The Rivalry (Lafayette–Lehigh)
Based on Wikipedia: The Rivalry (Lafayette–Lehigh)
In 1887, after Lehigh University finally beat Lafayette College at football for the first time, the freshmen were so disgusted by the rickety wooden stands their administration had erected for the occasion that they burned them to the ground in celebration. Thus began one of the most gloriously petty traditions in American sports.
The Lafayette-Lehigh football rivalry is the most-played in all of college football—161 games and counting since 1884. It's also the longest uninterrupted rivalry in the sport, a streak of 159 consecutive years broken only by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. To put that in perspective: this rivalry predates the invention of the forward pass. It predates football trophies entirely. The winning team simply keeps the game ball, paints the score on it, and displays it on campus. Lehigh shows theirs in an athletic hall of fame. Lafayette keeps theirs at the official residence of the college president. If you look at these balls in sequence, you can literally watch the football evolve from something resembling a watermelon to the modern prolate spheroid.
The Grudge Before the Game
The animosity between these two schools predates not just their football rivalry, but Lehigh University itself.
Asa Packer arrived in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania—now called Jim Thorpe—as an uneducated carpenter. Following family tradition, he joined the local Presbyterian church. But Packer was rough around the edges, and the strait-laced Presbyterians made him feel unwelcome. He left and found a home with the more accepting Episcopalians.
Packer eventually became fabulously wealthy through railroads and coal. When Ario Pardee, a coal baron from nearby Hazleton, approached the now-Judge Packer about funding an engineering wing at Lafayette College, Packer was initially enthusiastic. Then Pardee mentioned that Lafayette was controlled by the Presbyterian Church.
Packer refused to give them a dime.
Instead, he enlisted an Episcopal bishop and founded his own university: Lehigh. The two schools sit just seventeen miles apart in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, close enough to nurture generations of resentment.
Before Football, There Was Baseball and Tug of War
The first athletic contest between Lafayette and Lehigh wasn't football at all. In October 1869, they played a series of baseball games in Easton and Bethlehem. The first ended in a 45-45 tie—yes, 45 to 45 in baseball—and Lafayette won the second 31-24. Early baseball was a different sport entirely.
Their first joint track and field meet came in May 1881 on Lehigh's grounds. The program included fourteen events: sprints, distance runs, a hammer throw, high jump, shotput, broad jump, pole vault, hurdles, a bicycle race, a standing high jump, and—splendidly—tug of war. Lehigh won decisively, taking ten of fourteen events.
Lafayette's student newspaper, the Lafayette College Journal, did not take the loss gracefully. The paper called it "a defeat, too, doubly humiliating, coming, as it did, from an adversary in every other respect our inferior."
The stage was set.
The First Football Games
Lafayette started playing football in 1882, back when the sport still resembled rugby and goals and touchdowns were tallied separately. After the rules were standardized in 1883, Lafayette's manager Theodore Welles offered to play Lehigh. Lehigh hastily assembled its first team in 1884, managed by Richard Harding Davis—who would later become one of America's most famous journalists—and gamely lost twice to the more experienced Lafayette squad.
In those early years, because few schools played football and travel by horse and buggy was arduous, Lafayette and Lehigh played each other twice annually, with each school hosting one game. In 1891, they played three times—once in Wilkes-Barre before 3,000 spectators, whose cheering reportedly "startled the natives." Lehigh won all three that year.
This continued until 1902, when modern football conventions emerged and the annual single-game format was established.
The Only Year They Didn't Play
In 140 years, there has been exactly one season without a game: 1896.
Lehigh refused to take the field over a dispute about Lafayette's star running back, George Barclay. The previous summer, Barclay had played professional baseball in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The eligibility question hinged on whether Barclay had received actual payment or merely reimbursement for travel expenses.
It sounds almost quaint now—a hundred-year-old argument about amateurism and expense reimbursement that mirrors debates still happening in college athletics today. But in 1896, it was serious enough to cancel the biggest game on both schools' schedules.
