Some rivalries need a nickname. This one gave up on the idea a long time ago. In the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, you do not have to say which game you mean. You just say The Rivalry, capital T, capital R, and everyone for thirty miles knows you are talking about Lafayette and Lehigh, two small schools barely eleven miles apart who have played football against each other every autumn since Chester A. Arthur was in the White House.
They first met in 1884. They have met 161 times since, which is more than any two teams in the history of college football have ever met, anywhere. And they have done it almost without a gap, missing only two years in a century and a half: once over a baseball argument, and once for a pandemic. No rivalry in the country has been played more often, or more continuously, than this one.
It is older than the forward pass, older than the trophy, older than nearly everything we now think of as college football. And it is still, every November, the only game that matters here.
Table of Contents
- Just “The Rivalry”
- Older Than the Trophy
- A Century and a Half of Novembers
- The Goalposts
- Moments That Stuck
- The Current State of Things
- How Fans Are Fueling This Rivalry Off the Field
- Why It Endures
Just “The Rivalry”
The Lafayette Leopards play in Easton. The Lehigh Mountain Hawks play in Bethlehem, a short drive down the same small valley. Their stadiums sit just 10.8 miles apart, or, as Lehigh prefers to measure it, as the Mountain Hawk flies. There is no buffer of distance here, no different region or climate to hide behind. These are two neighbors who have spent a hundred and forty years refusing to share a backyard quietly.
Lafayette leads the series 82–74–5 across all 161 meetings, the most any two college teams have ever played. Both schools now compete in the Patriot League, where the late November game has a habit of settling the conference title, which means the oldest rivalry in the sport regularly doubles as a championship. The numbers are remarkable, but the number that matters most is the simplest one: 161, with almost no missing years, a streak of Novembers that no one else in the country can touch.
Older Than the Trophy
The Rivalry is so old it predates the idea of a rivalry trophy. There is no traveling statue, no painted boot. The winner simply keeps the game ball, marked with the final score, and takes it home. Lehigh displays its game balls in its athletic hall of fame. Lafayette keeps its at the official residence of the college president. The oldest balls in those collections are a different shape than a modern football, because they were made before anyone had thought to throw a forward pass.
The bad blood is older than the football too. It traces back to Asa Packer, the industrialist who founded Lehigh University, and his refusal to bankroll an engineering wing at Lafayette once he learned the school would answer to the Presbyterian Church. Packer wanted nothing to do with it, and went off to found his own university with the Episcopalians instead. By the time the two schools met on a field, they had already spent years not getting along. They played baseball first, in 1869, a game that ended in a 45–45 tie, and held a track meet in 1881 that Lehigh won handily. When the football began in 1884, Lehigh was so new to the game that, by one player’s later account, only a single Lehigh man even owned cleats while the rest slid around on the worn grass. Lafayette won that first meeting 56–0, and the animosity was already fully formed. Three years later, Lehigh freshmen celebrated the program’s first win by setting fire to the wooden stands, and the tradition of getting carried away was officially underway.
A Century and a Half of Novembers
For the first stretch of its life the rivalry was played twice a year, and in 1891 the two even squared off three times. That frequency, repeated across decades, is how the series piled up enough games to become the most played in the sport. The streaks could be lopsided. Lafayette won ten in a row from 1919 to 1928, and during World War II, when travel was restricted and the two simply played each other twice a season to fill out their schedules, Lafayette ran off six straight wins between 1943 and 1947 by a combined score of 193–0.
What makes the series singular, though, is what did not happen: the missing years. In a century and a half, the game has been skipped exactly twice. The first was 1896, when Lehigh refused to play over the eligibility of a Lafayette running back who had spent the summer playing professional baseball. The second was 2020, when the pandemic shut down the season, except the two schools refused to let even that break the streak. They moved the game to the spring of 2021 and played it in April, keeping the rivalry alive within the same school year. When the 150th meeting came around in 2014, they marked it by leaving the valley for the first time in over a century and playing at Yankee Stadium in front of a sellout crowd of more than 48,000, where Lafayette won 27–7.
The Goalposts
For most of the rivalry’s history, the goalposts did not survive it. Tearing them down was the tradition at both schools, and for decades the posts were built out of wood specifically so the crowd could pull them apart and carry off the pieces. It got dangerous. By 1989 a fight broke out between fans defending and fans destroying, and the two schools agreed to switch to reinforced steel posts anchored in concrete to put a stop to it.
It did not entirely work. After Lehigh won the 160th meeting in 2024 in front of a sellout crowd, students stormed the field, brought down a steel goalpost anyway, and carried it more than four miles over South Mountain to throw it into the Lehigh River. The local district attorney, who happened to be a Lafayette graduate, was not amused, and noted for the record that the whole thing amounted to a crime. The goalpost stayed in the river. The tradition, evidently, is harder to anchor than the posts.
