Harvard Stadium were the plays Yale assistant coach Kevin Cahill wrote on in preparation for the Harvard/Yale game.

Back then, I didn’t see that as a sign.

2023 was a tough season, forgotten by most, probably, but not by me. There were a lot of hung heads in the locker room that season after a lot of losses, a year where Lehigh was playing an enormous number of freshmen and sophomores mostly out of necessity. To the players credit, they never seemed resigned – they seemed genuinely pissed. That was part of Kevin Cahill’s doing too – to make losing unacceptable, to raise the bar. Raising the bar wasn’t easy, and took a lot of unpleasant press conferences, but it was necessary.

Pretty quickly it was clear to everyone that it was going to be a rebuilding year – but also, there wasn’t any indication yet that 2024 and 2025 were about to arrive. By the time summer of 2024 arrived, Lehigh was picked to finish sixth in the seven team Patriot League, and the league consensus was to be that Lehigh was probably going to be better than 2-9, but the Mountain Hawks would still be rebuilding. Even I, not known as a Lehigh doomsdayer, thought that sixth out of seven teams was terribly out of line for a team that went 2-9 the prior season, got smoked by Lafayette in their season-ending Rivalry game, and looked like they had a longer way to travel to get back to contending for the Patriot League title.

I think that’s what was so amazing about Kevin Cahill’s time at Lehigh – more than half of it was spent seemingly pulling the entire program up by its bootstraps to remember how to win football games.

“We all want to be in the Kevin Higgins Era again, or the Pete Lembo Era again and, of course, Coach [Andy] Coen did a phenomenal job,” Cahill said to Keith Groller of The Morning Call in the 2024 preseason. “But those eras don’t happen overnight. I’ve been very honest with our alums about where we’re at and I feel they appreciate that more than anything. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’m not going to tell them we’re ready to go because we’re not. Are we a better team than we were last year? I think so. Will it result it more wins? I don’t know that either. All I do know is that we all want Lehigh to be great again and we’re all working in the right direction to have that happen.”

The quote that really resonated with me came from OL George Padezanin, who had an injury-ridden early career with Lehigh and up to that point hadn’t enjoyed a whole lot of wins as a Division I football player.

“We have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder,” Padezanin told me during Patriot League Media Day that year. “I understand we haven’t proven anything but we are dying to prove to this league, and to each other, really, who we really are on the field, and what we strive to be. The adversity [from last season] really brings the team together overall.”

Kevin Cahill and the Lehigh Mountain Hawks would indeed do just that.

Act II: The Rocketship

2024 now is seen as an amazing year, a year where the goalposts came down at Murray Goodman for the first time since 1989, the amazing playoff win over Richmond that put them back on the map nationally, the Patriot League Championship.  

But most people don’t remember that the only reason Lehigh won the title was that Holy Cross did a favor the week before #Rivalry160 by beating Bucknell in overtime in Worcester.  

On November 2nd, 2024, Lehigh had a game against Georgetown that to me felt like a crossroads for the season – are the Mountain Hawks still rebuilding, I asked? It wasn’t just some sort of motivational ploy – Lehigh had just lost recently in double overtime to Bucknell, and another conference loss would have dashed their conference hopes.

The Mountain Hawks were not in control of anything at that point.

Georgetown was in the exact same boat as Lehigh that week – with a win, and some help, they could be Patriot League Champions Were we in Year Two of a rebuild, or at the start of something bigger?. A Georgetown win could have propelled them to a title just as easily as it could Lehigh.

Had Lehigh not gone on that winning streak in November, there would have been no FCS playoffs, perhaps the goalposts wouldn’t have come down, perhaps not even a co-championship.

Picked sixth of seven teams, starting with a loss at Army, the first FBS game on Lehigh’s schedule since last decade, it was only after a late stop by LB William Parton that would give Lehigh a 20-17 win over LIU.

“We needed something like this, to win a close game,” coach Cahill said after that game. “You can’t name one guy that really stuck out, that’s the way we’re going to operate. I’m really proud of these kids. We won as a team this week. They fought all the way to the end. We faced some adversity today, and we fought through it. And that’s growth for our program.”

It was the first time any of the Lehigh football players had enjoyed having a winning record up until that time, and the first time a Kevin Cahill-led team had a winning record.

“This is why you play football,” Parton said. “This game was so much fun. Winning is fun in general. Putting in the work every week to make sure these Saturdays we come out with the wins, come out with the dubs. That’s what it’s about. It takes you back to when you’re playing young, just having fun, flying around the field with your brothers. That’s what winning is about. It was a great time.”

As things started to improve, a double overtime loss to Bucknell, a rare double bye week, and a comprehensive 35-23 loss to Yale meant Lehigh was back to a 3-3 record, one of a bunch of teams still in the Patriot League title hunt, not really meriting a mention nationally.

But an amazing run of conference wins, including a gutty 10-7 win at Holy Cross where Lehigh DE Andrew Sharga reached up and blocked a low field goal kick as time wound down, and DB Mason Moore picking up the loose ball, and running with it, with a host of elated Mountain Hawks celebrating as the clock struck zero.

“This was the type of game we expected,” coach Cahill said after this game. “You’re not going to come in here and blow a team out, nor are we going to get blown out. I’m proud of out kids in the way they fought. Holy Cross is a very physical team. We knew we had to raise our standard. It was a hard-fought game and we were glad we got the win.”

The standard being raised, they proceeded to beat Colgate, saw Holy Cross defeat Bucknell in overtime to clear the deck, and suddenly were in a “beat-Lafayette-and-you’re in” situation in #Rivalry160.