Why It's the Most-Played Rivalry
Some people assume that older rivalries must have more games. They don't.
Harvard and Yale's famous annual showdown, called simply "The Game," missed four separate years during the period when Lafayette and Lehigh were playing continuously. The combination of missing only one year since 1884, plus nineteen years of playing twice and one year of playing three times, has given Lafayette-Lehigh more total games than any other college football rivalry.
Popular belief often gets this wrong. The streak of 159 consecutive games—broken only by COVID in 2020—is the longest uninterrupted run in college football history.
The World Wars and the Tradition of Zero
During World War II, travel restrictions limited which opponents teams could face, and Lehigh was hosting military officer training programs that constrained its athletic offerings. To fill out their schedules, the two schools went back to playing twice a year in 1943 and 1944.
This led to one of the rivalry's most remarkable stretches. Between November 1943 and November 1947, Lafayette won six consecutive games by a combined score of 193 to nothing. Not 193 to something small—193 to zero. Lehigh didn't score a single point across six games.
By the early 1950s, the pendulum had swung completely: Lehigh was winning by lopsided shutouts of their own.
The Goalpost Wars
For decades, it was traditional for fans to tear down the temporary wooden goalposts after the game. Pieces were kept as souvenirs in the fraternities of both schools.
This tradition aged poorly.
By the late 1980s, the goalpost rush had devolved into fans fighting each other—sometimes as early as the third quarter—for the right to destroy the posts. In 1989, after Lafayette won at Lehigh, a genuine fight broke out between Lehigh fans trying to defend their goalposts and Lafayette students trying to tear them down.
Both schools agreed to install H-shaped steel goalposts anchored ten feet into concrete.
The first test came in 1991 at Lehigh. Frustrated fans who rushed the field discovered they couldn't budge the new posts. Their response was to tear up chunks of the playing field and throw sod at the security guards and police surrounding the goalposts. One fan managed to climb a post before being pulled down, maced, and handcuffed.
The goalposts stood for over three decades—until 2024.
The 160th Meeting: Goalposts Meet the Lehigh River
In 2024, Lehigh defeated Lafayette 38-13 at home before a sellout crowd of 16,000. It was Lehigh's first winning season since 2016 and earned them their thirteenth Patriot League championship and a spot in the Division I Football Championship Subdivision playoffs.
After the game, Lehigh students did what their predecessors had been prevented from doing for 35 years: they tore down a goalpost. Not just any goalpost, but one of the reinforced steel goalposts with the concrete base specifically designed to prevent exactly this.
Then they marched it more than four miles over South Mountain and threw it into the Lehigh River at the Fahy Bridge.
Northampton County's district attorney, Stephen Baratta—a Lafayette alumnus—announced that the act constituted "criminal code violations" and that "this is not behavior that we can really sanction." Whether any charges were filed remains unclear, but the irony of a Lafayette graduate threatening prosecution over celebratory Lehigh vandalism was not lost on anyone.
The 115-Yard Touchdown That Probably Wasn't
Every great rivalry needs a legend, and Lafayette-Lehigh has one involving a 1918 run that keeps getting longer with every telling.
During Lehigh's 17-0 victory that year, halfback Raymond "Snooks" Dowd allegedly ran 115 yards for a touchdown. According to Lehigh's athletic media relations office, "Dowd ran the wrong way, circled his own goalposts," then ran the entire length of the field for the score, eluding Lafayette's All-American linebacker Zac "Baker" Howes along the way.
Some accounts have inflated the run to 160 yards, which would require Dowd to have run backward through his own end zone, possibly into the parking lot, before turning around.
The field is only 100 yards long. But legends aren't beholden to mathematics.
