So What's Up With South Jersey Football Fans?

The New York Times has a great interactive college football fan map on The Upshot today. It doesn't surprise me that Syracuse, Notre Dame, and Army are the most popular teams in my Hudson Valley county and Zip Code, and it doesn't surprise me that the area around New Brunswick is solid Rutgers country, but why is southern New Jersey so heavily Penn State country? And why doesn't Rutgers even make the top three in many of those counties? This map is based on  Facebook likes, so please like some Scarlet Knights links if you live in the lower counties of New Jersey.

The map and the accompanying article are fascinating and just a little bit addictive. I was surprised by the size of Fresno State's popularity in central California for one thing. Another surprise is the most popular team in the midtown and downtown Manhattan Zips, our visitors tomorrow, the Michigan Wolverines.

The First Keep-Calm-and-Chop Poster of 2013

Time to start using that #ChopFresno hashtag.

Rutgers Getting No Love From the CBSSports.com Preseason 126

The Rutgers Scarlet Knights do not even make it into the top half of the CBSSports.com preseason 126, coming in a number 77.

This makes game number one coming up on August 29th against Fresno State that much more important.  This meaningless preseason list (from the network that's still blacked out on my Time Warner system) has the Bulldogs ranked at number 26.

The Importance of Game One

In this year for Rutgers Football between the Big East and the Big Ten, there will be a scarcity of games that will mean something on the national level, especially early in the season. So I was glad to see the Fresno State Bulldogs are ranked at 22 in the preseason Athlon, Phil Steele, and USA Today polls.

From CollegeFootballPoll.com

If the Scarlet Knights can drive the ball with authority into the red-and-white checkerboard end zones of Bulldog Stadium more often than the home team on the night of August 29th, Rutgers has a possibility of making a dent in the polls by Labor Day.  There won't be another chance to impress national voters until the Arkansas game on September 21. The games against the second-tier Norfolk State Spartans on September 7 and the Eastern Michigan Eagles (touted to finish last in the MAC) on September 14 won't make the news unless Rutgers fails to win those home games by at least three or four touchdowns.

But I Love Lo-Def Amateur Football Videos!!

Here's a fuller article from today's New York Times entitled "Leagues See Bloggers in the Bleachers as a Threat " about the threatened crackdown by the SEC on content posted online (at sites other than those owned by ESPN & CBS).
Will the day come when the Big East, in its desire to prove itself as big as the SEC, decides that I can't bring my cheap digital camera into Rutgers Stadium because I might decide to engage its video setting and post something like this on YouTube?

I have high hopes of doing the same thing on Labor Day 2009 that I did on Labor Day 2008 up above (with a different result in Rutgers' Win Loss column, of course).

How to Celebrate the New Closed Endzone at R House on Labor Day? With A Wave!

Here's a video of Rutgers Stadium (without any seats in the south endzone) doing the wave during the game against the Fresno State Bulldogs on Labor Day of 2008.

What could we do on Labor Day of 2009 with the lower level of the Stadium finally completing the oval? I hope we can all be out of the parking lots and into our seats early so that we can be ringing R House with coordinated movement and noise before the loudspeakers tell us that the team is in the tunnel and asking us to "bring 'em out bring 'em out" to start the Knights' season against the Cincinnati Bearcats, a.k.a. "The Spoilers." One win against the Bearcats in 2006 or 2008, and the Scarlet Knights would have been in a BCS Bowl. It's rare for any team to begin a season with a game that means so much.
Here's a longer video from last Labor Day from YouTube (you can see the same wave between the 3rd and 4th quarters at 1:41 of this longer clip):

Mike Teel and Kenny Britt and Tiquan Underwood may not have hit their stride in those early games last fall (especially not in this 24-7 opening day loss), but there was no faulting the spirit in the all-scarlet crowd.

The Big Question Answered. There will be a cannon and a horse at R House in 2009!

Here's a short video clip of the cannon firing from its temporary position in the south endzone construction site last September 1st after a San San Te P.A.T. at the Fresno State game (and I challenge you to say san-san-tay-pee-ay-tee five times fast!).

