Archive For November 17, 2017
Like I did last year, I compiled a list of a "greatest hits" of some of the published articles on all of the Lehigh football seniors. They are below the flip.All of the players below are listed as seniors or 5th year players on the current Le…
We break down #Rivalry153 – and we give our fearless prediction, below the flip.
I have always felt like these Rivalry games are first and foremost about the seniors.
It seems like for the most part, it’s the seniors who really answer the call and compete to their fullest potential in this bowl game at the end of the regular season. Guys like Lehigh QB Nick Shafnisky last year, who won the MVP award, or Lafayette RB Ross Scheuerman, who dominated a certain game in the Bronx that shall not be named.
When you take away The Rivalry, when you take away the emotions, when you take away the craziness, the energy – what do we have? When you look at the Xs and Os, what do you have?
Certainly, this game, like every Rivalry game, will be dictated and informed by emotion. You can count on the fact, as a Lehigh fan, that Lafayette will play out of their minds.
That shouldn’t stop us, though, from looking over the Leopards and seeing what they’re all about. They will put together a gameplan to come away with victory, and though Lafayette head coach John Garrett could very well take their entire playbook up until this point and throw it in the trash, and it’s up to the Mountain Hawks to figure out a way to stop them.
Senior OL Zach Duffy could have chosen to talk about any number of career highs when he reflected this week in The Brown and White about his time as a football player at Lehigh.
He could have talked about building the program up from a 4-7 team into a Patriot League champion, crushing the sweet dreams of Lafayette last year in Easton in the 152nd version of The Rivalry, 45-21,
or perhaps he could have waxed philosophic about the last time Lehigh squared off against Lafayette at Murray Goodman Stadium, the time when QB Nick Shafnisky threw aside a Lafayette defender and the Mountain Hawks blew the doors out with a 49-35 win.
But that’s not what he talked about at all.
He went right at the “agony of defeat” moments instead, talking about the loss to Lafayette in 2013, the infamous “it’s supposed to suck, and it’s supposed to hurt” game where an 8-2 Lehigh team faced off against a 4-6 Lafayette squad that ended up going to the FCS Playoffs with a 5-6 record.
“We had come into that game 8-2 with some momentum,” Zach wrote. “We knew Lafayette was a tough team, but we didn’t respect them because we thought they couldn’t be tougher than us.
“[And after the loss,] I had no option but to stagger through the families consoling our seniors because they would never play football again. I watched grown men cry because they’d never again make a game-changing play, score a touchdown or deliver those big hits we love on defense. We saw their faces, and we felt their pain. Not only were their careers over, but we also lost the Patriot League Championship to our archrivals. Now, four years later, we’re in a similar position.”
Lehigh has played three Rivalry games since that 2013 meeting, but none of them technically had the Patriot League Championship – and an FCS Playoff berth – on the line, because Lehigh had wrapped up the autobid and no worse than a co-championship going in. In 2013, the Mountain Hawks had everything to play for, and lost, and this season, in 2017, Lehigh is in the exact same position.
And that’s both exciting – and terrifying.
I thought a fun way this season to show off the historic nature of Lehigh and Lafayette’s football Rivalry might be to do a jump through the decades.
(If you want to learn more about the Lehigh and Lafayette Rivalry, read my book: The Rivalry: How Two Schools Started the Most Played College Football Series, available in both paperback in Kindle versions.)
Lehigh and Lafayette’s Rivalry in football started in 1884, when Lafayette student manager (and founder of the football team) Theodore Welles approached the founder and student manager of Lehigh football, J.S. Robeson, and challenged them to a game of “foot-ball”, a ground-based game that resembled more of a cross between rugby and soccer than the modern game of today.
Let’s turn back the clock 130 years, and proceed decade by decade, and you’ll see how many times Lehigh and Lafayette have played over the years, and hopefully get an appreciation on how the game changed and evolved over time.
Read more »
I thought a fun way this season to show off the historic nature of Lehigh and Lafayette’s football Rivalry might be to do a jump through the decades.
(If you want to learn more about the Lehigh and Lafayette Rivalry, read my book: The Rivalry: How Two Schools Started the Most Played College Football Series, available in both paperback in Kindle versions.)
Lehigh and Lafayette’s Rivalry in football started in 1884, when Lafayette student manager (and founder of the football team) Theodore Welles approached the founder and student manager of Lehigh football, J.S. Robeson, and challenged them to a game of “foot-ball”, a ground-based game that resembled more of a cross between rugby and soccer than the modern game of today.
Let’s turn back the clock 130 years, and proceed decade by decade, and you’ll see how many times Lehigh and Lafayette have played over the years, and hopefully get an appreciation on how the game changed and evolved over time.
Read more »
It’s something you ought to see once in your life, if you can, because it’s unique, it exudes its own special energy, and it has an emotion and spectacle that many bowl games would dream to have.
