Archive For The “Football” Category
This weekend Lehigh’s Brown/White Spring game will be happening at 11:00 AM at Murray Goodman Stadium.
Admission is free and it will be Lehigh Nation’s first view of what the 2019 Lehigh Mountain Hawk football team will look like.
This spring season has been unusual by Lehigh standards where there have generally been public releases as to how people are doing in regards to moving up and down the depth chart. With the hiring of new head coach Tom Gilmore, this spring seems to be more about establishing “Gilmore fundamentals” as well as assessing the overall situation.
“The most important thing we are hoping to accomplish in spring ball is to establish good fundamentals in all phases of the game while establishing great work habits,” he told me this week. “We will install a modest amount of the schemes and try to build confidence in the base portions of the offense, defense and special teams.”
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Too often, we define football players by statistics.
As sports obsessives, we try to come up with figures and metrics to measure people, their contributions and their relative worth. QB rating, yards per carry, tackles for loss – all numbers of measurement.
Fans forget that there are human beings behind all of those numbers. They don’t encapsulate what it is to be a football player, teammate, person, fighter, boyfriend, husband, and father.
Brett Snyder, who passed away this past Sunday at the age of 41, spent his entire life proving, successfully, that numbers don’t matter.
He spent a lifetime going beyond mere numbers and showing that heart, fight, perseverance, and touching as many lives as possible in a positive way is much more important.
It is the toughness you bring to life, the faith you show, and celebrating life’s blessings that mean everything.
I learned this through Brett’s extraordinary life.
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I read the announcement that head coach Andy Coen was stepping down as head football coach late Friday evening.
It was an announcement that I was expecting, to some degree.
Those of use who have been following the program closely knew that something was amiss with Andy.
And yet, the reason for him needing to step down was devastating.
“Life has thrown me a curveball,” Coen said in the press release on Friday, December 7th, 2018. “I am in the early stages [of early onset Alzheimer’s disease] and it is best for me to eliminate stress and concentrate on my health and well-being. My wife, Laura, and my children, Molly, Nolan and Finn have supported me throughout my career and are my biggest fans. This is a very difficult decision for all of us, but it is what is best at this time.”
It was the gutting, pit-in-the-stomach diagnosis nobody wanted to be true. Just like that, a bigger challenge than simply winning football games faces the man who has been heading the program for the last thirteen years.
As the reality of the diagnosis sunk in over the weekend, the players who played for him and the people he touched poured out their gratitude on Twitter and Facebook. I did too, feeling a jumble of emotions and memories that have been difficult to process.
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It was a difficult preseason for both Lehigh (2-8, 1-4 PL) and Lafayette (3-7. 2-3 PL), but after a long stretch of games, we’re finally in the one-game regular season.
The experience called “The Rivalry”, the Lehigh Valley event of the fall, is finally upon us, taking place in Easton at 12:30 PM at Fisher Field.
If you can’t make it to the game, you can catch the contest on TV in the Lehigh Valley via two feeds.
The “good guy” feed is the local broadcast on WFMZ 69, with Steve Degler, Mike Yadush, and Will Lewis on the call. This is also streamed online via the Patriot League Network.
The “bad guy” feed is also locally broadcast on the Lafayette Sports Network on WBPH-60, RCN, and nationally on MASN. This is also streamed via the Patriot League Network, and Gary Laubach, Mike Joseph, and John Leone are on that call.
You can also catch the game on FOX AM 1230 and 1320, with Matt Kerr, Tom Fallon, Matt Markus and Jim Guzzo on the call, with the most excellent Lehigh pregame show starting at 11:30 AM. You can get it through your regular radio, listen to the broadcast streamed through TuneIn, or just simply going to the LVFoxSports.com webpage and listening that way.
Additionally, there are alumni viewing parties to watch the game all over the country. If you can’t find a parking spot in Easton to watch the game, you can simply head on over to Bethlehem at the legendary Goosey Gander, order a roast beef and turkey Gombo, and watch the game there. (Fun fact: a significant amount of my Freshman 15 came from Gombos.)
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It was a difficult preseason for both Lehigh (2-8, 1-4 PL) and Lafayette (3-7. 2-3 PL), but after a long stretch of games, we’re finally in the one-game regular season.
The experience called “The Rivalry”, the Lehigh Valley event of the fall, is finally upon us, taking place in Easton at 12:30 PM at Fisher Field.
If you can’t make it to the game, you can catch the contest on TV in the Lehigh Valley via two feeds.
The “good guy” feed is the local broadcast on WFMZ 69, with Steve Degler, Mike Yadush, and Will Lewis on the call. This is also streamed online via the Patriot League Network.
The “bad guy” feed is also locally broadcast on the Lafayette Sports Network on WBPH-60, RCN, and nationally on MASN. This is also streamed via the Patriot League Network, and Gary Laubach, Mike Joseph, and John Leone are on that call.
