Entire Patriot League off to horrendous start

 

(STATS) – The Patriot League has never been one of the premier conferences in the FCS, but there’s no way it should be this bad.
Besides preseason favorite Lehigh being winless, every member of the league owns a losing record. Every other FCS conference has at least three teams with records of .500 or better.
On top of that, Patriot preseason player of the year Chase Edmonds of Fordham has yet to have even one good game.
Yeah, it’s been a brutally awful start for a league with two teams – Lehigh and Edmonds’ Rams – that made the preseason STATS FCS Top 25, a Holy Cross squad that was ranked two weeks ago and a Colgate club two years removed from an FCS quarterfinal appearance. As of now, no Patriot team is worthy of a spot in the playoffs.
Yet, someone has to earn the league’s automatic berth, and that team could still be Lehigh despite owning an 0-5 record. The Mountain Hawks ran the table in conference play last season en route to a 9-3 record, then received 11 of 14 first-place votes in the Patriot’s preseason poll while getting the No. 17 spot in the STATS rankings.
“We’re kind of going back to the drawing board a little bit,” coach Andy Coen said.
All of the defending Patriot champions’ games have come out of conference, but that changes this week with a visit to Colgate – the 2015 league champ.
“They’re probably the best 0-5 team you can possibly see,” Raiders coach Dan Hunt said. “If you’re gonna win the Patriot League, you gotta beat Lehigh. Our kids know that.”
Colgate (2-3) has yet to score more than 21 points in a game but is facing a defense that’s been downright pitiful.
The Mountain Hawks are allowing an FCS-high 533 yards per game, including 298 on the ground, while surrendering an average of 48.4 points. Even woeful Wagner, which had totaled 34 points in three games against Division I foes, put up 37 in a win over Lehigh last week.
Brad Mayes threw five interceptions that night, and the Mountain Hawks already have 13 turnovers – one more than all of last season.
“We gotta go and get ourselves right, really find a way to get these guys to understand that you have to be diligent in everything you do,” Coen said. “We’re too sloppy. This late in the season, we should have had a lot of this stuff taken care of.”
Fordham (1-4) received the Patriot’s other three first-place votes and was ranked 22nd by STATS in the preseason but hasn’t been much better than Lehigh defensively. The Rams are giving up 47.4 points per game, though that defense might not have been exploited so badly if Edmonds was helping keep them off the field by chewing more time off the clock.
The STATS preseason All-American has missed two games with leg injuries and hasn’t been particularly effective when he has played.
Edmonds began the season with 5,465 career rushing yards, well within reach of the FCS all-time record of 6,559, but he’s been held to 198 yards on 47 carries through three games with only one touchdown. He doesn’t have a 100-yard game, something he failed to do just twice in 11 contests last season, and his 4.2 yards per carry are far off his career mark of 6.5.
No Patriot team ranks among the top 50 rushing offenses in the FCS, and Lafayette is second-worst overall with 11.4 yards per game.
Strangely enough, it’s the Leopards (1-4) who sit atop the conference standings after a stunning win last week at Holy Cross (2-3) on freshman Jeffrey Kordenbrock’s 43-yard field goal as time expired.
That defeat spoiled the belief that Holy Cross might be the class of the conference. The Crusaders gave FBS foe UConn a scare to begin the season, falling 27-20 on the road, and upset ninth-ranked New Hampshire on Sept. 16 to crack the STATS poll at No. 25. However, they went on to lose to Dartmouth before getting upset by Lafayette.
The latter defeat is the biggest blow, considering each of the past three Patriot champions and six of the last seven went 6-0 in league play.
“Now, every game is a championship game,” Colgate receiver Thomas Ives said. “You lose one and another team goes undefeated, you’ve lost the league in one game early in the season.”
That seems a bit less likely this year considering all Patriot teams have been finding so many ways to lose.