Lehigh University Athletics
Lehigh, Coen can blame this one on the rain
9/3/2006 12:00:00 AM | Football
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By Nick Fierro
of The Express-Times
With the rain coming down sideways, the football kept squirting loose, the quagmire of a field kept getting worse and the handful of fans who bothered to show up for Lehigh University's season-opening game kept growing restless with each passing minute.
The depressing scene is sure not how Andy Coen believed his first game as a head coach would be remembered.
"I envisioned winning the game, certainly," the visibly disturbed rookie coach said after his Mountain Hawks came up a point short, 17-16, against the University at
"But that's what makes football such a great game. There's the ups and downs, and these kids will work hard, and the neat thing is we'll play another game next week."
Coen understandably didn't want to use the weather and the playing conditions as an excuse.
"The other guys had to play in it, too," he said.
He only said it because it was the right thing to say at the time.
In reality, the conditions had everything to do with the whacky chain of events that led to Saturday's aberration.
Coen and all Lehigh fans have to know deep down that this one doesn't count.
Not when each team fumbles six times; not when two Lehigh snaps go sailing over Jason Leo's head, resulting in eight Albany points; not when the players are ankle-deep in mud at times and keep slipping to the turf like so many drunken sailors on ice skates.
Maybe
The truth is, the team has not begun to forge its identity. The atmosphere in this part of the glode on Saturday wouldn't allow it.
Coen roughed himself up afterward with some therapeutic self-analysis.
"I probably got a little conservative with some of my play calls with the weather," he said, "and I need to let this guy (quarterback Sedale Threatt) play the game."
Again, just words.
If anything, Coen wasn't conservative enough, asking Threatt to work out of the shotgun early and often, resulting in countless loose balls that threw off the timing of the offense even more than the footing.
Threatt, a splendid athlete and leader, was forced to pick the ball off the ground as many times as he caught it, taking his eyes off the defense every time. That he was able to complete 14 of 26 passes for 140 yards and a touchdown is as remarkable as anything he did last season in winning four of five games as a first-time starter a year ago.
"Toward the latter part (of the game), I don't really think (the wet ball) was that much of a factor," Threatt claimed. "Like Holy Cross (last year). I remember Holy Cross week. We were dumping footballs inside a bucket to get ready for it, literally, to work on the quarterback exchange."
What Threatt failed to point out was that Holy Cross prevailed, 13-10, in similarly fluky conditions that always favor the underdog.
The harshest truth about football is when games are played in a toilet with the water circling the bowl, bad things almost always happen to the better teams.
Deep down, Coen and Threatt and everyone else on the Lehigh sideline have to know that, even if they can't say it.
If it happens again in a Patriot League game in October or November, that will be a different story. But for now, Coen deserves a mulligan.
This one doesn't count.
This story originally appeared in the Saturday September 3, 2006 edition of The Express-Times. Used with permission.
