North Dakota State has one coach who has seen Lehigh and Lum before

FROM KEITH GROLLER

Just getting started on learning about North Dakota State.

Colleague Paul Reinhard has been filling me in on Fargo, and includes the pictures below that he took out there when he covered Lafayette's season opener against NDSU in the Fargodome back on Labor Day weekend.

In checking out the coaching staff you learn that head coach Craig Bohl, a very impressive 72-31 in his ninth season, is a Nebraska alum. He played for Tom Osborne in the 1979 Orange Bowl and the 1980 Cotton Bowl and later was a defensive coordinator for the Cornhuskers. He also coached at four other Division I schools, including Rice, Tulsa, Wisconsin and Duke.

He has impressive credentials and has done a spectacular job with the Bison. We hope to talk to him sometime this week.

But the guy that stood out to me in going through the coaching staff was defensive backs coach Chris Klieman. He was a member of the defensive staff at Northern Iowa last year, the same UNI team that Lehigh faced in the first round of the NCAA FCS playoffs.

Klieman was once a co-defensive coordinator and then a defensive coordinator and then became the defensive backs coach at UNI and that seems to have been his role at UNI last year when the Panthers faced Lehigh in the UNI Dome and lost, 14-7. Losing the defensive coordinator position position at UNI was probably one of the reasons he is now at NDSU.

UNI's defense played well against Lehigh last November, although Lehigh quarterback Chris Lum threw two third-quarter TD passes and that was the difference in the game thanks to the Mountain Hawks defense.

Lum completed 18 of 37 passes for 262 yards in that one with Ryan Spadola catching nine passes for 127 yards and a TD.

NDST plays a Tampa Cover-2 defense. It will be interesting to see how Lehigh and offensive coordinator Dave Cecchini attacks the Bison defense.

Available on the NDSU website is a press conference that introduced Klieman as the new defensive backs coach.

Most schools around here would have just handled that announcement with a press release. Interesting that hiring a defensive backs coach is that newsworthy to merit a press conference at NDSU.

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