You can also catch the game on FOX AM 1230 and 1320, with Matt Kerr, Tom Fallon, Matt Markus and Jim Guzzo on the call, with the most excellent Lehigh pregame show starting at 11:30 AM. You can get it through your regular radio, listen to the broadcast streamed through TuneIn, or just simply going to the LVFoxSports.com webpage and listening that way.
Additionally, there are alumni viewing parties to watch the game all over the country. If you can’t find a parking spot in Easton to watch the game, you can simply head on over to Bethlehem at the legendary Goosey Gander, order a roast beef and turkey Gombo, and watch the game there. (Fun fact: a significant amount of my Freshman 15 came from Gombos.)
Read more »
Lehigh and Colgate is always a big game, whether both teams are going in undefeated or, as in this case, an 2-7 team is squaring off against a 8-0 team.
In a testimony to how evenly matched both of these teams have been over the years, no team has won more than 3 straight against the other since the inception of the Patriot League.
Colgate and Lehigh have faced off 55 times, and the overall record has been, fittingly, close, with Colgate holding a slender 29-24-2 advantage. The last tie came in 1980, a 17-17 tie at Taylor Stadium in which Lehigh’s John Whitehead and Colgate’s Fred Dunlap faced off as head coach. In a way, that hotly-contested tie sort-of epitomizes the competitiveness of this rivalry today.
Lehigh and Colgate is always a big game, whether both teams are going in undefeated or, as in this case, an 2-7 team is squaring off against a 8-0 team.
In a testimony to how evenly matched both of these teams have been over the years, no team has won more than 3 straight against the other since the inception of the Patriot League.
Colgate and Lehigh have faced off 55 times, and the overall record has been, fittingly, close, with Colgate holding a slender 29-24-2 advantage. The last tie came in 1980, a 17-17 tie at Taylor Stadium in which Lehigh’s John Whitehead and Colgate’s Fred Dunlap faced off as head coach. In a way, that hotly-contested tie sort-of epitomizes the competitiveness of this rivalry today.
There aren’t any Patriot League title considerations at play this weekend at Murray Goodman Stadium, but there’s a whole lot to play for in this intense Patriot League rivalry.
Lehigh (2-7, 1-3 PL) takes on Colgate (8-0, 5-0 PL) this week in what seems to be annually the grudge match of the Patriot League.
If you can’t make it to the game, you can catch the contest on TV on Service Electric 2 in the Lehigh Valley, with Steve Degler, Doug Heater and Kristi Fulkerson on the call. That Service Electric 2 broadcast is also streamed online for free via the Patriot League Network.
You can also catch the game on FOX AM 1230 and 1320, with Matt Kerr, Andy Phillips, and Steve Lomangino on the call, with the most excellent Lehigh pregame show starting at 11:30 AM. You can get it through your regular radio, listen to the broadcast streamed through TuneIn, or just simply going to the LVFoxSports.com webpage and listening that way.
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There aren’t any books detailing the 4-7 2009 Lehigh football season, nor is it likely that the exploits of that season will be etched in stone at the base of a statue for head football coach Andy Coen.
Yet it’s a time and place which I return to often when I think back on Lehigh seasons past, and it’s where I find myself today as well.
The 2009 season felt like an inflection point for Coen’s coaching tenure. His first three seasons, 6-5, 5-6 and 5-6, boasted one Patriot League co-championship, but had fallen short of the lofty expectations that had been set during the Kevin Higgins and Pete Lembo eras of undefeated seasons, playoff wins, and basically scaring the pants off of Lehigh football opponents up and down the East Coast.
And when the Mountain Hawks limped to a 1-5 start, the fifth being an awful 7-0 loss to Yale whose only points resulted from a fake punt, it felt like Andy’s time at Lehigh was nearing an end. Nobody actually said officially that Andy’s job was in jeopardy, but you felt like the season was on the brink of falling completely off the rails, especially if the team truly had lost their will to play football.
But then, after bottoming out against Yale, something clicked against Bucknell.
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We break down the Bucknell game – and we give our fearless prediction, below the flip.
Like Lehigh, the Bison are 1-7, but unlike Lehigh, the Bison have played a whole lot of close games.
Two weeks ago, Bucknell came a two-point conversion away from tying Lafayette but fell just short in a 29-27 loss to the Leopards, and had the ball with a chance to win the game late in the fourth quarter.
They also played William and Mary close to start the season, falling 14-7, and their lone win of the season came against Holy Cross, the same Crusader team that walloped Lehigh last weekend 56-0. When the Bison played them, two Bucknell touchdowns and two Bucknell field goals were enough to carry the Bison through in a 19-16 win.
Like many Lehigh opponents, Bucknell always enjoys extracting their pound of Mountain Hawk flesh if they are able. The Mountain Hawks have won 17 of their last 19 meetings against the Bison, and they are likely to put their absolute best foot forward with a chance to send a message. This is this group of seniors’ final chance to be able to beat Lehigh, and they have to be licking their chops looking at last week’s game film.
