Archive For The “Football” Category
It would be easy to hate right now. It would be tempting to write a screed about unhappy I am about how this season is going so far, to make a report card filled with C’s and D’s. It would be tempting to write something in all caps on my displeasure about the outcome of the last three games.
Because I am not happy.
I am not happy with the energy level brought by the team. I am not happy with three huge 60+ yard pass plays that resulted in three Fordham touchdowns. I am not happy with Fordham, who averaged 1.0 yard per carry, routinely get nine-yard plunges for gains. I am not happy with a single offensive touchdown while the final score is in doubt. I’m not happy with unconverted 3rd downs. And I’m not happy, on a 3rd and 27, calling for a toss right to RB Dominick Bragalone.
Instead of hashing all that is wrong and needs to be fixed, however, I’m going to share with you what I think Lehigh is, and where Lehigh football fits into that. I hope that in here, somewhere, may be some sort of answer to all of these problems.
It’s time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Fordham Rams.
The first point of information about the 0-5 Rams you need to know is that they are young, and rebuilding.
Joe Conlin is their first-year head coach, and you had better believe that he and his team would love nothing better than to get Conlin’s first head coaching victory against Lehigh, a team that Fordham has beaten in four of the last five meetings between these two programs.
But the 2018 Rams are vastly different than the team that suited up QB Kevin Anderson and current Arizona Cardinal RB Chase Edmonds on their roster. Anderson, who was a transfer from an FBS school (Marshall), had loads of experience and additionally used a redshirt year at Marshall, and Edmonds, as any reader of this blog would know, stepped in immediately as a freshman on Rose Hill and it was abundantly clear he was a generational talent running the ball.
For Fordham, this team is adopting a new philosophy under a new coaching tree. Gone is the Joe Moorhead/Andrew Breiner tree, having finally settled down at Mississippi State. In is Conlin, a long-time Yale assistant coach who has made stops at a ton of different great, powerful FCS college football programs, including both New Hampshire and Havard as well as the Bulldogs.
So growing pains. certainly, were to be expected, especially with a schedule that included an FBS team (UNC-Charlotte), an FCS Playoff team (Stony Brook) and a historically good CAA team (Richmond).
One of the great things about being a student of Lehigh history is, no matter how dark your current timeline is, there is probably a time when the school had encountered something even darker.That is where I found myself this weekend, in a deep funk af…
It’s time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Princeton Tigers.
Princeton released their game notes earlier in the week and today added to their preview pack an interview previewing the Lehigh game from head coach Bob Surace.
Surace did make an observation about Lehigh that was worth mentioning, after philosophic about the abilities of RB Dominick Bragalone.
“You wanted to play them when Penn played them,” he said. “After playing a Top 4 type team in Villanova, and against a Navy team that plays in a bowl game every year, you wanted to play them then, not after a bye. Those change the outlook of everything you’re doing.”
As Lehigh fans, we do tend to forget that Lehigh has arguably played the most challenging schedule they’ve had in a decade. Not that that’s any sort of excuse, but the truth is that in order to be considered a top team in FCS, the Mountain Hawks need to be able to compete in games like this against nationally-ranked teams like Princeton – and beat them.
After a long, long weekend without Lehigh football, the Mountain Hawks this Saturday head to Princeton, New Jersey for a 1:00 PM date to play the Princeton Tigers.
If you can’t make it to the game, the game is available in two ways.
If through your cable service you subscribe to NBC Sports Philadelphia, you can watch the game live on that station. Additionally, you can stream the game through the NBC Sports Live App.
If you don’t subscribe to NBC Sports Philadelphia, the game will also be streamed though the pay streaming service ESPN+.
ESPN+ requires a monthly subscription of $4.99/month also carries a lot of college football games during the course of the season (including all the Ivy League home games), so it might be worth your while.
With a subscription, if you have a Roku box in your home, you can stream ESPN+ directly to your TV from there. If you have the ESPN App on your phone and Chromecast, you can bring it up on your phone and push the “Cast” button to have it stream directly on your TV. Or you can navigate here on your desktop in a Chrome browser and use the “Cast” button from there.
