Nebraska versus Rutgers in The New York Times, November 3, 1920

You can read a facsimile of the entire article about the first and only meeting between the Cornhuskers and Scarlet Knights in New York City on 11/2/1920 by clicking here, but I'm sure these first paragraphs will hook you.

NEBRASKA'S SPEED HUMBLES RUTGERS

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Cornhuskers' Lightning Grid-

iron Tactics Sweep Them to

Victory by 28 to 0.

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FUMBLES PLAYED PART

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Sanford's Pupil's Err at Critical Times--Crowd of 15,000 Watches Battle at Polo Grounds.

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They grow something besides corn out on the prairies of Nebraska. An avalanche of football warriors descended yesterday upon the unsuspecting Rutgers eleven at the Polo Grounds, a great, husky, fearless mass of gridiron terrors, coached by a square-jawed individual named Henry Schulte, and, when they had finished with George Foster Sanford’s cripples, the score stood 28 to 0.

A crowd of more than 15,000 brought umbrellas and raincoats to the baseball lot after they had attended to their civic duty of voting [in the 1920 election between Harding/Coolidge and Cox/FDR], and for the rest of the afternoon, wondered if all western elevens were of the same breed. If so, their advice to Eastern graduate managers is to dispense with intersectional football games [until joining the Big Ten in 2014]. New York won't see any faster or harder football all the rest of this season. Yesterday's first period left the spectators breathless, and what Nebraska's gatling-gun hammering must have done to Rutgers was evident in the second quarter when the cornhuskers pushed across the first two of their touchdowns.

Read the rest here.

The official Ohio State - Rutgers trailer from OSU for today's game seems to be missing something.

They couldn't even find a single clip with player wearing a Rutgers uniform?



The fans aren't showing much knowledge or respect for Rutgers football in advance of this first meeting either. Look at this article by Harvey Araton in The New York Times in which Buckeye fans guess that our Scarlet Knights might be called the 'Nuggets' or the 'Bulldogs'. Our players were wearing scarlet twenty years before there was an Ohio State football and a year before there was even a college in Columbus.

Let's all hope the players and coaches are looking past Rutgers as much as the fans and press office are.

Go Knights!

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.

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).

Beat Vistor should be writing for the Gray Lady

In the New York Times' Quad Blog, Paul Myerberg has placed the Cincinnati Bearcats at #23 in his countdown from 120 to 1. I beat him to it in my Saturday BlogPoll picks.

Preseason Prognostications at the New York Times and ESPN.com today

First the Times, where this afternoon Paul Myerberg in The Quad blog, places Rutgers at #34 of 120 (last year he placed the Knights at #58 at the beginning of the season and re-ranked them at #34 at the end):

...Everything is in place for a conference title run. And I would not be surprised at all to see Rutgers claim its first Big East championship, though I am predicting this team will finish third in the conference, trailing Cincinnati and West Virginia. I’m concerned about a lack of explosiveness from this Scarlet Knights offense, which will break in a new quarterback while struggling to locate depth at wide receiver. {...} Only a major slip-up would prevent the Scarlet Knights from winning at least eight games for the fourth consecutive season.

Over at ESPN.com this morning, Brian Bennett made three predictions about Rutgers' upcoming season. 1) Tom Savage (#7 on the new roster, taking Tiquan Underwood's lucky jersey) will start at some point this season, 2) the Knights will have at least 9 wins, and "If things break right, the Scarlet Knights could be looking at a 10- or even 11-win season -- and their first Big East title," and 3) that Anthony Davis will be leaving the Banks of the Old Raritan for the pros on the first day of the next NFL draft.

The Paper of Record attacks the "Fighting" Irish

Wow!

I thought I was tough on the Dames a few days ago when I asked the road to rise up and hit them in their drunken faces. I had nothing on Harvey Araton in tomorrow's New York Times, "Notre Dame Plays Holier Than Thou With Rutgers":

For self-importance on the grandest of delusional scales, there is no entity in sports quite like Notre Dame football, winner of three games last season, routinely whacked like a piñata in recent bowl games and not a national championship to its name in 20 years, or since the Gipper was about to hand off the presidency of the United States to George H.W. Bush.

