It’s almost impossible to believe that through the first 11 games this season, the Lehigh University football team and its potent rushing attack never dialed up a play that’s so familiar to everyone, especially Philadelphia Eagles fans — the tush push.
Maybe the fourth-ranked Mountain Hawks were saving it for the perfect time against 24th-ranked Lafayette in the 161st renewal of college football’s most-played rivalry Saturday afternoon in a winner-take-all clash for the Patriot League championship at a sold-out Fisher Stadium.
With Lehigh clinging to a four-point lead early in the fourth quarter, it appeared the visitors had gained the necessary yards on Luke Yoder’s 10-yard run to convert a third-and-10 to Lafayette’s 27-yard line. However, an officials’ video review indicated Yoder was stopped a half-yard short to bring up fourth-and-1 at the 28.
There was no question the Mountain Hawks were going for the first down. Quarterback Hayden Johnson lined up in shotgun as he had done on every other play. Suddenly, Johnson moved forward under center and took the snap from sophomore Colby Reph of Northampton.
With an assist from Yoder and an incredible surge from the offensive line, led by Reph, Johnson went for a 22-yard ride to the 6.
Yoder dashed through left guard and across the goal line on the next play, the Mountain Hawks went up by two scores and they held on for a 42-32 victory to cap a 12-0 regular season, their second consecutive league title with a 7-0 record, an automatic bid to the NCAA FCS playoffs and their second straight win over Lafayette.
Yoder, a junior from Palm Harbor, Florida, was voted the game’s MVP after rushing for a career-high 234 yards and four touchdowns on just 19 carries as Lehigh captured a record 14th Patriot League crown.
“It was awesome,” Reph said of the tush push. “We really haven’t run it before. It’s been in, and we’ve practiced it every week. We haven’t run it, but that was the time. We were ready for it, and we got it done.”
“That was fun. We were hammering our coaches to let us run it,” confirmed Lehigh sophomore right tackle Sammy Ayache of Bethlehem Catholic.
Kevin Cahill, who turned around the Lehigh program last year in just his second year as head coach, gave all the credit to his offensive line for the pivotal play.
“I don’t know who was on the headset with the coaches and said we probably should’ve run that more,” Cahill said with a laugh. “That’s going to go down as an efficient play. They called for it. The O-line said, ‘we got it, we got it, we got it.’ All right, if we said upstairs let’s run it, I said OK, if the players want it, you call what the players feel what they can execute and we just did it. That was the players calling it and the players executing it.”
The 22-yard tush push and Yoder’s subsequent touchdown were significant because Lehigh’s defense rose up to stuff Lafayette’s dangerous running back Kente Edwards of North Hunterdon for no gain on fourth-and-1 at the Leopards 47 on the previous possession.
Lafayette had already shredded Lehigh’s proud defense, ranked No. 1 in FCS in fewest rushing yards allowed (66.8 yards per game), for scoring marches of 75, 80 and 97 yards. Who knew how the game would’ve turned out had John Troxell’s crew earned that first down and continued down the field to erase the 28-24 deficit?
Instead, the defensive stop, spearheaded by tackle Jadin Nelson, gave the Mountain Hawks enough of a cushion to withstand another Lafayette touchdown and enable the offense to close the show with a 10-play, 75-yard march that consumed 5 minutes, 21 seconds, and culminated in Johnson’s 1-yard TD -- on a tush push -- with 1:53 to go.
“That was a huge momentum play,” Cahill said of the fourth-down defensive stonewall. “We were able to get them stopped and flip it over to points, and that needed to happen in that situation where it was getting a little hairy here.”
“I thought it would come down to two good running games, ours with Kente and theirs with Luke, and when you look at the game as a whole, every possession was going to matter, Troxell said.
That’s how the latest installment of the Rivalry played out with the offenses playing touchdown ping-pong.
Lafayette produced its pair of first-half touchdowns on time-consuming, 14-play drives with Edwards rushing 26 times for 125 yards by halftime. The most yards gained by an opposing running back against Lehigh this season prior to Saturday were 63 yards on 18 carries by Yale’s Josh Pitsenberger in the Mountain Hawks’ 31-13 victory over the Ivy League co-champion.
“We came out and knew we could compete against these guys,” said Lafayette junior left tackle Sean Wilson of Easton. “They’re fourth in the country, definitely a great unit. We took advantage of what they were doing inside in the box, trying to play a five-man, six-man box. We knew what we could do.”
Lehigh responded with Yoder’s 29-yard touchdown run on its first possession as he followed pulling right guard Langston Jones through a gaping hole.
“Langston is the most athletic big man I’ve ever met,” Yoder said. “Being 320-, 330-pounds, he moves like an animal. He’s awesome.”
Lafayette forced a punt and moved into Mountain Hawks territory looking to expand its 14-7 lead. On second-and-5 at the 35, junior wide receiver Carson Persing stepped back to catch a lateral from DeNobile. Persing looked downfield for a receiver, found no one and tried to throw the ball away to avoid the sack.
Instead, Lehigh senior free safety Nick Peltekian hauled in the pass like a wide receiver, making a quick toe-tap before falling out of bounds with the interception at his 11. Two plays later, Johnson sent Mason Humphrey deep down the Lafayette sideline and connected with the speedster for an 89-yard touchdown. Connor Poole’s PAT made it 14-14.
