Archive For The “Ivy League” Category
2015 was a great year for Patriot League football. It was a season where two Patriot League schools would qualify for the FCS Playoffs, and Dan Hunt’s Colgate team would have a one of the Patriot League’s most epic runs through the bracket o…
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.
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.
I know, I know, it’s strange when there’s no Lehigh football game result to pick apart. That doesn’t mean that the rest of college football stood still during the Mountain Hawks’ bye week.
Lehigh’s bye week came during a time when Penn State football, already rabid at the best of times, was at peak foaming-at-the-mouth after Happy Valley hosted ESPN College Gameday on Saturday morning and Michigan on Saturday night.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Penn State RB Saquon Barkley has a local connection: he went to Whitehall at the same time a guy called QB Nick Shafnisky was under center. Now, Barkley is the odds-on favorite to win the Heisman with the Nittany Lions after a 263 yard, 3 TD effort against the Wolverines as Penn State coasted to a 42-13 win.
Completing the return to 1986, Notre Dame also went to 6-1 after their own resounding 49-13 win over USC Saturday night as well, surprising in the ease in the way RB Josh Adams carved through the Trojan defense for 194 yards and 3 touchdowns. Oh yeah, Josh Adams’ high school isn’t too far from Barkley’s – he came from Central Bucks South in Warrington, the same high school where Lehigh freshman LB Nate Norris played.
Seeing the success of Barkley and Adams on college football’s biggest Saturday showcase serve as a fresh reminder that Lehigh’s football players frequently come from the same schools that produce some of these massive football talents.
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This week, Lafayette plays Harvard up in Cambridge, where the 2-4 Leopards are expected to lose to the 2-2 Crimson. I say expected to lose because with one exception since 2000, that’s what’s happened every time Lafayette has played Harvard: they have lost 12 out of their last 13 to the Johnnies, and have a lifetime record of 3-19 against them.
The expectation among Patriot League football fans is that football scholarships was supposed to change all of that. Simply offer conventional football scholarships, add to that a chance to play in the FCS Playoffs, and suddenly football recruits choosing between Harvard and Lehigh for business would start choosing Lehigh.
It hasn’t worked out quite that way.
Through five games in 2017, the combined record of the Patriot League is a mind-boggling 8-21 outside of Patriot League contests. And of those eight wins, only one has come against a team from the Ivy League – Colgate’s 21-7 win over Cornell. Collectively, the Patriot League is 1-7 against the Ancient Eight, with six of those seven losses coming by more than two touchdowns.
This is not what fans of the Patriot League signed up for five years ago when they decided to offer the same sort of scholarships that schools like Delaware, Montana and North Dakota State. But is the problem scholarships, or is it something else?
This week, Lafayette plays Harvard up in Cambridge, where the 2-4 Leopards are expected to lose to the 2-2 Crimson. I say expected to lose because with one exception since 2000, that’s what’s happened every time Lafayette has played Harvard: they have lost 12 out of their last 13 to the Johnnies, and have a lifetime record of 3-19 against them.
The expectation among Patriot League football fans is that football scholarships was supposed to change all of that. Simply offer conventional football scholarships, add to that a chance to play in the FCS Playoffs, and suddenly football recruits choosing between Harvard and Lehigh for business would start choosing Lehigh.
It hasn’t worked out quite that way.
Through five games in 2017, the combined record of the Patriot League is a mind-boggling 8-21 outside of Patriot League contests. And of those eight wins, only one has come against a team from the Ivy League – Colgate’s 21-7 win over Cornell. Collectively, the Patriot League is 1-7 against the Ancient Eight, with six of those seven losses coming by more than two touchdowns.
This is not what fans of the Patriot League signed up for five years ago when they decided to offer the same sort of scholarships that schools like Delaware, Montana and North Dakota State. But is the problem scholarships, or is it something else?
Last season, there were two iconic games that set the tone for the Lehigh football season – one a tough loss, the other a tough victory.
The first iconic moment was simply called “the Monmouth game” – the season-opening game where the Mountain Hawks started out slow, allowed the other Hawks to build up a double-digit lead, and after a furious comeback, Lehigh came up just short. Lehigh had multiple opportunities to seize control – but didn’t.
It threatened to become the narrative that defined the season – that is, until the second iconic game, which was simply called “the Penn game”, and also broke down to a specific moment – the end of the first half.
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Not going to the #HateTheGate (or, alternatively, #SlamTheGate) game at Murray Goodman, and you need to show your #Project10K support in some other way, either by watching TV or watching the game online?t
Never fear. LFN’s here.
You didn’t ask for them, but here’s my pick for this week’s FCS Top 25.
This week’s candidate for the LFN Top 25 curse? Sacred Heart, with Colgate a very close second, but there were a lot of teams in the lower reaches of my Top 25 that suffered defeat, in a list that includes Fordham, Southern Utah and (again) William and Mary, who suffered a second straight crushing defeat in two weeks, this time at the hands of New Hampshire.
Never in a million years did I ever think Tennessee State, Cornell and North Carolina A&T would simultaneously be in my Top 25, yet there they are.
