By any standard, the Lock Haven University football program both present and past had a banner Saturday on Oct. 18. At a jam-packed Hubert Jack Stadium homecoming crowd, the current Bald Eagles of first-year coach Joe Battaglia knocked off perennial PSAC football power West Chester, 28-21, the first victory over the Rams since 1991.

Incredibly, it was also the first time Lock Haven had defeated West Chester in Lock Haven since 1942. Meanwhile, while the Bald Eagles were dispatching West Chester, Vanderbilt — longtime doormats of the SEC — continued an outstanding 2025 season by downing LSU in Nashville. Former LHU player and coach Terry Szucs happens to be a defensive analyst on the Vanderbilt staff and would have been involved with the game day defensive plan to knock off the Tigers.

Szucs is a college football lifer, having had more stops than a New York City cab driver, and his Lock Haven buddies would like nothing better than to see he and the Commodores in the season ending college football playoffs.

On the same day, Tennessee Tech extended their 2025 unbeaten streak with a 52-28 victory over Lindenwood in the OVC/Big South Conference. Tech’s coaching staff includes two names familiar to LHU football — former LHU coach John Allen and former LHU assistant coach, Central Mountain High School and Lock Haven alum Stephen Pribble. Both are instrumental in Tech’s success to date.

One final LHU football connection also occurred that October weekend.

After a brutal loss to Mississippi State that Saturday night, Florida coach Billy Napier was ousted as the Gators’ coach. One of the key figures in the recruitment and selection of the new Gator coach is none other than former LHU coach and now Florida football GM Nick Polk. With the advent of NIL and the portal, college football is now similar to professional sports in that GMs are hired to oversee financial/personnel issues.

Polk holds that position with the Gators. Szucs, Allen, Pribble, and Polk are examples of some outstanding college football minds who started to hone their skills up on the hill at Hubert Jack Stadium. There are likely many others spread throughout the country.

THE MERCY RULE

In 1998 the PIAA implemented what has become known as the mercy rule in Pennsylvania for high school football. The rule states that if a 35-point differential develops at any time during the second half of the game, the game clock will run continuously, stopping only for timeouts, injuries, or scoring plays.

Once implemented, the clock continues to run, even if the score differential falls below 35.

The rationale for the rule is two-fold — player safety is at risk when there is a huge disparity in team skill level, and it is a way to not embarrass and extend a game between two unevenly matched teams.

Writing for the Webb Weekly, sports columnist Scott Lowery noted that in the recently completed 2025 high school regular season schedules saw 28 mercy rule games played by the eight Lycoming County high schools this season. And this is not just an area high school football issue.

In checking Friday night football scores, it is common to see teams all over the Commonwealth racking up 50, 60, even 70 points. One game in the western part of the state this season ended up 82-0.

Even in the season-ending playoff you see lopsided scores. So, the obvious questions become how do you reverse the fast growing trend of blowout games? How do you close the gap between the haves and the have nots of high school football?

The answers to those questions are critical to the balance of high school football statewide. I will conjecture this thought. The commonality of teams on the long end of mercy rule games appears to be that they have more and better athletes than the teams on the short end of the score.

As a highly experienced and wise high school coach once remarked, “It’s not the Xs and the Os, it’s the Jimmys and the Joes.”