Click here for the word from Tim Pernetti that there will be a cannon somewhere in the Stadium this September when the bowl is closed and the folks in Revolutionary garb can no longer light the fuse on the top of the green shady knoll.

"Having played in that old-old stadium, I know how important the cannon of all things is. And the horse was kind of brought into that scene with (coach)Doug Graber when I played for him." -- Tim Pernetti

The video from Labor Day's opener

It was great to be at the Stadium on Monday afternoon for the game against Fresno State even if the result wasn't what we all wanted and cheered for. The biggest losses from last year's team were the loss of Ray Rice's ability to get those last three yards on the ground, and the loss of Jeremy Ito's leg (but remember Ito's misses in his first game against Michigan State?).
Here's the video evidence that the loss had nothing to do with lack of spirit in the stands:

See you all on the eleventh as we face the team in baby blue. I'll be the guy in red in section 123.

Looking at our Alma Mater through fresh (Fresno) eyes

Click here if you want to read a fresh appreciation of Rutgers and the State of New Jersey from Matt James of the Fresno Bee. Here's a representative quote:

"The first thing you notice about the Rutgers campus is that it's roughly the size of Greenland.
The name sounds like a small private college with a dozen ivy-covered buildings and tasteful school uniforms, but that would be far from the actual situation.
Rutgers has an ecological preserve in the middle of campus where they could have filmed "Last of the Mohicans." You could head to Accounting 208 and not be seen for a month. The preserve, alone, could hold the entire Fresno State campus.
Rutgers has a bus system that has at least 10 different lines. The city of Clovis has only five.
[...]New Jersey really is the Garden State. Could have sworn that was an ironic state nickname, you know, like calling Hawaii the Glacier State.
It really is beautiful, trees as thick as an opening-week frat party. The river that carves through campus is called the Raritan, which leads to the Rutgers alma mater: "On the Banks of the Old Raritan.""

When I've had relatives visit from Southern California and Nevada, they've always been amazed by this green state of ours, especially driving down the Parkway south of the Raritan. Let's hope the Bulldog players are still a little bit amazed and disoriented by the size and beauty of our school at 4pm tomorrow afternoon.

Get your game notes for TOMORROW'S opener by clicking here. You can also download the The Greg Schiano Radio Show or Inside Rutgers Football for your computer or iPod by clicking here.

Click on the following links to get interesting position-by-position comparisons of the Bulldogs and the Scarlet Knights on Fresno State's Bark Board for the QB, the RB/WR, and the OL/TE positions.

But tomorrow all the reading and anticipation will come to an end. I can't wait to see you there. Coat your vocal cords with a little bit of honey so that you can scream as loudly as possible! Let them be as impressed by our volume and spirit as they are by the beauty and size of our campus.

S.N.O.R.T., or the Block R of Rutgers joins "the elite of the elite"

Rocky Top Talk today lists "The 29 Most Boring Football Logos" and the Block R of Rutgers takes pride of place in the first five that are mentioned.

"Madonna, Prince, Sting, Bono. Bozo. Only the most notorious are known by a single name. The elite of the elite, though, are known by the most extreme of abbreviations: a single letter. [...] Rutgers is sort of crashing the party. Fortunately for them, though, Rhode Island is the only state that begins with the letter 'R,' and it's common knowledge that it lacks the acreage for a standard football field, so while the red block 'R' may induce blank stares in college football fans, at least they won’t confuse it with another team."

Which is what we've said all along, the Scarlet Knights have never had a more distinctive, simple, and memorable (if maybe a little boring) helmet identifier. And it is the logo that will be identified with their rise into the higher competitive tiers of the college football universe.

Our first opponents, the Fresno State Bulldogs, were mentioned in yesterday's "LOL, Your Logo is SOOO Scary" for their muscled cartoon canine that is quite a bit less simple:

"Popeye’s dog had some potential as well, but the execution . . . oy. I think it’s the sweatshirt with the block 'F' on it. It does not stand for 'fear.' "

At least the Fresno State Bulldog is scarier than the panting fuzzy white sled dog of UConn.

