The Lehigh Mountain Hawks have named defensive coordinator Rich Nagy as head coach. Nagy will take over for Kevin Cahill, who left for Yale in February. Cahill went 23-14 overall in 3 seasons, which included back-to-back Patriot League championships and 2025 FCS Coach of the Year honors.
Nagy has been the defensive coordinator and linebackers coach for the past three seasons. The defense was woeful in 2023, allowing 430 yards and 31.2 points per game, but it improved drastically in the next two years. In 2024, the defense allowed 304 yards and 21.6 points per game. Last year, Lehigh surrendered only 278 yards and 14 points per game en route to a 12-1 season.
Nagy has spent nearly four decades coaching. He played collegiately at Trinity College in Connecticut as a running back from 1983 through 1987. He became a coach in the fall of 1987 at Trinity, taking over the defensive backs responsibilities. He would spend 1988 at Allegheny as a graduate assistant, before going to Union (NY) in 1989. He spent two years at Maine as the outside linebackers coach in 1990 and 1991.
He returned to Allegheny for five seasons from 1992 through 1996, but ended up back in the FCS (then Division I-AA) in 1997 at South Dakota. He would stay for over a decade at the FCS level and eventually joined Western Michigan as safeties coach in 2010 and 2011. He would become the defensive coordinator at WMU in 2012. He was the DC at Old Dominion during its transition from FCS to FBS from 2013 through 2018.
In 2019, he finally became a head coach, returning to Alleghany for a third stint. In 2019, the team went 4-6 overall, followed by no season in the 2020-21 COVID-impact season. In 2021, Allegheny went 3-7 overall in its final season as a member of the North Coast Athletic Conference. The school moved to the Presidents’ Athletic Conference in 2022, but finished 3-7. Nagy resigned from Allegheny after the 2022 season to become defensive coordinator at Lehigh. He went 10-20 overall and 8-18 in conference games as head coach at Allegheny.
The Rich Nagy era is set to begin on Saturday, August 29, with a Patriot League matchup at Holy Cross. Lehigh will open the season with two more Patriot League contests at Georgetown and at home to William & Mary. The non-conference schedule will get underway with a pair of Ivy League teams starting on Saturday, September 19, with a home game versus Dartmouth, followed by a game at Penn on Saturday, September 26.
Photo Credit to Lehigh University Athletics
