"Hey Big E! Hey Big E! This one's for you buddy!"

Here's a short iPhone video taken from my seat in section 122  of the trophy presentation at Yankee Stadium after the Scarlet Knights' 27-13 Pinstripe Bowl victory over the Iowa State Cyclones.  You can see Jawan Jamison getting his MVP award and Greg Schiano dedicating the win to Eric LeGrand.

What "SI Curse" for appearing on the Sports Illustrated cover right before a big game?

(Here's the lo-res version I originally posted via Blogger):

Eric LeGrand on the next Sports Illustrated cover

On Newstands Later This Week.

This fan choice of Eric LeGrand for the cover of Sports Illustrated's Pictures of the Year issue is an amazing honor for a great guy.  It's wonderful to know that the rest of the country is as touched by Eric's story as those of us who bleed scarlet.

Unless I've missed something over the years, I think this will be the first chance since football began in New Brunswick in 1869 that the Scarlet Knights have a chance to overcome the so-called SI Curse.

Quote of the Day about Rutgers Football

One should also look at O-lines when identifying potential surprise teams flying under the radar. Even without longtime starting quarterback Mike Teel, Rutgers is my pick to win the watered-down Big East due in large part to its five returning starters on the line.
--Stewart Mandel, SI.com College Football Mailbag, August 12, 2009

Don't wait until the last minute to reserve your flight!

The first 2009-2010 bowl predictions are coming in and the Rutgers Scarlet Knights are getting some respectable early-season picks from the mainstream football press (if anything, the Rutgers fans and bloggers themselves are being a lot more conservative, at least publicly).

ESPN has Rutgers playing in Charlotte on December 26th in the Muffler Bowl (the Beat Visitor style guide calls for no brand names whenever possible, and you know which bowl we mean) against either Clemson or North Carolina.

Sports Illustrated has the Scarlet Knights meeting Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl on January 1. Like ESPN, SI also has Rutgers ranked at #27 in their first Power Rankings, the highest of the Big East teams (just ahead of West Virginia at #28).

Brian Bennett, the Big East blogger for ESPN, also has the Knights playing football in New Orleans on New Years Day.

Is it too early to check Orbitz for flights to Louisiana and hotel rooms in the French Quarter?

BCS Bowl or Bust

Click Here to see Stewart Mandel's answer to a reader asking about Rutgers' chances of getting to a "decent" bowl game this year.
You only have to think back five years to remember what an accomplishment it was for the Scarlet Knights to be going bowling anywhere, so you have to love the heightened expectations.

Go Red Teams: Reminded of a pre-season prediction from Stewart Mandel

Watching the Sugar Bowl between the Utah Utes and the Alabama Crimson Tide last night, I was reminded of Stewart Mandel's preseason prediction from July 30th. (Click here to see his origjnal SI.com Mailbag prediction.)

The three teams he gave the best chance of going from unranked to the top fifteen in the final 2008 rankings were the Utah Utes (who at 13-0 have a strong argument for being the National Champions and certainly can't finish lower than #2 if there's any justice), Alabama (ranked at #1 for five weeks until they lost to Florida in the SEC championship game; they'll definitely finish in the top ten), and our beloved Scarlet Knights. When the Knights were 1-5, Stewart looked like he was totally off on one of his three picks, but who would have known at that point of the season that the Knights would then pull off seven victories in a row? With an extra four points in the game against Cincinnati, we would have been going to the Orange Bowl instead of the Pizza Bowl, and we would have been ranked despite the slow start. If early season games were discounted in football the way they are in basketball, the dominant RU team of November and December would definitely be in the top 15 now, so I'm giving Stewart props for his predictive acumen.

He was also two for three on his picks for the three teams he thought had a chance to drop out of the top 25 in the final standings after starting in the top 10. West Virginia and Wisconsin didn't waste much time dropping from their preseason heights. Ending the regular season at #8, Texas Tech will probably hang onto a place in the top 25 even after their bowl loss to Ole Miss in the Cotton Bowl yesterday, but they'll probably drop out of the top 10.

Congratulations Stewart! I know you're probably reminded about your bad picks more often than about those with which you're (almost) right on.

Book Your Air Travel Now, because if Sports Illustrated says it, it must be so!