The goalposts are only the loudest of the rituals. Lehigh, an engineering school to its core, marks the week by feeding a Lafayette steel beam into a five million pound testing machine and crushing it, then racing decorated beds down Packer Avenue and running a Turkey Trot up its hill, while both campuses spend the days before the game draped in bedsheet banners. A hundred and forty years in, the game has accumulated a liturgy.
The older traditions were rowdier still. For decades each campus tried to sabotage the other’s pregame bonfire, sometimes by capturing a rival student and stealing his jacket to sneak in and light it early, and a captured Lehigh man might find an L shaved into his head as proof. Lehigh’s band, the Marching 97, paraded through classrooms and tailgates to stoke the week, and the bedsheet banners hanging from windows were busy roasting the other school long before anyone could do it online. One Lehigh alumnus, running through the bonfire arson, the kidnappings for jackets, and the rest of it, landed on the only honest summary: today it would all be crimes, and everyone just calls it legendary.
Moments That Stuck
A rivalry this long generates its own folklore. In 1918 a Lehigh halfback named Snooks Dowd supposedly took off on a touchdown run of well over a hundred yards, the story being that he ran the wrong way, circled his own goalposts, and then went the length of the field, a tale that has grown taller with every retelling. In 1995, the first year the Patriot League used overtime, a Lehigh receiver caught the game winner with one hand in the back of the end zone in double overtime, as the sun set and the stadium lights strained to keep up, capping a comeback from sixteen points down and clinching the league. In 2005, a Lafayette backup quarterback threw a touchdown on fourth down and ten with thirty eight seconds left to steal the game on Lehigh’s own field. The details change depending on which campus is telling the story. That is part of the point.
The Current State of Things
At the moment, the rivalry belongs to Lehigh. The Mountain Hawks won the 160th meeting in 2024 by 38–13 and the 161st in 2025 by 42–32, giving them two straight, and the second came in the middle of the best Lehigh season in years. The Mountain Hawks ran the table in 2025, finishing the regular season undefeated at 12–0, claiming their fourteenth Patriot League title, and stretching their regular season winning streak to seventeen games, the longest in the FCS. They earned a top seed in the playoffs and hosted Villanova at Goodman Stadium for their first home postseason game in twenty one years, and their coach, Kevin Cahill, was named the FCS coach of the year and given the Eddie Robinson Award. Lafayette, for its part, still leads where it counts most, holding the edge at 82–74–5 that a century of Novembers built up.
The venues are doing something unusual right now. To accommodate Lafayette’s bicentennial, marking the college’s founding in 1826, the schools swapped their normal home schedule so that Lafayette hosts in both 2025 and 2026 before the rotation reverts to normal in 2027. The next meeting is set for November 21, 2026, at Fisher Stadium in Easton. And the rivalry stretches well beyond football: since 1968 the schools have also competed for an All Sports Trophy, awarded to whichever wins more of their head to head meetings across every varsity sport in a year. Lehigh has dominated that count on the men’s side, while Lafayette has held the edge on the women’s side. On the basketball court, where the two meet twice every winter, Lehigh has had the better of it lately and took the most recent meeting in February 2026. The arguing never really stops at the final whistle in November. It just moves to the next sport.
How Fans Are Fueling This Rivalry Off the Field
The game ball goes to whoever wins in November. These days, fans have a say in something else.
In the NIL era, backing a program means more than a ticket and a voice. Platforms like RallyFuel let fans support individual athletes directly through verified, compliant NIL deals, choosing which players to fund, following their real performance stats, and turning loyalty into something measurable. Both sides of the valley have a home there: Leopards fans gather at Lafayette and Mountain Hawks fans at Lehigh.
It adds a modern contest to the oldest rivalry in the sport. RallyFuel’s Fan Power Rankings measure a fanbase’s energy (fans, fire ups, Rally Pit activity, and posts), while the schools leaderboard ranks programs by total support from fans. For two schools that have been measuring themselves against each other since 1884, the question of which fanbase shows up hardest off the field is just the newest version of a very old argument.
Why It Endures
Most rivalries endure because of a trophy, a grudge, or a good marketing department. This one endures because it simply never stopped. It started before the forward pass, before the modern shape of the ball, before nearly every team it now shares a sport with even existed, and it has kept going through two world wars, a presidential assassination that moved the date, a pandemic that moved the season, and a hundred and forty years of everything else.
There is no secret to it. Two small schools barely eleven miles apart started playing in 1884 and never found a good enough reason to quit. The streaks will keep swinging, the goalposts will keep being a problem, and every November the valley will divide itself in two again. The Leopards and the Mountain Hawks do not play for a trophy. They play because they always have, and because the longest argument in college football is not the kind that ever gets settled. It just gets continued.
