Hawks

Before Lehigh's football team had a conference to win or a stadium of its own, it already had nearly two decades of the university behind it. Students at the Pennsylvania school, opened in 1865, put together a team in 1884, at a time when only a handful of colleges in the Northeast had agreed on anything resembling a common set of rules for the game. That start places the Mountain Hawks among the oldest college football programs still playing in the country, long before anyone had thought to call it Division I or the FCS.

The identity that came with it has held: maroon and white, and a nickname, Mountain Hawks, taken from the high ground the campus occupies above Bethlehem. Home games are played at Goodman Stadium, which seats 16,000.

What sets the modern program apart is the Patriot League record. Lehigh won the league title in every season from 2011 through 2019, then again in 2021 and 2022 — eleven championships in twelve years, a stretch few programs at this level have matched. For most of that decade, opponents in the Patriot League simply knew they were playing for second place, and Lehigh's players and coaches came to expect the trophy as much as chase it.