Sportsmeat

Before the NCAA started giving the Patriot League an automatic bid to the I-AA football championships, Patriot schools were often overmatched in non-league games, including those against teams from the Ivy League. In 1994, Lafayette won the Patriot League with a losing overall record. In 1996, when Bucknell won its only Patriot League championship, the Bison opened 1-4, including losses to Harvard, Penn, and Yale, before beating Princeton in week six. But as Lehigh, Colgate, and Lafayette began to build successful programs that played well in the postseason, the tables turned. Patriot schools took the edge in Patriot-Ivy games, in some years by a wide margin.

This year, there seems to be another reversal in the works. Ivy schools have won nine of the 11 Patriot-Ivy meetings so far, with seven inter-conference games remaining in the next two weeks. Is this a blip on the screen or a sign that the balance of Northeast mid-level I-AA power is shifting? Does anyone really care? I might be the only one, but it definitely caught my attention.

Also of note, from I-AA football:
- Montana State, Portland State, Richmond, North Dakota State, and New Hampshire have all beaten I-A teams this season, with New Hampshire’s drubbing of Northwestern perhaps the most significant.
- New Hampshire-Delaware was the best college game I saw last weekend. (And with ’Nator at the beach, I saw a bunch.) For those who didn’t see it, New Hampshire won, 52-49. UNH’s junior quarterback Ricky Santos has been simply amazing, and their top receiver, David Ball, has passed Jerry Rice to top the career touchdowns list.
- Lehigh's junior quarterback has a name familiar to NBA fans: Sedale Threatt. The son of the former hoops star has posted good numbers so far, completing 60 percent of his passes for 215 yards a game with five touchdowns and two interceptions. But the numbers have not translated to wins for the 1-3 Engineers, er, Mountain Hawks.