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).

Visitor Number One is Generating High Hopes on the West Coast

This article in yesterday's Merced Sun-Star asks, "Is Fresno State football BCS bound?" in its title and states "Six months from now, when the college football season is nearing an end, Fresno State could find itself playing for a national championship," in its lead sentence.

Is this attitude of our WAC opponents a confidence that will lead them to victory over our Scarlet Knights? Or is it a hubris presaging defeat?

It seems clear now (despite the current hometown responses to the sidebar poll) that a consensus is developing, and that only one of the two teams meeting on Labor Day in Piscataway will be ranked in the AP's preseason top 25. It won't be the Scarlet Knights. It's interesting to see that some fans of the Bulldogs are already riding their expected toehold in the bottom of the rankings to a trip to the absolute top. It's funny, but some of us wearing Scarlet can well remember that feeling about a team that entered the fall of 2007 with a preseason ranking of 16 and climbed as high as 10. I like Rutgers' chances more this year if they have to play their way into the rankings with convincing wins against Fresno State and North Carolina on September 1st and 11th. That will be a much better start than last year's coasting through Buffalo and Norfolk State that did nothing at all to prepare the Knights for the real competition of the Big East (and Maryland).

With Only 52 Days Until Life Begins Again at R House, use this tool to spread the news

Get this widget!

If you want to place this on your own page to spread the good news around the "internets", just click here to get the code. I'll try to create countdown clocks for all of this season's games.

OK. We're all Manchester United fans now (and not just because they're another red team)

There are photos of football (the kind that doesn't have helmets) superstar Wayne Rooney all over the internet wearing not one, but two, different Block R Rutgers caps.

Check it out here, here, and here.

And check out these Manchester United song and chant lyrics here. Here's a sample:

"If you want to go to heaven when you die; you must keep the Red Flag flying high; Get yourself a red bonnet; and put 'F*** the Scousers' on it; If you want to go to heaven when you die"

Or, in place of "F*** the Scousers", you can just put a Block R on your red bonnet.

Rutgers Enters the Top Ten (for its 2009 recruiting class)

Click here to read about how Rutgers' nineteen verbal commitments have earned them a number nine ranking from Tom Luginbill on ESPN.com today. The others on the list are Texas, USC, Ohio State, LSU, Georgia, Clemson, Oklahoma, Florida State, and Tennessee, which certainly sounds more like a list of the usual suspects.

"It is amazing what winning and national television exposure can do for a program and now all the fruits of Rutgers' labor are starting to pay dividends as it enters into our top 10 for the first time ever. Its class is extremely strong on defense with speed and playmakers, and the most important piece of the puzzle might be its quarterback of the future Tom Savage (Philadelphia/Cardinal O'Hara)."