Of course that solution works even better when you pair it with the local radio broadcast, either off your old-fashioned radio, streamed through TuneIn or just simply going to the LVFoxSports.com webpage and listening that way. Matt Kerr, Lance Haynes and Matt Markus are on the call this Saturday.
Are you like me – not all that sure of what to do this weekend now that there’s no Lehigh football to watch?
Fortunately, there’s loads of college football game to watch – there are games on Friday and Saturday to enjoy to scout out Lehigh’s upcoming opponents – and they don’t even impinge on College Football Gameday at Happy Valley, either.
(Photo Credit: Philadelphia Inquirer)
It’s time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Penn Quakers.
Penn’s game notes were out in good time, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, thankfully, still does a pretty good job in covering the Quakers in an independent way. Both were invaluable for my analysis.
Unusually, Lehigh faces Penn this time around in a game that is not the Quakers’ season opener. In prior years that made it tricky for the Mountain Hawks to sometimes get a full sense of what head coach Ray Priore might be doing, because there would be no true game film to study, only practice film and, if they’re lucky, an accurate two-deep.
This year, though, Penn has already had their first game, playing Bucknell in a game which they won 34-17. It was a strange contest, basically won in the first five minutes thanks to 17 points donated to the Quakers via two Bison turnovers and a blocked punt. Both teams would only put up 17 points the rest of the way each.
This week, Lehigh makes the short trip down to Franklin Field in Pennsylvania to take on the Quakers of Penn.
Kickoff time is at 3:00 PM and if you can’t make it to the game, the game is available though a pay service called ESPN+.
This isn’t the exact same thing as ESPN the station.
It works basically the way ESPN3 does, except that it requires a monthly subscription of $4.99 per month (though last I heard there was the availability of a free trial subscription available). ESPN+ also carries a lot of college football games during the course of the season (including all the Ivy League home games), so it might be worth your while. (Replays of the game I believe are available on ESPN3 for free later.)
With a subscription, if you have a Roku box in your home, you can stream ESPN+ directly to your TV from there. If you have the ESPN App on your phone and Chromecast, you can bring it up on your phone and push the “Cast” button to have it stream directly on your TV. Or you can navigate here on your desktop in a Chrome browser and use the “Cast” button from there.
Of course that solution works even better when you pair it with the local radio broadcast, either off your old-fashioned radio, streamed through TuneIn or just simply going to the LVFoxSports.com webpage and listening that way. Matt Kerr, Mike Yadush and Matt Markus are on the call this Saturday.
I’ve never done one of these before after Lehigh’s played an FBS opponent.
That’s because the last FBS opponent Lehigh played was in 2003, when the Mountain Hawks lost to UConn 35-17.
The Lehigh Football Nation blog was in its first year of existence back in 2003, and undoubtedly I wrote about it – but it’s not currently in the archives here at Blogger, because I archived those first two years offline.
What I can tell you about that UConn game was that Lehigh faced off against a future NFL player in QB Dan Orlovsky and that QB Chad Schwenk got hurt late in that game, which made it his final game in a Mountain Hawks uniform and effectively threw the rest of that season in some turmoil.
Fortunately turmoil doesn’t seem to be a part of the report card today.
(Photo Credit: Capital-Gazette)
It’s time to go full nerd and do a full-blown breakdown of the Navy Midshipmen.
I can’t tell you how many of these previews I’ve done where I get game notes late Friday evening, had to play games with Ivy League depth charts to try to divine game plans, and the like.
Some schools Lehigh plays don’t have any local media anymore, so finding out more about the starting players and the like is extremely difficult.
Not so this week. For the first time in 15 years, Lehigh plays an FBS team, but not just a regional school, say, from the Midwest – they play Navy, a school with national and international reach.
Game notes were out early and were detailed.
The coverage of Navy football isn’t just from the local Capital-Gazette – which continues, through tragedy, to be stellar – but from national media, too. In fact their last two games – against Hawai’i and Memphis – were big-time affairs in the national world of college football.
There is no shortage of media about Navy football or Navy football players. In that way specifically, it’s like a breath of fresh air.
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