Same Message Every Week During Rutgers Football Season...

...even when, or especially when, we're playing the number one team in the country at R House in front of a national television audience in prime time on Saturday night on ABC:

"There are hats involved."

A fictional high-school football player on Suburgatory considered Rutgers along with non-existent schools in Florida and Nevada on last night's episode.

A Pet Peeve

I hate the way that televised football games have come to look more and more like video games and less and less like the game that we see from the stands.  Here's a photo I took from the screen with 40 seconds left in the first half of today's Rutgers / West Virginia game:

Rutgers Stadium on ABC TV, October 29, 2011

It's bad enough when they add the yellow lines and the arrows and the team logos and other crap to our green fields, but black lines on snow?  The fact that Rutgers is dressed in all black today makes it even more visually distracting, but if you look closely you will see that the black lines on the 20 and the 25 aren't even lined up with the white lines, which are still visible under the light snow.  Tell ESPN and ABC that the experiment failed!

Time for the second half to start with Rutgers still up by a score of 31 to 21.  As I said over on Twitter, I won't relax unless they have a 30 point lead with 30 seconds left.  I'm signing off here, so look for me over at @BeatVisitor.

AND GO RU!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE at 7pm:
Same old story. West Virginia scored 20 unanswered points in the second half and the final was 41-31 in favor of the Mountaineers.  I wasn't sorry that I was watching on television today.  I've been in attendance at Rutgers Stadium for too many of the 16 straight losses, many of which seemed to be in bad weather (or maybe that was simply my post-game mood).  I'm not sorry to see this team moving to the Big 12.

ABC: "Hey, we can be as racist and sexist as the next major American network!"

It's nice to see that Don Imus has paid his debt by getting a 6-month vacation and $20 million payoff from his former employers.
Now that we've all forgotten what he said on April 4th about the very young and talented women of Rutgers whose only sin was making it to the televised NCAA finals, ABC is free to prove that it can support racism and sexism for profit just as much as its identical siblings CBS and NBC.

"Only," as Don King likes to say, "in America."

If this is really were a free speech issue (which, of course, it's not), rather than an argument about what kind of lucrative speech all three of the major American networks choose to broadcast on the airwaves handed to them in trust by the public, then we should be free to chant FUCK IMUS at every Rutgers athletic event at which ABC or its child ESPN are present.
But, of course it won't come to that, since this is only a rumor, and ABC (and its corporate overlord, Mickey Mouse), would never allow this to really happen.