The short version of the tale of the football Rivalry between Lehigh and Lafyette is simple: It’s the most-played college football Rivalry in the world.
It’s been waged every year, with only one interruption since 1884.
And the two schools, in competition in pretty much everything since the founding of Lafayette (1826) and Lehigh (1865), eventually coalesced around football as the main driver of The Rivalry between them.
I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life being around The Rivalry. I’ve studied it, blogged about it, and even written a book about it.
The world has changed, and football has changed, a lot since 1884. What hasn’t changed, I think, is the weird and particular chemistry that seems to happen when these two teams get together for a football game. To call it a big tailgate party doesn’t really describe it. To call it schoolyard intensity doesn’t do it justice. To call it a “bowl game” doesn’t really capture it either. It’s just The Rivalry. It’s all of those things, and more.
And even if you’re not a hardcore fan of Lehigh or Lafayette, it’s worth coming to experience the craziness if you can.
There are other intense Rivalries. There are other big regular-season games that have lots at stake. But The Rivalry, the most-played Rivalry in college football, has all the energy yet also has a level in intimacy that is unmatched by any other game.
You can go to the Iron Bowl and watch a game between Alabama and Auburn in the nosebleeds. You can go into the cavernous Yale Bowl and watch Harvard play Yale. You can experience the craziness when Michigan plays Ohio State. But a game versus Lehigh and Lafayette packs the fans into an intimate setting that has all the energy and intensity yet is much more accessible and, at times, feels much more organic than those other Rivalries.
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It has been a most unusual season for Lehigh.
Starting the year off at 0-5 and getting swept in their out-of-conference schedule, the Mountain Hawks were in danger of having their season go off the rails.
But two things have come together over the last five football games that have put Lehigh on the brink of back-to-back championships.
The first is the late blooming of the Lehigh defense, which kept battling every week since the low point of the September 30th loss to Wagner to do the job in four of their five Patriot League conference games.
The second is the development of junior RB Dominick Bragalone into a bellcow running back, a back who has to be in the conversation for Patriot League offensive player of the year.
In five Patriot League games, Bragalone has run for 863 yards in 5 games, rushing for 11 touchdowns and adding two more receiving touchdowns as well.
The South Williamsport, PA native certainly wasn’t unknown before this week – after all, as a freshman and a sophomore, he had already rushed for 1,000 yards in consecutive seasons. But this year, where he’s amassed 1,200 yard rushing and an FCS-leading 16 rushing touchdowns, he’s gone into full Monster Mode, and Lehigh fans are loving every minute of it.
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The term “control of your playoff destiny” is thrown around a lot.
The 3-6 Mountain Hawks were in control of their destiny this weekend. Win against Holy Cross, and Lehigh will stay alive for no worse than a co-Patriot League Championship and possibly a ticket to the FCS Playoffs.
By the time the clock hit triple zero’s, the Mountain Hawks did what they had to do, beating the Crusaders 34-21, and keeping destiny in their own hands with one more regular season game to go – the 153rd meeting of The Rivalry next weekend vs. Lafayette.
Junior RB Dominick Bragalone carried the offense on his back with 30 carries for 205 yards and 4 touchdowns, but he and the offense fed off the energy of some big Lehigh defensive and special teams plays. Once Lehigh went up 14-0, Holy Cross would never get any closer than a touchdown.
Not headed to the the frozen tundra at Murray Goodman Stadium to catch the critical Holy Cross/Lehigh game?
Why? THIS IS IT, FOLKS. This is one to catch in person.
Yeah, I know it’s going to be cold. Yeah, I know that life is busy. But it’s a home game, it’s win, and stay alive for a Patriot League Championship. It’s a big game; there’s no doubt about it. You need to be there for big games. Future generations of your family are counting on you to say that “I was there on that freezing cold day at Murray Goodman”.
So after that sales pitch, you still can’t make it, and still want to know how to you catch the game?
Never fear. LFN’s here.
We break down the Holy Cross game – and we give our fearless prediction below the flip.
The old Forrest Gump saying that seems particularly apt about this matchup this weekend is: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You don’t know what you’re going to get.”
So as it goes with Holy Cross, whose offensive outputs in every game this year have been: 20, 20, 51, 26, 7, 36, 0, 7, 24, and 42.
Three games scoring less than 10 points; three games scoring more than 30 points, and four games scoring between 20 and 29 points – that defines inconsistency.
In their high-scoring games, the ingredient that has seemed to help Holy Cross score points in bunches are the same thing that helped Lehigh so much this week: turnovers.
In Holy Cross’ two most impressive wins – against New Hampshire and against Fordham – in both games, the sequence “Holy Cross touchdown, get ball back after a turnover, Holy Cross touchdown” played a huge part in their wins. Once they got up by two scores, it was a hill that neither opponent could climb.
It is that sequence, in my opinion, that needs to be avoided at all costs.
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