Archive For The “Ivy League” Category
For one reason or another, I hadn’t been back.
Since my undergraduate years, I hadn’t gone to see Lehigh play Yale at the Yale Bowl. It was either too long a trip as an undergraduate to catch the Engineers, a trip to Disney with the family interfered, or maybe I was just saving up my energy for a big conference game the following week.
No matter what it really was, it really was a bucket of excuses, with the ultimate result being I hadn’t gone back, even though Lehigh had played there so often.
It feels almost criminal, even though I have driven past the stadium many times.
This weekend, for the first time since a beautiful night for football in October of 1977, I will be heading back to the iconic Yale Bowl.
And in contemplating this trip, a flood of memories returned from my first trip there – my first-ever college football game, and thus the very first inspiration for what I would end up doing the rest of my life.
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Not going to the game at Murray Goodman, and you want to know how to catch today’s game?
Never fear. LFN’s here.
Not going to the game in North Philadelphia, and you want to know how to catch tonight’s game?
Never fear. LFN’s here.
We continue the series “Know Your 2016 Opponents” a mere 9 (!) days away from the opening of the 2016 football season.
This might be a good time, for your reading pleasure, to remind you that these are modified with some more awesome Lehigh information from the originals over at The College Sports Journal.
It’s also a good time to remind you that I already have written a bunch of these:
Bucknell
Georgetown
Fordham
Holy Cross
Lafayette
Princeton
Yale
To come: Colgate, Villanova, and, of course Monmouth, the season opener on September 3rd. And also, this preview of Penn. Below the flip.
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Today’s “Know Your 2016 Opponents” series continues with the team that is predicted by College Sports Journal to finish 3th in the Ivy League: Yale.
Although it would have been a great narrative coup if Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton met at the classic 14-12 upset of the Bulldogs by Harvard in 1970 at wind-swept Cambridge, they instead, the world learned this week, met in the spring of 1971 at the law school library.
One of the curious things about the Clintons is their lack of association with the “Yale-Harvard Football Game”, as it’s now known, even though Bill Clinton is a self-admitted sports nut, able to recall times when he congratulated winning teams that visited him in the White House, or times as President or at the Clinton Foundation reminiscing about Montana Grizzlies football.
Where does it ever end?
That’s the question I keep asking myself lately.
It seems to have added up for me from six months of lunacy, one where collegiate athletic departments have been caught up with such a large number of horrifying incidents.
There’s serious allegations of rape by athletes at Baylor and Vanderbilt. Louisville hiring prostitutes to lure in potential recruits. The case of the Stanford swimmer who got off with a slap on the wrist after raping a young woman. They are literally everywhere, with new twists and turns coming in so fast it’s hard to keep up with it all.
Even past scandals involving college athletes don’t seem to keep themselves out of the news lately, either. The Penn State Jerry Sandusky story that never seems to die got a new lease on life when alleged abuses were revealed as far back as the 1970s. The when-will-it-ever-end revelations of sham classes at North Carolina. The continuous trickle of revelations at Miami (FL), where the latest is that football players got free use of luxury cars.
The most worrying thread that weaves itself through this collegiate offseason is the word “criminal” — an offseason where criminals reveal themselves as students on college campuses, criminals that hang out with athletic departments, trying to get some of the fame, fortune and swag, and criminals reveal themselves in the management of collegiate athletics as well.
It’s enough to depress any college football fan, and to rightfully make one think: Can it happen here?
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As we hit the 92 day mark before the 2016 Lehigh football season officially starts, it’s time to take a look at the overall schedule – and opponents – the Mountain Hawks will be facing.
Every Lehigh football fan knows that their Rival of Rivals, Lafayette, is only 18 miles away from Bethlehem.
What fans may not know is that, by drawing a circle around Lehigh on Google Maps, you can surround seven of the Mountain Hawks eleven 2016 opponents. (The site NCAA Savant has an interactive, zoomable map that shows the schools quite clearly.)
The only FCS programs within the circle that Lehigh doesn’t play are Delaware, Wagner, and Columbia.
Lehigh will be hosting Monmouth, Bucknell, Fordham, and Princeton, all of whose fan bases are within two and a half hour’s drive, and will have “road trips” to Penn, Villanova, and Lafayette, which couldn’t be easier for Lehigh football fans.
However, if you wanted to earn frequent flyer miles supporting Lehigh football, you had better hope the Mountain Hawks make the FCS playoffs.
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For the last few years, “the commitee” and I have compiled the Patsy Ratings, an attempt to evaluate the incoming football classes of the Patriot League.
It’s clearly “for entertainment purposes only,” an effort to try to take a look at whether a schools’ recruiting needs are met, whether they’ve secured the playing services of a lot of recognized talent, and whether some of their measurables look good.
However, I frequently find myself wanting the Patsy Ratings to do more. For example, how did the Patriot League as a whole do in comparison to other FCS schools? Did the Mountain Hawks crush their FCS competition? Or was the actual picture different?
Without, say, an equivalent James Madison Football Nation willing to make these Patsy-like evaluations of the incoming classes of other FCS schools, there was no real good way to make that type of comparison.
However, my curiosity got the better of me. “There must be a way,” I thought, “to at least be able to see how the different schools stack up against other schools in different conferences, even if it’s not as good or as thorough as the Patsies.”
I found out that there was.
If you’d like, you can check out my FCS Top 25 vote below.
Pity Dartmouth.
The Big Green and Harvard, whom I’ve had in my Top 25 all season, played a game last Friday that was as great as a game between Top 25 teams can be.
For 3 1/2 quarters, Dartmouth controlled the game, up 13-0 and the Big Green’s defense, somewhat surprisingly, completely smothering Harvard’s potent offense.
Then, in the span of about six and a half, Harvard, amazingly, pulled out the win.
One touchdown pass to WR Seitu Smith, one Dartmouth fumble and another touchdown throw from QB Scott Hosch to RB Justice Shelton-Mosley, and Harvard took their first lead of the game with 36 seconds left in the game.
It was a great game to watch, and amply showed that both teams were worthy of Top 25 status, but it is impossible, as a neutral fan, to not feel for the Big Green, who had them right there.
Lehigh 63, Yale 35 Postgame Thoughts: The World May Have Changed, But College Football Fans Haven’t
By LFN |
The timing between college football games I attended at the Yale Bowl was a shade under thirty-nine years.
How were both games similar?
Well, in both games Yale lost. Also, both games were played at the Yale Bowl. In addition, there were fans at both games wanting to have a great college football experience.
That’s where the similarities end.
Many thoughts went through my head during the game this weekend, an incredibly encouraging one for Lehigh as they are surging, on a three game winning streak going into league play after scoring a grand total of 154 points in the last three games, or, if you’re scoring at home, an average of over 51 points per game.
But not all the thoughts were ones about Lehigh, or Yale, or the game at hand. Many of the thoughts I had, after staring out at the 2,196 souls that came out on an overcast, but perfectly adequate weather day to watch an extremely entertaining game, involved the fans that did not show up at one of the iconic, most storied venues in college sports.
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