It's Exactly 24 Hours Until Kickoff in Toronto . . .

. . . and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are dressed in scarlet in honor or our Knights' arrival!

I'm not going to be flying into the Great White North until tomorrow morning. I'd love to be up there right now, but I'll stay for a day and a half after the game instead to see the CN Tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame, and some of these guys in red with the Smokey-the-Bear hats. You're supposed to tease them and tickle them and try to make them smile, right? Or is that the tradition in some other English-speaking nation with men in red wearing funny hats?

The thing I love about the International Bowl the most (so far) is its lack of corporate sponsorship. Canada will be around long after Tostitos and FedEx and GMAC and PapaJohnsDotCom are long forgotten (unless, of course, Cartman's Mom finally gets her way, eh?).

See you tomorrow!

Go Knights!

for any students who haven't yet planned a trip to Toronto:The International Bowl Is the Only Bowl with a Legal Drinking Age Lower than 21!!

The legal drinking age in the province of Ontario is 19, which should make everyone but college freshmen temporarily legal. If they put a bowl game in Quebec, Alberta, or Manitoba next year, then the age will drop to 18.

Actually, if they put a bowl game in ANY other country (other than Egypt, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Kiribati, the Mariana Islands, or the United Arab Emirates), the legal drinking age would be low enough to accommodate most college students.

Having been a charter member of the College Avenue Tavern Association and loyal customer at the Rusty Screw pub in the Student Center in the unfairly-maligned 1970's (often watching The Gong Show with a Guinness and a sandwich at lunchtime between classes), it's still hard for me to imagine being a college student now in Neo-Puritan America.

So enjoy Toronto kids, I'll see you there on January 5th!

Go Knights!

As of 4:00 this afternoon, it's official. We're Toronto bound!

Please be sure to practice these two songs before your trip (and mine) on January 5th:

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

and, of course:

R-U, Rah, Rah;
R-U, Rah, Rah,
Whoo-Rah, Whoo-Rah;
Rutgers Rah
Up Stream Red Team
Red Team Up Stream
Rah, Rah, Rutgers Rah!

Here's the official announcement that just appeared on ScarletKnights.com:

Remember to please order your International Bowl tickets only through Rutgers (ScarletKnights.com, RutgersBowl.com, or 1-866-445-GORU) so that you'll be sitting with the sea of people wearing red, and so that the people who decide bowl invitations in the future see how well we support our team in the postseason.

Go Knights!

It'll be a great game, eh?

"If we were going strictly on travel, we probably would have taken Rutgers. Outside of West Virginia, they're probably the second-best traveling team in the Big East..."
-- Will Webb, executive director of the Meineke Car Care Bowl, quoted in this morning's Cincinnati Post.

Let's prove what great bowl travellers we are once again.

The formal invitations aren't out to the PapaJohns.com Pizza Bowl in Birmingham or the International Bowl in Toronto, but it's time to start planning a January trip to the Great White North! The Sun Bowl has formally invited the University of South Florida, the Meineke Muffler Shop Bowl has invited the Huskies of the Yukon (talk about a team that's custom built for a game north of the border), and it seems clear that the game in Alabama will choose the Bearcats and we'll be heading north to play either Bowling Green or Ball State -- no matter what the results of tomorrow night's game against the Louisville Cardinals.

We'll have better beer, we'll be able to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, we won't have to brave a trip south of the Mason-Dixon line, and we'll have a bowl trophy that doesn't double as an advertisement for a franchise that will be obsolete in 5-10 years.

It looks like we should be getting our passports ready

A consensus seems to be solidifying around the prediction that the Scarlet Knights, and we their fans, will be heading north of the border at the beginning of January to take part in the International Bowl in Toronto. This is the message in today's update of the SI.com bowl predictions, the Scarlet Scuttlebutt blog, today's Star-Ledger, today's Home News Tribune, CBSSportsline, ESPN.com, etc., etc.

That's not to say that you have to stop putting your own bowl preferences and/or predictions in the sidebar poll. There's always the chance that another bowl will jump at a New York-area team with what that means for TV exposure and fans who travel well (especially if that New York-area team were to massacre a certain school from Kentucky [which isn't Kentucky] on ESPN this Thursday night), but we're just saying that it looks like a passport might be needed for the Knights' last game of the season, so make sure yours is in order.

I don't like the fact that we'll be playing a MAC team like Bowling Green or Miami (not from Florida) if we head north, but I do like the fact that the bowl, like the Texas Bowl last year, is not named after a muffler joint or a corporate pizza chain. And I like the idea that we'll get to sing "O Canada!" before the opening kickoff.