Archive For The “Al Bagnoli” Category
By now you’ve seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm.
Perhaps it was Penn’s 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe it was Princeton’s 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale’s shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend.
The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League.
But it’s not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.
Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.
The four losses – Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown – were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League.
Why the Ivy League, and why now? How has the Ivy League turned things around, completely, as a league?
The answer appears to lie with three converging trends that every Ivy is starting to exploit to their advantage – increasing the overall number of athletic admits, using their so-called non-scholarship status to make a mockery of the scholarship limits of FCS football, and allowing essentially an unlimited roster size for home games.
By now you’ve seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm.
Perhaps it was Penn’s 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe it was Princeton’s 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale’s shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend.
The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League.
But it’s not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.
Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.
The four losses – Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown – were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League.
Why the Ivy League, and why now? How has the Ivy League turned things around, completely, as a league?
The answer appears to lie with three converging trends that every Ivy is starting to exploit to their advantage – increasing the overall number of athletic admits, using their so-called non-scholarship status to make a mockery of the scholarship limits of FCS football, and allowing essentially an unlimited roster size for home games.
Saturday’s game is a personal landmark for head coach Andy Coen: it marks the first time he’s coached a Lehigh team at Penn since he was hired there from Al Bagnoli‘s staff back in December of 2005.
He’ll be facing off against another former Bagnoli assistant coach, Ray Priore, who was a defensive coordinator at Penn when Andy was an offensive coordinator there.
Franklin Field, then, becomes one of the big #NarrativeStreet storylines going into Saturday, and for Lehigh, not a good reason.
Since 1895, when the enormous field was built in downtown Philadelphia, Lehigh has won exactly four times at the iconic venue, and the overall Brown and White record there is 4-28. Along the way, among the many losses by Lehigh there, came one recent one in particular that snapped a long Lehigh regular-season winning streak.
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Offseasons are long after season-ending losses to Lafayette, but it seems like no game after a Lafayette loss has been as anticipated as this one.
All offseason – and I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone – there’s always been question for the Mountain Hawk football team concerning a football game played last November:
“Did you actually watch a tape the 150th Rivalry game in Yankee Stadium last November?
“What was your reaction? Did you toss the DVD out the window, or set it on fire?”
“Do you think about that loss every day, or simply once a week?”
This Friday up at New Britain, Lehigh football players and their fans will finally have something to talk about that doesn’t involve that infernal game in the Bronx last November.
Oddly enough, they are facing a team that comes from a similar place. The Central Connecticut State Blue Devils, 3-9 last season and in their second season under head coach Pete Rossamondo, wants to erase the memory of a six-game slide that doomed their 2014 season.
Lehigh’s relationship with the schools of the Ivy League go all the way back to the 1880s.
Yes, really.
In 1885, Lehigh’s fledgling football team opened the season with the University of Pennsylvania, who throttled the Brown and White 54-0.
1887 was the year that Princeton first squared off against Lehigh, throttling them 80-0
And it would be 1890 when Yale first hosted Lehigh, 26-0 winners.
These three traditional Ivy League football opponents appear on Lehigh’s football schedule for 2015 and will be a critical litmus test for this your Mountain Hawk football team.
But one opponent stands out more because of the fact that Lehigh hasn’t played them in more than a decade.
We’re going to be talking today about Penn, a rival (with a little r) that hasn’t faced off against Lehigh in over a decade.