And that's just the opening paragraph.
Not only does the attack on Notre Dame's arrogance continue in that grain throughout, but the praise of Rutgers not only includes respect for RU's standing up to ND on the recent scheduling question, but it ends by mentioning our favorite football program's stellar Academic Progress Report last week...

... as one of six Bowl Subdivision colleges to be rated in the top 10 percent of the study’s four-year cycle. The other ones, all private, were Duke, Stanford, Rice, Air Force and Navy.
“Good company,” Mulcahy said.
Notre Dame excluded.

Read the whole thing, you'll love it.

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Rutgers Football and Bob Mulcahy are getting respect from around the web for standing up to Notre Dame's bullying tactics. Here's another example from BlackAthlete.net, but there are many more.

Never leave off the last "s" for savings, or "Nobody ever died for dear old Rutger Hauer"

Please click on the picture to enlarge for legibility.

This tastefully typeset block of type about ignorance appears this morning in the center of an otherwise blank page of this morning's New York Times. The only other items printed on the page are the header for page 5 of the April 15, 2007 Sports Sunday section and a small Nike swoosh at the foot of the page.

First of all, the sentiment is fine and should, at this point, be universal.

However, the University from which we graduated was named after Col. Henry Rutgers, and not Rutger Hauer, so line three of Nike's public service announcement should salute "the Rutgers team" and not "Rutger's team". Of course this is probably just an example of faulty copyediting (the same line ends with a sentence fragment and the first line is punctuated to make us believe that ignorance is thanking the reader rather than Nike thanking ignorance) or the same inexplicable theory of punctuation that leads people to put signs that say "The Smith's" rather than "The Smiths" on their front lawns and RVs. However, we can't help thinking Nike's mistaken belief that the team we root for is the "Rutger Scarlet Knights" is due to the fact Rutgers' athletic program still isn't high on Nike's radar screen. After all, we can't imagine America's big sneaker company making a similar mistake when writing about the Louisville Cardinals (little birds) and the Stanford Cardinal (like Scarlet and Crimson, a shade of red).

Despite the recent surge of notoriety, we may have to wait for the 2007 football season before that widespread ignorance about the school on the banks of the old Raritan finally changes forever.

"I wasn't yelling Boo, I was yelling JA-bu!"

The heading of this article shouldn't need any explanation for anyone who witnessed one of Mike Teel's less impressive passing performances at the Stadium during his first two years wearing Scarlet. Despite his stellar performance in Rutgers' most recent game (see illustration and click to enlarge & read the front page), there may be days in his last two years on the banks of the Raritan when some of us in the stands may again express a momentary preference to see Jabu Lovelace under center.

There's a great piece by Joe Queenan on the Op-Ed page of this morning's New York Times entitled Life in the Mean Seats; it has nothing to do with Mike Teel or Jabu Lovelace, but a lot to say about the joys of booing and the fact that Washington state is considering a ban on booing (offensive chants, homemade signs, and more) at scholastic sporting events. And if this takes off on the high school level, what's next? The RU student section won't be able to yell "SUCKS!" after each opposing student-athlete's name is announced over the PA?

...it is clear that the movement is fast infiltrating the zeitgeist. First, no booing high school teams. Then no booing the Fighting Irish. Before you know it, Mets fans will be getting ejected from their own stadium for booing the Yankees. And if Mets fans can’t boo the despicable Yankees, why go on living?

Personally, I'm not a big fan of booing amateur players (I prefer making my point with sarcastic cheering and enthusiastic applause for their dropped passes and missed extra points), but well-paid opposing coaches and anyone in a striped shirt who makes an unfavorable holding call needs to be prepared for the inevitable chorus of boos and worse (and, being, like Joe Queenan, a fellow native of the City of Brotherly Love, I'd like to ask that they please keep Santa Claus out of R house; I might not be able to control myself).

(And the Rutgers Women play #1 Duke in less than an hour in their Sweet Sixteen game. If they win, will they be on their way to becoming the first Rutgers team to win an NCAA Championship?)