Yesterday's First Home Game Was Fun

I won't be at R House be next week (my daughter-in-law will be in my seat for New Mexico, so everyone better be polite!), but my wardrobe is cleaned and ready for Iowa.

See you at R House!

13 Hours Until the First Home Game

Tomorrow morning will be the first morning of 2016 with football fans filling the parking areas around Rutgers Stadium for the first game of the year against Howard. Here's the poster:

KEEP CALM AND CHOP PENN STATE

What a great win just now out in Seattle for the Scarlet Knights over Washington State. The team showed a lot of heart coming back over and over again tonight (this morning).

I have a season seat at Rutgers Stadium this year, but I'll be out of the country and away from television and computers during the first two home games against Howard and Penn State. I don't feel a need to do a KeepCalmAndChop poster for Howard, but I can't let the first Penn State game of Rutgers' Big Ten era pass without this:

2012 Home Opener

I'm watching my first Rutgers game of the year today (on SNY, not in Piscataway) and I'm tweeting as @BeatVisitor.

If Mohamed Sanu doesn't make the catch, watch out

Even if true freshman Mohamed Sanu doesn't make the reception on any given play, he still is very into the play. The defensive backs from Florida International should note this video clip from the opening game against Cincinnati and keep their heads on the swivel looking for the wide receiver wearing number 6 next Saturday:

And they might also find this block from last Saturday's Howard game of more than academic interest:

Speaking of high-impact true freshmen, that's also not a bad pass from Tom Savage to Tim Brown in the Howard clip.

New BlogPoll, Pryor Restraint & "AC Speech," Booing, and a Bold Prediction for the Howard game!

• The updated BlogPoll (of which my contribution constitutes 0.99009% [or 1 of 101 votes] again this week) has been posted at CBSSports.com. Cincinnati is at #22 according to this sample of the college football blogiverse.


• Click Here to see the reason that teams should consider installing some content-based version of Auto-Tune for their players during post-game press conferences. In the same way that singers who wouldn't know a B flat if it bit them on their asses can sing note-perfect on their multi-platinum Disney albums with the help of software, maybe some computer algorithm prodigy could come up with the code that would change Terrelle Pryor's "Not everybody's the perfect person in the world. I mean everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me, whatever. I think that people need a second chance, and I've always looked up to Mike Vick, and I always will." into an athletically-correct (or AC) postgame boilerplate, "We're taking this season one day at a time. As long as my teammates and I continue to give 110 percent, we'll keep on winning ball games." Note that AC speech does not require statistical correctness; as a matter of fact, a mere "100%" is always athletically incorrect when speaking of effort.


• Speaking of sticking strictly to AC speech, Brian Bennett tackled the issue of booing in Big East stadiums last weekend in his Big East Blog on ESPN.com today. He writes at one point that "In the past, I've heard from fans who said they were just booing the coaching staff, not the players. But that's like carpet bombing a city and saying you're only trying to take out one evil guy." I don't think there's any doubt that the boos I heard in my section at Rutgers Stadium last Monday were aimed squarely at the well-paid coaching staff. Certainly most of the negative comments I heard were aimed at the men in the khaki slacks and not at the student athletes. No one ever criticizes the "Jabu package" and its drive-killing timing without praising Jabu Lovelace himself. I don't think it takes an abnormal amount of critical acumen to know when it's the coaches who are being reprimanded by the fans.


• A HOWARD UNIVERSITY VICTORY IS ASSURED ON SATURDAY! I know that I've called Beat Visitor dot com a prediction-free zone in the past, but this prediction is such a no brainer that I have to make it in bold type. Howard University will obliterate Rutgers University in the Battle of the Marching Bands on Saturday. The Marching Scarlet Knights ("The Pride of New Jersey") put some dance moves into their halftime tribute to Michael Jackson on Monday, but I predict that Thriller is going to be no match whatsoever for whatever the Showtime band has in store for us. The last time the amazing Howard band was in Rutgers Stadium, we watched them stretching on the sideline for 10 minutes before taking the field. Remember to take your drink & restroom break before or after halftime on Saturday, but not during it.

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.)

The Answer Was Blowing in the Wind

Greg Schiano talks with freshman Mason Robinson (24)
on the big screen after a 4th quarter kick return.

Before the game, as my son and I played catch in the parking area, it was clear that the wind would be a factor inside Rutgers Stadium. Stiff swirling breezes made it an ugly kicking and punting day for Jeremy Ito all day long, and in the first quarter when Mike Teel was passing into the wind the Knights only managed to score 3 points. That changed quickly -- with the first two long passes of the second quarter leading to the first two touchdowns of the 42-point second quarter -- once the wind was at Teel's back.

The only other highlight worth mentioning is the fact that Norfolk State's marching (& dancing) band, like Howard's band last season, was worth the price of admission to the Stadium. They brought down the house, and brought the crowd to its feet. Their marching band trounced the Marching Scarlet Knights, "The Pride of New Jersey," as badly as the Football Scarlet Knights trounced the Football Spartans on that same field before and after halftime.

Of the streaks mentioned in the last entry, all but one are still alive. 16 will be the number of weeks that the Knights will be ranked, 10 is the current home winning streak, 6 is the number of games scoring 30+ points, 6 is the number of games without a sack of Mike Teel, 4 is the number of straight Homecoming Day victories, but Ray Rice's current streak of 100-yard games ended at 5 when he (like many of the starters) didn't come back for the second half. He "only" ran for 72 yards on 12 carries (with 3 touchdowns) in his first half action.