And they did – winning 38-14, the final nail being driven in by DB Mason Moore with a late pick six – and for the first time since 1989, the goalposts came down in Goodman, marched for four miles into South Bethlehem, and dumped into the Lehigh river.

I was an undergrad in 1989, and I never, ever, ever thought I would ever see a Lehigh goalpost come down again at Murray Goodman Stadium. The Lehigh students made that happen, but then again so did the football team, and Kevin Cahill. Out of all the great things Kevin Cahill did in his time in South Mountain, that one event is the one I will cherish the most, building the team, building the culture, and building the pride and joy of the alums and the student body to that moment.

By that point, you might as well have put the Lehigh team on a rocket ship.

They’d travel down to Richmond, and win in the first round of the FCS Playoffs over Richmond 20-16 before falling to a stacked Idaho Vandals team coached by Jason Eck, who a year later would be at New Mexico, who would then beat UCLA.

From that came the amazing undefeated season of 2025, one that will be talked about at Lehigh for a long, long time, with wins over Yale, Richmond (now a Patriot League member), a historic win over Lafayette 42-32 in one of the best-ever editions of the Rivalry. Murray Goodman Stadium hosted an FCS Playoff game for the first time since the early 2000s, a 14-13 loss to James Madison. (I was at that game, too.)

By December 31st, everything felt like things were still going up in Bethlehem..

The team, and coach Cahill, had earned a tremendous amount of respect – locally and nationally. Cahill would win the Eddie Robinson award for FCS Coach of the Year, an award well deserved by him.

Which is why him leaving in this way hurts so much.

The Missing Last Reel

In his three short years at Lehigh, Kevin Cahill proved himself to be an amazing head football coach. Not every coach can take a 2-9 team and make them into an FCS Playoff-winning team in a season. It did not happen overnight, but nonetheless in a short period of time he put a culture in place in Bethlehem that eradicated almost a decade of losing records and put Lehigh back in the national spotlight, a spotlight to which I was not at all sure the Mountain Hawks would be able to return.

At the same time, as a Lehigh fan It felt like I didn’t get to taste enough of it, in a strange way. Looking back, the vast majority of the Kevin Cahill era was spent climbing the mountain – both literally and figuatively. It’s easy to envision an alternate 2024 reality where Holy Cross beats Lehigh in overtime, or falls to Bucknell the following week, or Georgetown upsetting Lehigh at home, and none of this happens. The Mountain Hawks, at the conclusion of their game against Colgate in 2024, didn’t know if they were in control of their own playoff destiny.

With many key pieces on offense still in place, and an intact staff, Lehigh looked like they were were poised for another Patriot League title run – or more.

Cementing my sense of complacency about coach Cahill’s job status as head coach was the multi-year extension near the end of the year, a huge commitment by Lehigh.  

Certainly everyone at Lehigh, from President Joseph Helble on down, showed that they were willing to commit to him whatever resources they could to him staying in Bethlehem – not just money, but also with time and energy as well.  A treasured memory of mine was the view of Pres. Helble on the field in Easton after the game this past November, true joy on his face and the people surrounding him.

Lehigh didn’t have to make that commitment to Cahill, but the Lehigh community, athletic director Jeremy Gibson and everyone at Lehigh Athletics did everything to show how dedicated they were to Lehigh football, and the man leading it – only to see that contract, effectively, broken when he suddenly was announced as Yale’s new head football coach only six days after Tony Reno stepped down due to health concerns.

Just like that. An era ends.

Whatever reasons for Cahill’s departure for Yale, no matter how honorable it was, the fact is he signed an extension to be the head coach of Lehigh’s Top 10, two-time Patriot League Champion football team, and he broke that contract. It was a substantial commitment not shown any other Lehigh football coach as long as I’ve followed the program, and Cahill walked away from that. Seeing someone walking away from that hurts badly.

He walks away from a lot more than that, too. He walks away from a great foundation that still has most of the parts of their undefeated regular season last year.

2025 never felt at any time like a final Act III for the Cahill era. It had always felt like the end of an Act II, where plenty of thrilling things had happened, but a lot more great things were yet to come this year. That’s why this end of the Kevin Cahill era feels so shocking, and sudden.

So far, the Mountain Hawks had gone through a really successful recruiting cycle, secured some great local talent (and key transfers), and were getting ready for spring football, with a fantastic core of players scheduled to return, like QB Hayden Johnson, RB Luke Yoder and a lot more than just those two stars. Even with Cahill leaving, the Mountain Hawks still have a real chance to be ranked in the FCS Top 10 going into the season and might even be considered a dark horse to win the FCS National Championship in a North Dakota State Bison-less FCS, with a game against new conference foe Villanova circled on the 2026 schedule already. The timing of this announcement and move couldn’t really be worse.

Whomever takes over now at Lehigh – due to the timing of the announcement, the rumors I’m hearing are that the next Lehigh head football coach will be promoted from within – they will inherit a team built to make a run at another Patriot League Championship, and will have an eye on more.  Lehigh has made a huge commitment to football, and whomever the top man is – that will not change.  The hope is by me that Jeremy Gibson acts fast and keeps the staff together.

And yet I’m grateful for coach Cahill coming in and challenging what Lehigh football could be.

In 2019, it seemed like a crazy dream journal entry to think of Lehigh playing for an FCS National Championship. Now, that doesn’t feel too much like just a dream anymore. Kevin Cahill built that here – much more quickly than I expected – and for that I, and I’m sure most of Lehigh Nation, are eternally grateful.

I throughly enjoyed the historic season, the goalposts coming down, and the incredible experience he has given people in and aroung the Lehigh football program. It just feels like he’s leaving before the main course has been served.