“Nick Peltekian stayed home,” Cahill said. “He sniffed it out. He saw it coming and found a way to catch it and stay inbounds. It was great to see. We harped on that a lot. Hey, there’s a tendency once they (Leopards) cross the 50 be ready for some trick plays and all that stuff. These kids tuned in and listened and didn’t waver.”
Lafayette then had to settle for a 21-yard Jack Simonetta field goal and 17-14 lead with 1:03 left until halftime when the Leopards failed to gain one yard after setting up with first-and-goal from the 4. Edwards was stopped twice for no gain, and DeNobile was rushed into an incompletion by hard-charging junior linebacker William Parton (team-high 11 tackles) off the left edge.
“Coming out at halftime we were very calm,” Cahill said. “We didn’t play great, and we were only down three. I think we ran 18 plays in the first half. We just had to get the ball back and get going.”
Reph echoed his coach. There really wasn’t much to fix offensively during the break by the Mountain Hawks.
“Keep doing what we’re doing,” Reph said. “It’s the same message every week. We knew we were going to tire them out. We knew we were going to keep going so it was stick to the game plan. We had a good first half. We just had a couple of things we had to clean up and we finished.”
Whatever the Mountain Hawks cleaned up, the first play from scrimmage was spotless. Yoder shocked the Leopards by bursting up the middle for an 80-yard touchdown before the 13,367 in attendance had settled back into their seats.
“We ran a little power play with an extra puller that we kind of schemed up and came out, made our adjustments,” Yoder said. “I stayed pretty tight to our puller (left guard Aidan Palmer), that’s my read. I took it out backside and got out unscathed and gave the spark the offense needed coming out for the second half.”
The teams swapped the lead again with Edwards’ 1-yard finishing off a 97-yard trek after he was denied three times from the 1. Yoder started a four-play sprint with a 33-yard run and concluded it with a 3-yard score with 48 seconds left in the third quarter.
And that brought us to the fourth quarter when Lehigh flashed its championship mettle and Lafayette showed its perfect Patriot League mark coming into the game was no fluke.
Yoder’s 234 rushing yards eclipsed his previous best of 174 yards earlier this season against Bucknell and was the fourth-most in program history. His four rushing touchdowns were the most against Lafayette since Jack Rizzo did it in 1971.
“I went to bed last night knowing I had to do my job every single play,” said Yoder who enters the playoffs with 1,329 yards rushing. “I trust in the offensive line, trust in the receivers, trust in the quarterback and when we have that trust it’s pretty hard to deny us. We came out and did a great job offensively and got the job done.”
While Lehigh knows it’s in the FCS’s 24-team playoff, Lafayette can only hope it’s resume, which includes two losses to FBS programs, is good enough to attract one of the 13 at-large bids.
“Only time will tell. We’ll see tomorrow,” Wilson said. “It’s a great team we played against, and we showed we can compete against any team in the country.”
Edwards was held to 32 yards on 15 rushes in the second half to end with 157 yards on a career-high 41 carries. Despite missing 2 ½ games, Edwards accumulated 1,454 yards which are second behind the 1,460 yards registered by Jamar Curtis in 2023. It was Curtis, who opted to play his final season this fall at Sacramento State, that Edwards succeeded as the Leopards’ lead running back after serving as primarily a special teams player in 2024.
**Lehigh 42 (12-0, 7-0), Lafayette 32 (8-4, 6-1)**
1
2
3
4
FINAL
Lehigh
7
7
14
14
42
Lafayette
7
10
7
8
32
**First quarter**
Laf: Kente Edwards 1 run (Jack Simonetta kick), 8:00
Leh: Luke Yoder 29 run (Connor Poole kick), 4:46
**Second quarter**
Laf: Dean DeNobile 2 run (Simonetta kick), 14:21
Leh: Mason Humphrey 77 pass from Hayden Johnson (Poole kick), 7:32
Laf: FG 21 Simonetta, 1:03
**Third quarter**
Leh: Yoder 80 run (Poole kick), 14:42
Laf: Edwards 1 run (Simonetta kick), 2:46
Leh: Yoder 3 run (Poole kick), :48
**Fourth quarter**
Leh: Yoder 6 run (Poole kick), 10:20
Laf: Edwards 4 run (Mason Kuehner pass from Justin Penza), 7:14
Leh: Johnson 1 run (Poole kick), 1:53
**TEAM STATISTICS**
Leh
Laf
First downs
18
27
Rushes-Yards
33-354
47-162
Passing yards
159
275
Passes Comp.-Att.-Int.
11-16-1
26-38-1
Fumbles-lost
0-0
0-0
Punts-Average
2-43
1-45
Penalties-Yds
5-39
0-0
Third-down conv.
2-5
13-18
Fourth-down conv.
1-1
1-3
Time of possession
24:22
35:38
**INDIVIDUAL STATISTICS**
**RUSHING** \-- Lehigh: Yoder 19-234, Johnson 7-64, Jaden Green 5-49; Lafayette: Edwards 41-157, Penza 1-2, Jakyre Henley 1-0, Team 1-(minus 1), DeNobile 3-(minus 9).
**PASSING** -- Lehigh: Johnson 11-16-1 for 159; Lafayette: DeNobile 26-37-0 for 275, Carson Persing 0-1-1.
**RECEIVING** -- Lehigh: Geoffrey Jamiel 5-26, Humphrey 2-83, Joseph Marranca 2-17, Green 1-21, Yoder 1-12; Lafayette: Kuehner 11-99, Persing 9-85, Matt Scerbo 4-64, Ethan Hosak 2-27.
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