Leopards energized by bye; Mountain Hawks enthused by 4-TD performance
The byes are gone. The nonleague opponents are gone.
All that’s left for the Lafayette and Lehigh football teams is a sprint to the finish.
Both the Leopards and Mountain Hawks will play four consecutive Patriot League games culminating with the 157th edition of college football’s most-played rivalry on Nov. 20 at Lehigh’s Goodman Stadium.
Lafayette is 2-5 overall, 1-1 in the Patriot League entering a road game at Georgetown (2-4, 1-2) at 12:30 p.m. Saturday.
At 0-7, 0-2 league, Lehigh is not only still looking for its first win and of the season and an end to a school-record 14-game losing, but is also trying to pull off what would be one of the great upsets of the FCS season when it welcomes defending league champ Holy Cross (5-2, 2-0) to Goodman Stadium for a noon kickoff.
Despite their combined 2-12 records, both teams are upbeat and looking forward to the final stretch of the regular season.
Here’s a look at their matchups:
Lafayette at Georgetown
The Leopards seem refreshed coming off the bye week after a 30-3 loss to Ivy League power Harvard on Oct. 16.
“We had a good week of practice and accomplished what we wanted to accomplish,” Lafayette coach John Garrett said. “We’re excited that it’s game week again and we’re ready to go. We were able to get some guys rested and some other guys back healthy.”
With a Saturday off, Garrett said he was able to check out what was going on around Patriot League and he described what he saw as “awesome.”
“Everybody is competitive every week and it doesn’t matter what the record is, you better be ready to play,” Garrett said. “You look at Fordham nearly losing to a Lehigh team that hadn’t had a lot of success. And by the way, the way Lehigh played they looked as good as anybody in the league. So, it’s fun each week and we look at it as a month-long, single-elimination tournament. It’s win and advance and we like that atmosphere.”
Garrett believes his team will get a boost by the return of key players who have been injured.
“We haven’t had our running back corps completely healthy,” he said. “We haven’t had our starting offensive line completely healthy once this year. We haven’t had our starting tight end or our receiving corps healthy every game and we haven’t had a lot of depth with our defensive line. We haven’t had our starting linebacker. So when we did a self-scout on ourselves, we figured out we’d be playing a lot different if ...”
Perhaps the most significant return will be of senior linebacker Major Jordan, who has missed five games due to injury. In the two games he played, he racked up 25 tackles, which is still good enough for seventh on the team.
“There’s a good chance we’ll have Major and to have back as the anchor and leader of our defense will be really nice to see,” Garrett said. “We’ll get a little more depth on the defensive line and it’s important to not only have the front-line guys in there but also have the ability to rotate and keep putting fresh bodies out there.”
Offensively, the story of the season has been the emergence of freshman Ah-Shaun Davis at quarterback.
In five games, he has completed 63% of his passes for 1,012 yards and three touchdowns.
“He doesn’t play like a freshman,” junior wide receiver Jordan Hull said of Davis. “Every week he seems like he’s getting better and his connection with the receivers is also getting better week by week.”
Lafayette plays three of its last four on the road. While Georgetown has struggled since entering the league in 2001, the Hoyas have won two in a row and six of the last 10 meetings with Lafayette,
including a 14-10 win over the Leopards in Washington, D.C., the last time they played in 2019.
“We would like to play the game now,” Garrett said of Georgetown. “We’ve had some frustrating games with them. We’ve moved the ball against them, but haven’t finished drives consistently against them. They’ve been fortunate against us and we’re going to do everything we can to take that good fortune away.
“We love playing on the road. We’ve won everywhere we’re about to go. We love the silence you hear from the home crowd when we execute at a high level and sap the energy out of their stadium. We know what it takes and we’d love to do it again.”
Holy Cross at Lehigh
After not scoring a touchdown and just nine total points through the first six games of the season, Lehigh’s offense came to life at Fordham. The Mountain Hawks racked up 577 yards in total offense, the highest total since a 45-17 win over Bucknell in 2018.
Junior running back Zaythan Hill ran for a career-high 159 yards and three touchdowns and sophomore quarterback Dante Perri threw for 317 yards and a touchdown.
It was a much-needed, but totally unexpected offensive outburst and even though Fordham rallied from a 28-14 deficit to score the game’s final 21 points, it may have been a turning point for Lehigh.
“We went toe-to-toe with one of the top teams in the league, so we feel like we may have turned a corner,” Mountain Hawks coach Tom Gilmore said. “There were a lot of positives. The story of the day was that we moved the ball. We only punted one time all day. We turned the ball over twice on our last three possessions and on one of them, we’ve found out, it shouldn’t have been a turnover because progress was stopped. But we put the ball on the ground and it hurt us.”
Also leading to the 35-28 loss was not capitalizing on three drives in the first half that carried inside the 5-yard line that produced no points — two ending on missed field goals and another ended on downs.
“We need to finish those drives off but we did a tremendous job getting there and we did well other times in the red zone,” Gilmore said. “The great thing was we had the ability to run the ball in the red zone and get it into the end zone.” What changed things?
“Those little improvements I have been talking about in previous weeks,” Gilmore said. “We really are improving. It wasn’t just coachspeak. The other thing is that we pared down our offensive package and changed some procedural things we’ve been doing. We’re focusing on certain things more and working on more schemes than we were. Dante [Perri] having two full weeks of practice because of our bye was also beneficial. At Penn, he came in in the third series without much practice. Two weeks of work certainly showed up.”
Gilmore likes what he sees from Perri, who is one of four quarterbacks Lehigh has used through the first seven games.
“He wasn’t in the two-deep at the start of the season, but we saw the improvement in him and once he got an opportunity, we started seeing good ability,” Gilmore said. “With practice, reps, and game reps, he’s playing with a lot of more confidence and everybody is taking what’s there and we’re not pressing as much and trying to go for a big play on every play. If you trust the call and execute the call, you’re going to be much more consistent. And it still all starts with the offensive line.”
Gilmore said his team had played with confidence on defense and special teams and there was hope the offense would turn it around. Now that hope has turned into results.
“A performance like that has to build trust and confidence and it could lead to big results moving forward,” he said. “But still you’re facing different opponents. We have a very different challenge against Holy Cross this week.”