Searching for another Curt Cignetti or Bob Chesney? Lehigh's Kevin Cahill may be next

As the coaching carousel spins ever faster in college football, the search for what’s next becomes even more frantic.

In athletic departments across the country, athletic directors are asking, “How do we find our version of Curt Cignetti?” That may be impossible. It may be that Cignetti, who is 22-2 at Indiana since coming from James Madison, is a unicorn. But it’s also possible the head-coaching path Cignetti took — from Division II to the FCS to the FBS — prepared him for success. It’s also why current James Madison coach Bob Chesney (who moved from Division III to Division II to FCS to FBS) is one of the hottest candidates for several openings.

The coaches who can build and win at multiple levels seem most likely to keep figuring out how to build and win at higher levels. Chesney’s last stop before James Madison was Holy Cross of the FCS Patriot League. The next coach who may succeed at making the leap? Lehigh’s Kevin Cahill, whose team will play for the Patriot League title Saturday in the Mountain Hawks’ NCAA-record 161st meeting against rival Lafayette. 

Cahill’s team is 11-0 and ranked fourth in the FCS. Lehigh has the longest regular-season win streak in Division I at 16 games. (Cignetti’s Hoosiers have the longest FBS streak with 12 consecutive regular-season wins.) Lafayette is 8-3 and ranked No. 23. Both are 6-0 in the Patriot League, so Saturday’s winner takes the title and the league’s automatic bid to the FCS playoffs. Cahill’s team won the title last year and beat Richmond in the first round before falling to current New Mexico coach Jason Eck’s Idaho team in the second.

It was against Lafayette two years ago that first-year head coach Cahill saw exactly what he wanted his program to be and exactly what he didn’t want it to be.

The Mountain Hawks led the Leopards 21-14 at halftime of the 2023 meeting. Lehigh certainly wasn’t the more talented team; it had entered the game 2-8 and Lafayette was trying to clinch the Patriot League title. But in that first half, just as he had in some of those losses, Cahill saw his team playing the way he and his staff had preached. The Mountain Hawks were tough. They were disciplined. Even if they weren’t better.

In the second half, the Leopards poured it on. They exploded for five touchdowns and won 49-21. “The fourth quarter of that game, I felt we quit,” said Cahill, who came to Lehigh after 10 seasons as an assistant at Yale. “That bothered me.”

So Cahill set about to build a culture where Lehigh players set the standard, where they were so invested that they’d never give up on one another again. It has worked. Cahill has convinced his team that the scoreboard doesn’t matter. Only the way it plays matters. And if the Mountain Hawks play the way they’re supposed to, they’ll rarely lose. And sometimes they’ll win even if they don’t meet the standard for 60 minutes.

“If you were to walk into our team meetings, you’d think we were 0-11,” Cahill said. “We know on the inside that not everything is roses.”

Continuity has helped. The Mountain Hawks have the same leading passer (Hayden Johnson), rusher (Luke Yoder), receiver (Geoffrey Jamiel) and tackler (Brycen Edwards) as last season. Bringing back that much production isn’t easy at the FCS level. FCS programs have little NIL money, so any interested FBS program can swoop in with something the current team can’t match. 

“In the land of the NIL and the transfer portal, it’s not easy to navigate,” Cahill said. “But we just try to be open and honest with everybody. This is where we’re at. This is what we’re doing. And if you want to be a part of it, stay. If you don’t, if you think there is something better, then go chase something better.”

Cahill said a Big Ten school tried to poach one of his players last offseason. After learning the dollar amount offered, Cahill and his staff met with the player and explained how much a Lehigh degree — which the player was a year away from obtaining — could be worth in the future. Cahill also explained that the player, who the staff learned likely was being recruited for depth and not as a starter, would have a better chance of being seen by NFL scouts as a starter in the FCS than as a backup in the Big Ten. The player stayed.

The Patriot League occupies a unique space in the FCS. Its members are more similar to Ivy League schools than they are to the schools that populate the rest of the FCS playoff bracket. Players come from a smaller pool because they must meet admission standards. In some ways, it’s similar to recruiting to a service academy. Which makes sense, because Army and Navy are full members of the Patriot League with the exception of football, where they play in The American.

In Patriot League football, fortunes can rise or fall with the right coaching hire. Chesney’s Holy Cross teams won the Patriot League in 2021 and 2022 and fell one game short in 2023. Lehigh was 9-27 in four seasons under Tom Gilmore before Cahill arrived. Now the Mountain Hawks are playing for their second consecutive title.

To win it, they’ll need to forget the scoreboard and play to the standard they’ve created over these past two seasons.