Archive For The “Tim Murphy” Category

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA’s Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

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How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA’s Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

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.

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How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA’s Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By |

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA’s Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

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.

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An LFN Investigation: What’s Wrong with Patriot League football?

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An LFN Investigation: What’s Wrong with Patriot League football?

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?

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An LFN Investigation: What’s Wrong with Patriot League football?

By |

An LFN Investigation: What’s Wrong with Patriot League football?

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?

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Lehigh At Holy Cross Game Preview: Cornered Crusaders Are The Worst Crusaders

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Lehigh At Holy Cross Game Preview: Cornered Crusaders Are The Worst Crusaders

No college football coach wants to face a team boxed in a corner.

In that way, Harvard was stepping into a purple hornet’s nest last weekend when the nationally-ranked Crimson came to play the wounded Crusaders.

After their injury-riddled team failed to hold onto a win against Bucknell, ultimately falling 21-20, Tom Gilmore‘s team needed to make a stand against a really good football team in order to keep their season from a limp to the finish.

Even if they didn’t win, they had to keep things close – few pundits gave Holy Cross much of a chance against the better bankrolled, historically dominant Harvard team that hadn’t lost a road game a non-conference game in their last sixteen tries.

Cornered like rats, Holy Cross responded in a big way.  Six sacks and a second-half shutout later, the Crusaders would notch their first win over a nationally-ranked opponent since 2009, thus turning things around at the exact right time for them and the exact wrong time for Lehigh.
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Lehigh At Holy Cross Game Preview: Cornered Crusaders Are The Worst Crusaders

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Lehigh At Holy Cross Game Preview: Cornered Crusaders Are The Worst Crusaders

No college football coach wants to face a team boxed in a corner.

In that way, Harvard was stepping into a purple hornet’s nest last weekend when the nationally-ranked Crimson came to play the wounded Crusaders.

After their injury-riddled team failed to hold onto a win against Bucknell, ultimately falling 21-20, Tom Gilmore‘s team needed to make a stand against a really good football team in order to keep their season from a limp to the finish.

Even if they didn’t win, they had to keep things close – few pundits gave Holy Cross much of a chance against the better bankrolled, historically dominant Harvard team that hadn’t lost a road game a non-conference game in their last sixteen tries.

Cornered like rats, Holy Cross responded in a big way.  Six sacks and a second-half shutout later, the Crusaders would notch their first win over a nationally-ranked opponent since 2009, thus turning things around at the exact right time for them and the exact wrong time for Lehigh.
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