Visitor Number One is Generating High Hopes on the West Coast

This article in yesterday's Merced Sun-Star asks, "Is Fresno State football BCS bound?" in its title and states "Six months from now, when the college football season is nearing an end, Fresno State could find itself playing for a national championship," in its lead sentence.

Is this attitude of our WAC opponents a confidence that will lead them to victory over our Scarlet Knights? Or is it a hubris presaging defeat?

It seems clear now (despite the current hometown responses to the sidebar poll) that a consensus is developing, and that only one of the two teams meeting on Labor Day in Piscataway will be ranked in the AP's preseason top 25. It won't be the Scarlet Knights. It's interesting to see that some fans of the Bulldogs are already riding their expected toehold in the bottom of the rankings to a trip to the absolute top. It's funny, but some of us wearing Scarlet can well remember that feeling about a team that entered the fall of 2007 with a preseason ranking of 16 and climbed as high as 10. I like Rutgers' chances more this year if they have to play their way into the rankings with convincing wins against Fresno State and North Carolina on September 1st and 11th. That will be a much better start than last year's coasting through Buffalo and Norfolk State that did nothing at all to prepare the Knights for the real competition of the Big East (and Maryland).

With Only 52 Days Until Life Begins Again at R House, use this tool to spread the news

Get this widget!

If you want to place this on your own page to spread the good news around the "internets", just click here to get the code. I'll try to create countdown clocks for all of this season's games.

30 minutes closer to the season kickoff!

The kickoff time for the Rutgers / Fresno State game has been moved from 4:30 to 4:00 on Labor Day, September 1, so I've adjusted the countdown clock that appears in the sidebar.

Get this widget!

The Site of the Day: FSFB (and other Fresno State Links)

It's time to start learning (if you haven't already) about the first visitors to R House on Labor Day, the Bulldogs of Fresno State. I plan on keeping up with the following blog at fsbulldogsfootball.blogspot.com:
They have big plans to challenge for the WAC title and a BCS bowl if everything goes their way in 2008, and that challenge begins for Fresno State not with success in the preseason polls, but with a game in New Jersey on September 1st. However, as we've said before, the Bulldogs' presence in the preseason polls could catapult the Scarlet Knights into the first regular season rankings if the Knights pull off the nationally-televised "upset" to start the season. Even though the Knights started at 16 in the AP poll last August and may very well be unranked this August, I have a much better feeling about 2008 with Rutgers playing a real threat in the first game. It was harmful to the 2007 team to begin with Buffalo and Norfolk State; they felt invincible by the time they met Maryland, when, at 3-0, they hadn't even been challenged yet. If the healthy passing game of Mike Teel to Britt, Underwood, Brown, Campbell et al. opens up the running game for Kordell Young, Mason Robinson and friends, we could find ourselves in a good mood leaving the Stadium on the first.

Here are a few more Fresno State Bulldogs links for your pre-game (and long football-free summer) reading and research:

• BarkBoard.com
• The Bulldog Bounce
• gobulldogs.com (The Official Site)
• Measured Buildup
• RedWaveReport.com (slogan is "Anybody, Anyplace, Anytime)

Please Participate in Beat Visitor's Summer Sidebar Poll

In the most recent ESPN preseason rankings from May 9th, the Fresno State Bulldogs are listed at #21. The only Big East teams on Mark Schlabach's post-Spring rankings are West Virginia (#9) and Pittsburgh (#19). The Knights do not make an appearance on his (or many other) preseason prognostications.
So far, the only preseason ranking on which both the Bulldogs and our Scarlet Knights have simultaneously appeared is the AthlonSports.com top 25, in which the Dogs are #25 and the Knights are #22.
Losing Ray Rice to the Baltimore Ravens has obviously introduced a question mark into the minds of many football writers, so I really have no idea at this point about whether our team will find enough support to be listed in the preseason coaches and AP polls.
That widespread uncertainty leads directly to my question in the new sidebar poll, "Who Will Be in the AP Preseason Top 25? a) Rutgers, b) Fresno State, c) Both, or d) Neither." It will be interesting to see what visitors to this blog say between now and mid-August. Please add your vote (even if you, like me, are unsure).
Here's my one firm prediction. No matter which of these teams appears on the preseason poll, the winner of their September 1st meeting will definitely appear on the first regular-season listing.

