The Quote of the Day about Rutgers Football and the good news from yesterday's game

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant." -- Horace

Imagine for a second that yesterday's game between the Scarlet Knights and the Bearcats had still been lost by Rutgers, but in an entirely different way. Imagine that the final score, rather than being 47-15, had been a more respectable 21-17 and that Dom Natale, though not playing a perfect game, had not capped his first half with a third interception. Imagine that he had played just well enough to keep himself in the game and to keep the talents of Tom Savage lying dormant on the sideline with his headphones and clipboard rather than on the field with a helmet and football. Yesterday's adversity (and in the long run a loss is a loss whether it's by four points or forty) then would not have given us a clear solution to our quarterback question. We would still be pondering the Tom Savage / Dom Natale conundrum today rather than knowing that we have our quarterback for the next four years. Next Saturday he'll have his first start, the Scarlet Knights will have their first victory, and 2009's football team will finally start to gel (just one game too late).

In Saturday Sidebar News

Aditi Kinkhabwala's new Big East Sportsblog has been added to the sidebar links. I'm expecting unique stories and links from that source and it's great to see her name back among the active sportswriters following the Scarlet Knights as the football season approaches.

And in the sidebar poll question that will be running until the kickoff on Labor Day, "Who will be the Rutgers Quarterback for the LAST game of the 2009 season?", there has been a dramatic shift in the last few days. Domenic Natale got off to a fast start, but now Tom Savage is given an even chance with Dom to be starting the West Virgina game on December 5th (and D.C. Jefferson, Steve Shimko, and Jabu Lovelace are getting no love from the voters). You still have nine days to register your opinion.

Senior Day at Rutgers Stadium versus Pittsburgh, 17 November 2007

With a little over a week until kickoff and only two days to September's start, we'd like to ask two little things of every Rutgers season-ticket holder.

1. Please get at least one of those magnetic red "R"s that you've received over the years onto the back of your car by September 1. Let everyone see where your heart lies and let everyone on the roads of New Jersey know that there's a game - and a great football season - coming to their state.
2. When we get to the game on September 7th, let's make sure that we're all out of the parking lots and into our seats by 3:30 or 3:45 at the latest. We don't want national television coverage of ANY empty seats in the expanded Stadium. Think of the people you will piss off by being part of a raucous sold-out crowd. Nothing that you and your buddies can be doing around the grill and cooler could be more important or exciting than watching the 2009 Knights come through the tunnel for the first time this year.
   

And for those of you who read this blog and don't have season tickets to Rutgers Football? Well, for the first time since 2006 you might be able to buy single game tickets by clicking here. But hurry if you want to see the Labor Day opener against the Bearcats. And if Rutgers turns the current seven-game win streak into an eight, nine, ten, or eleven game streak, you can forget about getting any single game seats at all.

Jefferson, Lovelace, Natale, Savage, or Shimko. Who's the QB gonna be on December 5th versus West Virginia?

It's been a long time since BeatVisitor dot com, like every other blog and news site on the interwebs, has run a meaningless poll in its sidebar. How could we possibly forget that there's nothing that your average internaut likes more than clicking radio buttons over and over again to drive a political or other point home to his or her (usually his) fellow internauts?

Rectifying this mystifying omission of ours became our task this afternoon, so after spending minutes of our valuable time, we have come up with the following question: Who will be the Rutgers Quarterback for the LAST game of the 2009 season?

You like the way we threw that little twist in there? As everyone else in the Rutgers football universe is watching reports from the August camp and scrimmage for hints as to which QB will be Greg Schiano's field general versus the Bearcats on September 7th, we're asking you for your opinion about the name of the quarterback who will face the Mountaineers on December 5th. Tom Savage? D.C. Jefferson? Jabu Lovelace? Domenic Natale? Steve Shimko?

You can vote until kickoff time (18 days and 23 hours from now) on Labor Day. Start clicking.

The Scarlet beat the White 31-3 on Saturday (here's the video to hold you until Labor Day)

Here are some film clips and photos from Saturday afternoon's 2009 Scarlet-White Game at Rutgers Stadium in beautiful Piscataway.
Once again, it was beautiful weather for the Spring game -- you didn't need to wear anything more than your free scarlet t-shirt. The Scarlet beat the White 31-3 after we watched the Rutgers Lacrosse team fall to Penn State by a score of 9-4 in the 11:30am opener (which explains the yellow lines you may notice on the field).
This video features film clips and shots of quarterbacks Domenic Natale and D.C. Jefferson, wide receiver Tim Brown, kicker San San Te, running back Joe Martinek, the ongoing stadium construction, the on-field postgame autograph session, and more. The background music -- variations on our Alma Mater "On the Banks of the Old Raritan" -- was recorded specifically for this three-minute video. The guitar was played by R. Mumma, but if you want to play along at home the bass and drums are courtesy of a Fender G-Dec Junior (ballad setting in the key of A).
See you at the next game at R House on Labor Day versus Cincinnati!