According to the SI Bowl Projections posted yesterday, we will need to be in St. Petersburg, Florida to face the University of Central Florida Golden Knights on December 20th. Because it will be almost a home game for the gilded ones, we'll need to get a large and noisy contingent in Scarlet heading south (where we can also visit all those expatriate New Jersey parents and grandparents).

Even though this news comes from that most reputable of sports and swimsuit authorities, maybe you shouldn't start pricing and reserving Christmas-week flights from Newark, Philadelphia, JFK, and Atlantic City just yet. After all, their College Football Preview prediction from last August didn't quite come to fruition. Who needed a trip to Pasadena when we could go to Toronto anyway?

[FIVE DAYS, FIVE HOURS, ONE MINUTE & 29 SECONDS TO KICKOFF!!]

Knights, Utes and Tide as the sleepers of 2008? Go Red Teams!

Click here to see what Stewart Mandel has to say in his most recent Mailbag on SI.com about the 3 teams with the best chance of going from unranked in the preseason to ranked in the top 15 at the end of the 2008 season (remind any Scarlet Knights fans of 2006?) and the 3 teams with the best chance of starting in the top 15 and ending the season unranked (a feeling that should be familiar to 2007 fans of the Louisville Cardinals).
For those who don't like to click, the potential sleepers are 1) Rutgers, 2) Utah, and 3) Alabama.
The sinkers are 1) West Virginia, 2) Texas Tech, and 3) Wisconsin.
I hope that Stewart's Mailbag is made of material that's strong enough to handle the weight of mail that it's going to be receiving from Mountaineer country this week (and for the rest of the season).

Have you seen Stewart Mandel's Spring Picks over at SI.com?

There are three Big East teams listed in the lower half of his first top 25 for the Spring and one team in position 26, and none of them are the Scarlet Knights. Maybe he feels burned about putting the Knights at #12 in his 2007 Spring power rankings, or picking us to go to the Rose Bowl last year.

He has the Mountaineers down at 14, the Cincinnati Bearcats at 22, the Pitt Panthers at 25, and the Connecticut Huskies as the first of five teams "On the cusp". He doesn't mention in this first ranking how the four Big East teams in the bottom of the conference -- Rutgers, USF, Louisville, and Syracuse -- are ranked in his mind at this point in the preseason, but the Scarlet Knights look like they're going to need some big wins, with style points, to make an impression on the pollsters this fall.

It's not the same game. Have you dug into the SI Vault yet?

I did a little browsing around in the newly-free Sports Illustrated Vault this afternoon looking for Rutgers football history, and one of the first things I found was this little paragraph from November 27, 1961 issue, when the undefeated Scarlet Knights were ranked by SI at number 3 in the East.

"Rutgers remained unbeaten, mostly because of defensive play by Quarterback Sam Mudie. While Colgate pushed the supposedly inviolable Scarlet Knights around scandalously, Mudie ran back intercepted passes 52 and 38 yards for touchdowns. He plunged a yard for another and passed 35 yards to End Bill Craft for a fourth as Rutgers won 26-6."

So why isn't Mike Teel out there intercepting passes and running them back for touchdowns?? Football in the Noughties is nothing like football in the early Sixties.
Have fun browsing around in sports history yourself.

It's not too early to start making this year's bowl predictions

It may have been too early back in mid-August when a certain national magazine (which rhymes with "Warts Illustrated") picked the Scarlet Knights to play the Wolverines in the Rose Bowl.

But with one game left for the Knights against the Louisville Cardinals next Thursday, it's not too early to predict where we'll be travelling in the holiday season this year.

Please vote in the sidebar poll; tell us whether you think we should make our travel reservations for El Paso, Birmingham, Charlotte, Toronto, or somewhere else.

On ESPN.com, Ivan Maisel has the Knights playing Southern Miss in the PapaJohns Bowl and Mark Schlabach has the Knights playing Bowling Green in the International Bowl. CBS Sportsline.com has the Knights playing Florida State in the Meineke Car Care Bowl. And Sports Illustrated seems to be stepping back from their pre-season Rutgers/Michigan matchup, with Stewart Mandel at SI.com also having Rutgers against Florida State in North Carolina.