Number 22, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, revealed today at AthlonSports.com

The Knights have received their first preseason ranking:

Only four schools have been revealed on the Athlon Sports preseason top 25 so far, Rutgers at 22, Penn State at 23, Wake Forest at 24, and Fresno State at number 25. As mentioned earlier today, that nationally-televised battle between the Bulldogs and the Scarlet Knights on Labor Day is looking bigger and bigger -- as if it could set the tone for the 2008 season the way the televised Rutgers/UNC season opener set the right tone for 2006 (not to put any pressure on the guys in Scarlet or anything).

More very early preseason polls for this lull before the football season known as "spring & summer"

Here's one from Rivals.com from January that has only two Big East teams, West Virginia (7) and South Florida (22), ranked in the top 25.
Here's a January list from Mr. College Football that also has only two of our teams, WVU (6) and UConn (24).
In his January rankings, TheFootballExpert.com had only one Big East team -- West Virginia (8) -- in his first 25, but his list had 34 places, leaving space to include three others -- Pitt (26), USF (31), and Cincinnati (33). Most interestingly, he also had the Fresno State Bulldogs in position number 27 (and Rutgers unlisted, even among the "other teams to watch out for").
This early list from Scout.com doesn't stop at 25, or 34, but lists all the Bowl Subdivision schools. Again, there's only one from our conference in the top 25 -- WVU (9), but then there's a cluster of schools in the next 25 -- Cincinnati (26), UConn (27), Rutgers [finally!](30), USF (31), and Pitt (34). The Big East is rounded out with Louisville at 59 and Syracuse at 87. Our first opponents from Fresno State are ranked just below Notre Dame at 46.
Finally, this January list from ESPN.com continues the theme of giving short shrift to the Big East Conference with the inclusion of just two teams, West Virginia (14) and the Pitt Panthers (22), but it's interesting in that it put the Fresno State Bulldogs at number 25.
Is is possible that our Knights will be underdogs to the Bulldogs on Labor Day?

SCHEDULE UPROAR. Howard out! Fresno State in! September 27 still TBA!

Now the Rutgers football season is opening on Labor Day, with a game at R House against Fresno State (after they were dropped by Kansas State) at 4:30 on a Monday afternoon. This will begin a home-and-home series between the two schools, so the Scarlet Knights will travel to California in 2012. Here's the Fresno State Bulldogs article and a Fresno Bee article about this schedule change.

The game against Howard on August 30th has been removed from the schedule (I'll miss Howard's band!). September 27th is still a question mark, but with Howard off the schedule, it seems likely that 9/27 may see another team from the Football Championship Subdivision visiting the Banks of the Raritan in their place.

Here's the current schedule, with home games highlighted in, of course, Scarlet:

• Monday, September 1 - FRESNO STATE
  Thursday, September 11 -NORTH CAROLINA
  Saturday, September 20 at Navy
  Saturday, September 27 - TBA
  Saturday, October 4 at West Virginia
  Saturday, October 11 at Cincinnati
  Saturday, October 18 - CONNECTICUT
  Saturday, October 25 at Pittsburgh
  Saturday, November 8 - SYRACUSE
  Saturday, November 15 at South Florida
  Saturday, November 22 - ARMY
  Thursday, December 4 - LOUISVILLE
  

(Oh, and the Gridiron Bash with FallOut Boy for April 18th has been canceled too -- and moved to an undisclosed date in the fall. This does not affect the Scarlet-White Game on April 19th.)