Good Luck to Jourdan Brooks!

The best of luck to number 39, Jourdan Brooks, who is transferring from Rutgers to Morgan State.
He had a number of important runs for the Scarlet Knights, but the most memorable run at R House may have come in the 2008 blowout of the Louisville Cardinals when his 60+-yard run was ended with one of his dreadlocks on the FieldTurf. Let's go to the video:
I hope he gets a lot of carries for the Morgan State Bears, where he should see a number of successful runs.
Good Luck Jourdan!

Today Beat Visitor dot com is rooting for Jamaal Westerman's team

Ignore the cartoonish lettering (doesn't it remind you of the Simpsons?) and the apostrophe abuse (hey, at least they didn't paint one in "Jet's"), but here's an example of some playoff spirit painted on the side of M + S Grocery on West End Court (yes, the ugly street on which Bruce Springsteen wrote Born to Run) in Long Branch. I just took this photo on the way to the store.
The game is on my static-filled radio and the GameCast and the Jets are up 17-13 over the Baltimore Indianapolis Colts late in the second quarter of the AFC Championship game as I write this.

J! - E! - T! - S! Jets! Jets! Jets!

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update @ 6:15pm: OK, so the Jets fell one game short of the Super Bowl (or half a game short) by losing to the Colts by a final score of 30-17 this afternoon, but they had a great run and should be proud of their 2009-2010 season when the sting of today's loss fades.
Two New Jersey teams with true rookie quarterbacks now have a lot to look forward to in September 2010.
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update on February 10: On this snow day wandering around on the internet, I discovered that this picture was actually reproduced on Apostrophe Abuse! I'm so proud.

College sports don't end on New Years Day? Who Knew?

This morning I opened a Scarlet Letter yearbook from the era when coaches were required to wear plaid sport jackets and I found evidence, between pages on major Rutgers sports like football and ultimate frisbee, that there was once a men's team playing the women's sport of "basket-ball" on the Banks of the Old Raritan.

Who knew?

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

I'm not near a television, so I didn't see it happen, but it's great to see the stat line after the first quarter in Foxboro, Massachusetts with Ray Rice having 94 yards and two touchdowns for the Ravens after fifteen minutes of play.As I typed this and uploaded the picture of Ray from ESPN's splash page, I just watched Ray go over 100 yards on NFL GameCast with his 8th rush of the game at the beginning of the 2nd quarter. As I said in my headline, this success could not be happening to a nicer guy. He continues to make everyone with any connection to Rutgers extremely proud and happy that we shared some time with him on the Banks of the Old Raritan.
Run Ray Run, as they used to say on the t-shirts in Rutgers Stadium.

25 Football Teams that are not the Rutgers Scarlet Knights

Really, who cares? None of the teams on the following list wears a block R on their helmets or sings "On the Banks of the Old Raritan" after their games, but since I have religiously filled out the fifteen previous BlogPoll ballots this season, here is my sixteenth.

As always, you can click on the thumbnail on the upper right to check out the scribbled logic behind these rankings.

See you in April for the Scarlet-White Game!

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama
2	Boise State	3
3	Texas	1
4	Florida	2
5	TCU	1
6	Ohio State	1
7	Iowa	2
8	Cincinnati	5
9	Penn State	1
10	Pittsburgh	2
11	Virginia
12	Brigham Young	3
13	Oregon	5
14	Georgia Tech	3
15	Utah	4
16	Nebraska	5
17	LSU	3
18	Wisconsin	6
19	Mississippi
20	Miami (Florida)	4
21	Central Michigan	2
22	Southern Cal
23	Texas Tech
24	Navy
25	Oregon State	7
Last week's ballot

Dropped Out: Virginia Tech (#13), West Virginia (#17), Oklahoma State (#20), Stanford (#22), Houston (#25).

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Update 11 January 2010:

OK, maybe I need to start proofreading. #11 on this final list should probably have been the 10-3 Virginia Tech Hokies and not the 3-9 Virginia Cavaliers. Though I love Charlottesville and I'm sure there was a least one Cavalier fan who was thrilled to see his team's name in a position high on the "Others Receiving Votes" list because of my carelessness, I'm sorry. Thanks to Brian Cook for singling out this error in the "Wack Ballot Watchdog" section of his Postseason Blogpoll wrapup earlier this afternoon.

Name That Tune.

(once again, thanks to Wordle.net and their addictive little toy. Images of Wordles are covered by a Creative Commons license.)

The Visual State of Beat Visitor dot com on the Fifth of January Twenty Ten

It's obvious from this picture that I need to use the word Rutgers with more regularity. Rutgers. Rutgers. Rutgers. Visit Wordle.net to try one yourself for your own site, or for a website that you visit regularly.
I was surprised by the words that popped up most regularly on my blog. But I'll fix that. Rutgers. Rutgers. Rutgers. Scarlet Knights. Scarlet Kinghts. Scarlet Knights. Football. Football. Football.
This cloud of words was created using the tools at http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed by a Creative Commons license.