If you can't say anything nice....

... use Twitter.
Rather than trying to summarize today's 52-17 loss to the Cincinnati Bearcats here, I just took all the words from the tweets I wrote at the Stadium this afternoon and threw them into a single vaguely-football-shaped word cloud.

You can click on the cloud to enlarge the smaller words, or you can see them in context by looking at twitter.com/beatvisitor if you're interested in today's frustrations.
The only things I'll add are that it will be a crime if Dave Cohen is still the Rutgers defensive coordinator when the Scarlet Knights take the field in our next game against the UCF Knights. And it will be a worse crime if Chas Dodd is not at least considered for the job of starting quarterback in that game. Anyone (of the few hundred of you) who stayed for the last three Rutgers offensive series this afternoon will know why. As at the end of the Houston game, in front of another empty Rutgers Stadium, Dodd demonstrated that he can move this team with confidence in a way that our starting quarterback fails to show in any consistent way.
From this day forward, the words "Gary Nova gives us the best chance to win" need to be banned. He doesn't. 

Keep Calm and Chop Cincy

It was strange to go through a November weekend with absolutely no football games of any note taking place last Saturday, but now we're only three days away from another long drive to Piscataway to see the Scarlet Knights take on the Bearcats at R House for the last time, so (in case you lost last year's) here's your Keep Calm and Chop Cincy poster.

Keep Calm and Chop Cincy

Don't tell the players how big tomorrow's game at Nippert Stadium is -- that a win keeps the Scarlet Knights (8-1, 4-0) all alone in first place in the Big East and a loss creates a three-way tie between the Bearcats, Cardinals, and R Team.
Don't let them know.
Tell them to keep calm and try to go 1 and 0 again this week.

Get your copy of the poster from

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-chop-cincy/ 

Some Questions Settled Earlier Today. One New Question Unanswered.

A beautiful view of the expanded Rutgers Stadium on 7 September 2009
(beautiful except for the halftime score, that is)

I'm not going to write too much tonight, or put together a video before bedtime (or ever?) of today's 47-15 loss to the Cincinnati Bearcats in R House, but there were some questions settled today in Piscataway.

1. Freshman Tom Savage is the starting quarterback for the Scarlet Knights for the rest of 2009 (and he should have been the starting quarterback in the first half as well as the second today).
2. Mohamed Sanu is another true freshman who will be thrilling Rutgers fans with his receptions and runs for the next four years.
3. One Big East team deserves to be placed firmly in all the top 25 lists (hint: it's not the Scarlet Knights)

But some questions remain unanswered, chief among them being:

1. Where was the f***ing defense?

Summer's Gone and the Time is Right for Dancing on our Seats

The best day of the year. Summer officially ends. The New Yorkers with their Benzes and Beemers and Bentleys (none of whom know how to drive) will be gone from my beach town when I get home tonight, with my shredded vocal cords and bleeding ears, after watching my Scarlet Knights at Rutgers Stadium.
If I'm home in time I may post my BlogPoll contribution tonight after today's Rutgers/Cincinnati and Florida State/Miami games. If not tonight, it will go up early tomorrow morning.
I'll definitely post some photos and videos from the game later this week.
I'll also be doing a little tweeting from the game if I can get a connection, but not if it gets in the way of screaming and yelling and banging on the aluminum benches.
Have fun today, whether you're in the Stadium with the noise and the cannon smoke, or just screaming with joy in a bar or living room! It's time for me to get ready to hit Route 18.

I hope for his sake that Tony Pike has eyes in the back of his head

I hope that the Cincinnati Bearcats quarterback finds himself trying to listen for footsteps over the deafening crowd noise next Monday. I hope he has this video from two years ago etched into his neurons. Joe Lefeged is bigger, stronger, faster, and more experienced as a starter than he was in this game against Syracuse when he won Big East defensive player of the week as a true freshman, and a substitute:


What more can we add, than another slightly modified quote from King Lear:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Lefeged
They kill us for their sport.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

"... I'll tickle your Bearcat ..." another slightly shaken Shakespearean quote

I'm sorry, but The Shakespeare Quote Generator is too addictive. Here's one for our friends from the University of Cincinnati.

Away, you scullion! You rampallion! You fustilarian!
I'll tickle your Bearcat!

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

The Quote of the Day about Rutgers Football comes from Rutgers' first opponent (Let's get Gilyard a Hyundai for the long ride back to Ohio)

“We’re getting antsy. The coaches are running us into the ground. We knew the coaches were going to run us into the ground, so we had to adjust to that. It’s like if we win against Rutgers – when we win against Rutgers – we’re in the driver’s seat of the Big East. We’re driving a Maserati. I’d rather be driving a Maserati in front of the pack than trying to catch up to the rest of the Big East in a Hyundai.”

--Mardy Gilyard,

Cincinnati Bearcat Wide Receiver

What? He's Anti-American too? He's too good to drive a new Pontiac or Plymouth or Oldsmobile?