So, what's your pick?

The SI on Campus Tailgate Report Card for Rutgers is Out

Click here or on the screen shot to read the entire report card from Andrew Reed released yesterday afternoon. Without giving it all away, it seems that we need to work on our selection of alcoholic beverages and use more bodypaint. Maybe alcohol facilitates the application of more bodypaint?? Never thought of that!!

Though the season is far from over and a sweep of the next four games could put the Knights in a very respectable bowl game, is anyone else more than a little bummed that we only have one more home game at R House on November 17th against Pittsburgh at which to try to pull up our tailgating grades? Where did the season go?

And what exactly does Andrew Reed find so distasteful about being herded like cattle to board a shuttle bus that takes 45 minutes to move 3 blocks on its way back to the parking lots at the RAC at the end of the game? Do other schools do it any differently?

RU shines in the current print issue of SI

Of course there was a time in the very recent past when a fan of the Scarlet Knights would have to search closely through the fine print in Sports Illustrated's annual College Football Preview issue to find any mention of our favorite team. Would we come in last in the Big East? Or would Temple be predicted to finish below us?
This year's issue, dated August 20, 2007 and on the newstands now, has a wealth of scarlet pages, from a full-page John Hancock advertising feature about Greg Schiano on page 44, to a profile of Ray Rice (with photo vs Syracuse) on pages 65 & 66, to a full-page article on SI's #12 preseason pick (with emphasis on Eric Foster) on page 102. You could miss the smaller mentions of Rutgers on the Big East page on page 119, or in this list of Bowl Predictions on page 129:

Our Knights versus the Wolverines in the ROSE Bowl?? I don't want to get too confident, but I'm trying to save my money for a long New Year's Day trip.

Kings, Barons, Knights or Peasants? Guess where Stewart Mandel of SI.com ranks Rutgers Football

In his attempt today in SI.com's College Football Mailbag to rank the "prestige level" of all 66 BCS schools by dividing them into four tiers, Kings, Barons, Knights, and Peasants, Stewart Mandel puts the Scarlet Knights, despite their long history and their recent winning ways, and their noble mounted mascot, firmly among the Peasants.

You can write to him to express your disagreement, but this is probably exactly what the Scarlet Knights need (like their recent #70 ranking on ESPN.com) to keep in the players' minds that there is still a lot to prove to the rest of the country, despite the recent successes on the field, in the media, and at the box office.
The entire Big East takes their lumps in these feudalistic rankings. There are four Peasants (Cincinnati, Connecticut, Rutgers, and South Florida), three Knights (Pittsburgh, Syracuse, and West Virginia), and no Barons or Kings. The eighth school in the Big East, Louisville, is the only BCS school that he left off the list entirely, because "History-wise, the Cardinals are peasants, but the program has completely reinvented itself over the past decade and now gets mentioned with the kings and barons. For now, we'll just say: TBD. "

The Current Preseason Rankings (visually enhanced with Scarlet)

Now that Athlon (RU at #10) and Lindy's (RU at #16) have been added to this Wikipedia 2007 poll summary page, the picture of the consensus about the Scarlet Knights' place in the national football scene is becoming clearer. I've added the scarlet coloring to this screenshot here in order to emphasize how everyone (except nationalchamps.net) has our school firmly in the hunt. The average of these seven red boxes gives the Knights a combined preseason ranking of 15.42.

Click on the picture for an enlargement, or here to see the very latest updates.

The Knights at Number 12 in the new SI.com Power Rankings

Click here for the full list of the updated preseason top 25 in Stewart Mandel's "Rights of Spring" Power Rankings published on SI.com on April 24th.


Not that it means much at this point, without a single game having been played in the 2007 football season, but as we've pointed out previously, watching the preseason polls is a brand new phenomenon for longtime fans of the Scarlet Knights. Seeing them ranked between Ohio State and Arkansas is unprecedented, so forgive us for the constant updates.

We're also watching the 2007 Heisman Trophy previews. Ray Rice is at #10 in this one.

(AND REMEMBER TO VOTE IN THE BEAT VISITOR POLL

"When, if ever, will the current Rutgers Stadium home win streak come to an end?"
IN THE RIGHT-HAND SIDEBAR)