The 150th Game at Yankee Stadium
For 123 years, every Lafayette-Lehigh game had been played in either Easton or Bethlehem—the two teams' home cities. Then, in 2014, they celebrated the 150th meeting by playing at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
The setting was both grand and slightly absurd. Yankee Stadium is vastly larger than either school's regular venue, and likely larger than anyplace almost any player on either side would ever compete again. Each team debuted special uniforms: Lafayette wore plain gray jerseys, while Lehigh paid tribute to the stadium's usual occupants by wearing pinstripes.
The game seemed destined for drama until both of Lafayette's top two quarterbacks went down—the starter injured in the previous week's game, the backup hurt in practice. Third-string senior Zach Zweizig was pressed into service.
Lafayette won anyway, 27-7.
The Rivalry That Survives Pandemics
When COVID-19 forced the Patriot League to cancel fall 2020 sports, it appeared the streak would finally end after 159 consecutive years. But the league made a remarkable decision: move the entire fall 2020 season to spring 2021.
This wasn't done for all sports or all teams. It was done specifically to preserve the streak.
Lafayette and Lehigh were originally scheduled to meet on April 3, 2021, but the game was postponed due to COVID issues within Lafayette's program. They finally played on April 10, with Lafayette winning 20-13. The rivalry remained officially uninterrupted, at least within the academic year.
The Other Rivalries: Every Sport, All Year
Football is the crown jewel, but these schools compete in everything.
In 1968, they created the "All Sports Trophy," awarded to whichever school wins the most varsity sports matchups during the academic year. One point per victory, total them up, declare a champion.
Lehigh has won this trophy 34 times. Lafayette has won it twice. There have been six ties.
In wrestling specifically, Lafayette leads the all-time series 12-10. In football, Lehigh leads 84-72, with 5 ties.
The asymmetry is telling: Lafayette occasionally dominates individual sports, but Lehigh has been the more consistent overall athletic program.
Championship Implications
Since both schools joined the Patriot League, their season-ending rivalry game has frequently decided conference championships.
In 2004 and 2006, Lehigh came into the game leading Lafayette by one game in the standings. Due to tiebreaker rules, the winner would claim the league title outright. Both times, Lafayette won—jumping to big leads, surviving Lehigh rallies, and pulling away.
This created memorable class-wide futility. From 2004 to 2007, Lehigh lost four straight, meaning the Lehigh Class of 2008 graduated without ever seeing their team beat Lafayette. Lehigh then reversed this from 2008 to 2012, winning five consecutive games and leaving the Lafayette Classes of 2012 and 2013 winless against their rivals.
In 2013, for the first time since 2006, the Patriot League championship was on the line when the teams met. Lafayette won 50-28, claiming the title on Lehigh's home turf. Quarterback Drew Reed, a freshman, took Most Valuable Player honors—the first Lafayette freshman to do so in nearly 25 years.
What Makes a Rivalry
Sports Illustrated once told its readers that seeing Lafayette-Lehigh "is something you have to do once in your life." ESPN ranked it eighth among all college football rivalries. Athlon Sports placed it among the top 25 rivalries in the sport's history.
These aren't powerhouse programs. Neither Lafayette nor Lehigh has ever contended for a national championship or produced waves of NFL players. The Patriot League—home to schools like Colgate, Holy Cross, and Bucknell—emphasizes academics over athletics and doesn't offer football scholarships.
And yet the rivalry endures, intense and genuine, precisely because it doesn't matter to anyone outside the Lehigh Valley. The stakes are local, personal, and petty in the best possible way. When Lehigh students march a goalpost four miles to throw it into a river, they're not doing it for television cameras or recruiting rankings. They're doing it because they beat Lafayette, and that's what you do when you beat Lafayette.
The game has inspired books and a PBS documentary narrated by the legendary sports broadcaster Harry Kalas. It has its own informal name—simply "The Rivalry," as if there were no other.
For 161 games across 140 years, two small Pennsylvania colleges have been proving that you don't need national relevance to have a sporting tradition worth caring about. You just need seventeen miles of distance, a perceived slight from a Presbyterian church, and a willingness to set things on fire when you finally win.