The Importance of this Saturday

Ray Rice and Jean Beljour providing pass protection
for Mike Teel, 18 October 2007 (click to enlarge)

• This Saturday's game is about much more than just saving some porch furniture from the torches of celebrating Mountaineer fans.
• This Saturday's game is about more than avenging last year's triple-overtime loss that kept the Knights out of the Orange Bowl.
• It's about more than the dozen straight losses and the fact that Rutgers will never be taken seriously as a Big East power until they show they can do more than almost beat the Mountaineers.
• The importance of this Saturday's game is simple. It's not about 2006 or 2004 or 2001; it's about the 2007 season, where the Knights once again have their fate entirely in their own hands. If they win this game and the rest of their Big East games, they win the Big East (period); the team that beat them, Cincinnati, already has two losses. If the Mountaineers were to win on Saturday, they would still need help from another Big East team to beat the USF team that owns the tiebreaker against them.

Our job is the same job that we had during the South Florida game, to make as much noise as possible. There's at least one West Virginia source wondering if R House can be as loud on a Saturday afternoon as it can on a Thursday night, if we can get as worked up at noon to beat a #6 team as we did at 8pm to beat a #2 team. If that team is the West Virginia Mountaineers, a team with whom the Knights have more recent history than the USF Bulls have history (period), then we can't get loud for anyone. I had friends on the crew team when I was On the Banks who were told by their coach that you didn't row hard enough if you didn't toss your cookies into the Raritan after each practice. Well, you didn't yell loud enough on Saturday if you can still speak to your friends and family in anything other than a painful croak on the walk to the parking lot. Your vocal cords should feel like they're bleeding bright scarlet (just like the ears of the women and children who were standing in front of you). Yes, please show The Charleston Gazette, and the Mountaineers, that Rutgers Stadium can be just as loud in the daylight.

• (And Please Be Sure to Read This Entry in The Bastard Sons of Pinfall Marks, a WVU fan blog with an inquiring and open mind [until the first snap on Saturday])