Another Bearcat Theory.

One of our readers wrote in to say that in addition to being a car made by Stutz (as we pointed out yesterday), a bearcat is also a real animal, as pictured here.

We'd love to see the University of Cincinnati spring to bring one in a cage to Rutgers Stadium on September 7th.

~~~

And in other mascot-related off-season news, we'd love to see the next redesign of the cartoony Scarlet Knight bearing a face more like the one that you can see here at @TweetsFromHell (the knight riding the horse should remain unchanged). The whole scarlet armor with the scarlet face thing might not work at all, but it might be worth testing, and it just continues the whole trope about the Jersey being Hell and our hockey team being called the Devils. Sir Gawain thought that Green Knight was tough? Well, get a look at this diabolical Scarlet hombre!

~~~

But here's our favorite college mascot (and its even stranger tie-dyed sibling).

Rutgers Alum A.K. Miller answers the age-old question, "What's a Bearcat?" or, "Those Were Different Times"

As the annual game between Rutgers and Cincinnati approaches, someone always wonders aloud w.t.f. a Bearcat is, and then usually heads to Google and Wikipedia for the answer.

And though he died before the advent of either of our common electronic cheat sheets, A.K. Miller of Rutgers and East Orange (Vermont) not only knew what a Bearcat was, but he tried to corner the market.

Why Life Begins on Labor Day!

Click Here for an early preview from Protect R Turf of Labor Day's matchup between the Scarlet Knights and the Cincinnati Bearcats on September 7 ...

... and Click Here for a preview of the Knights' entire 2009 season from College Football News.

I know that summer just officially started this week, but I can't wait for those autumn leaves.

International Bowl, here we come!

This afternoon the Cincinnati Bearcats accepted an invitation to play Southern Miss in the Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham, so our Knights in Scarlet Armor will almost definitely be playing in the bowl game with a miraculously non-commercial name that takes place at noon on Saturday, January 5th just north of the border.
See you there!

The quote of the day, and a challenge to everyone at the Stadium tomorrow night

Here's the quote from ESPN.com today:

"We went up there two years ago, and it was not a very good environment," said Bearcats senior safety Haruki Nakamura, recalling a 44-9 loss. "They're pretty brutal fans. Their student section is very proud of their program -- very loud, very hostile. I mean, it's one of those atmospheres we were yearning for at the University of Cincinnati."

A happy crowd on 15 September 2007.

"Pretty brutal." "Very proud." "Very loud." "Very hostile." Isn't this exactly the way we want every visiting player to feel about their visits to R house? Is there any reason we shouldn't cultivate the famous (or infamous) attitude demonstrated by the fans at a professional football field a little ways south of New Brunswick in Philadelphia? A lot is written in the national press about Rutgers being a satellite of New York City, but everybody who has ever gone to school on the banks of the Raritan knows that there's also a whiff of Philly cheese steak in the air in Central New Jersey. A number of us finished high school in South Jersey and rooted for the Eagles before we went to the school we sometimes called "Rutgers North" to differentiate it from its satellite campus in Camden.

The last time the Bearcats were in Rutgers Stadium in 2005, the atmosphere seemed fairly good-natured to me (& certainly not as brutal, loud, and hostile as it can sometimes become). It wasn't quite sold out. And there was only one student section in one corner of the Stadium. Now it's always sold out. And there is a second student bleacher section behind the goal line at what was the "open" end of the field until last November.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And Go Knights!

Neither a Bear nor a Cat, or A few facts about this Saturday's opponent

A Bearcat, also known as a Binturong (Arctictis binturong) from the order Carnivora and family Viverrida, is neither (as we said in the title) a bear nor a cat. There are no viverrids living in the Americas, but they resemble wolverines and badgers (although no bearcats are playing in the Big Ten).

Two fun facts from the Binghamton Zoo website: "... scent glands are located in such a position that as the animal moves through the trees, the gland drags on branches, leaving a trail of scent behind (the odor is said to be similar to that of popcorn). " & "Females' genitals are similar in appearance to the males."

Why did the University of Cincinnati pick this Asian racoon as its mascot? Was every other carnivore taken? (Actually, there's a good reason involving a player named Leonard "Teddy" Baehr in the UC Traditions section of this page from Buckeyeplanet.com where it is also pointed out the University of Cincinnati has the fifth oldest football program in the top division of college football, after only Rutgers, Michigan, Navy, and Minnesota).

The most important streak coming into tomorrow night's game is the Bearcats' eight-game winning streak, which began at Nippert Stadium last November 18 when they beat our 9-0 Knights by a score of 30-11. That game, not the close overtime loss to West Virginia on December 2, was the game that lost the Big East title for Rutgers in 2006. Who's the newly-ranked overconfident undefeated visitor this year?

If the Scarlet Knights aren't ready for the Bearcats tomorrow, then they'll never be ready for anybody in 2007. They certainly won't be ready for the next two ranked visitors coming to Piscataway in October.