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).