It All Begins a Week from Now...

So here's your first keep-calm-and-chop... poster of 2015:

How to End the Rutgers Homecoming Curse

What curse, you ask? Well, here are the results of the last eight Homecoming games at R House:

• Homecoming 2014 - Wisconsin 37 - Rutgers 0 (1st shutout since posting a zero on the scoreboard at Notre Dame in 2002)
• Homecoming 2013 - Houston 49 - Rutgers 14 (1st 2013 home loss)
• Homecoming 2012 - Kent State 35 - Rutgers 23 (1st 2012 loss; Kent State was a 13.5-point underdog against an undefeated and 15th-ranked Rutgers)
• Homecoming 2011 - The last Homecoming win at The Birthplace of College Football was the 21-20 squeaker over Navy that required a blocked field goal to seal the win.
• Homecoming 2010 - Tulane 17 - Rutgers 14 (Tulane was a 17-point underdog)
• Homecoming 2009 - Rutgers beat an FCS opponent, Texas Southern, by a score of  42-0 for the 600th victory in the program's history.
• Homecoming 2008 - Another close win over UConn requiring a late missed field goal.
• Homecoming 2007 - Another victory over an FCS opponent, 59-0 over Norfolk State.

So, you get the idea. Short of scheduling FCS opponents for Homecoming, how can we combat this obvious curse? Simple.
End Homecoming Games.
Read this. It's a silly tradition from the South and West anyway that only started between Missouri and Kansas in  1911. We won't miss it, and it doesn't encourage more alumni and students to show up anyway if there's a little bit of cold rain.

The Second Keep-Calm-And-Chop Poster of the Season

It's week two of the 2013 Rutgers Football Season.

Let's hope #ChopNorfolk is more effective than last week's hashtag.

It's Good to Be Back

It wasn't too impressive a first half, but we weren't beginning the season against Cincinnati this year and there was plenty of time to turn things around, so it was fun to listen to the Scarlet Knights come together in the second half and end up dispatching Norfolk State by a respectable score of 31-0.

Because I'm not living within an easy drive of Piscataway this year I didn't renew my tickets. These weeknight games are extremely hard for me to get to, but I do hope to catch a couple of Saturday games at R House (or R New Guest House in the Swamps of East Rutherford) and I hope to be able to write more in a Beat Visitor blog that's been more than a little moribund lately.

2010 Begins Tonight

Not that there's been a big clamor for information, but the rumors of the death of the Beat Visitor dot com Rutgers football blog have been exaggerated.
Tonight's game is the first home game at Rutgers Stadium that I've missed since I was traveling for business during the 2007 Navy game. I'm now living outside of the Garden State for the first time since 1981 and my new internet service provider has not reached an agreement with the Evil Friggin' Disney Empire to show ESPN 3 (reduced from 360), so I'm only "watching" tonight's game against Norfolk State on GameTracker and listening to it on WCTC dot com. With the Knights only leading by 3-0 with 7:01 left in the first half (San San Te just missed his 2nd of 3 field goal attempts), I don't think I'm missing a lot by not being down in New Jersey tonight.
But here's the real question for both Rutgers and the Big East (other than why the Scarlet Knights aren't leading by at least three touchdowns): Why schedule a game for a Thursday night if it's not going to be on television?

Saturday is Senior Day at Rutgers Stadium, but will a certain Junior be playing his last home game as well?

Ray Rice vs. Norfolk State, 15 Sept. 2007 (click to enlarge)

Tara Sullivan entitles her column in The Record today "RU's Rice Should Go to NFL."

. . . Rice owes Rutgers nothing. He's not going to get any bigger or faster by playing one more season, but he surely will get a lot more tackled. And with one recent NFL Players Association report putting the average career of an NFL running back at 2.3 years (the lowest among all position groups and well below the 3.2 overall average), why wouldn't Rice want to start out as fresh and healthy as possible?
As one NFL executive put it recently, "Rice should go before Schiano gets him killed."

All that being said, and knowing that I would have personally had a great deal of trouble delaying a multi-million-dollar payday to spend another year On The Banks, I'd love to see Ray Rice follow Brian Leonard's example and come back to Rutgers for his senior season. He could be in the first class to go to four straight bowl games, he could raise the sword to direct the band in the Alma Mater on his Senior Day like Brian did last November versus Syracuse, and he could take another run at the Heisman trophy and the few remaining all-time Big East rushing records. But if he doesn't ... if he does do the logical thing for a talented man of limited financial means and start his professional career a year early, we can't blame him. We met a man from New Rochelle at last Friday's Army game who was sure that Ray will begin earning a big paycheck as soon as possible just because of the neighborhood he's from (and from which he wants to help his family escape). In any decision Ray makes, he is balancing noble motives against noble motives.

Whether he comes back for the 2008 season at Rutgers Stadium or not, we should cheer heartily every time number 27 touches the ball on Saturday against Pittsburgh. Cheer as if it may be the last time that we're privileged to see the sight on Rutgers' home field.

All that being said, Don't Go Ray.

-----------

VOTE FOR RAY FOR THE DOAK WALKER BY CLICKING HERE.

Vote for Ray for the Heisman Here.

About The Norfolk State University Band

The Norfolk State University brass section
marching into Rutgers Stadium on 15 September 2007

Before all the attention shifts to the September 29th game against Maryland, I want to say just a couple more words about the guys pictured above. First of all, they are a great argument for why sports on television are not sports at all. I don't care if you were able to see the second-quarter touchdown receptions of Tiquan Underwood and Kenny Britt in slow motion replays on MSG. You still missed all the best moments of last Saturday's 59-0 victory. You wouldn't have had any idea that their brass section could drown out the deafening piped-in music at the beginning of the game, or that their halftime brought the crowd to its feet, or the most magical moment of all . . .

Right before the explosive 42-point second quarter, with the score only 3-0, a wave started in Rutgers Stadium (yes, with the new student bleachers in the open end of the Stadium, and with every seat filled, it is possible to have waves in Rutgers Stadium!) and when the wave got to the Norfolk State band, which was large enough to fill a section and a half of the bleachers, they rose in unison, in silence, at a quarter the speed of the other sections. Their slowing of the wave was a thing of coördinated beauty. The crowd in the Stadium responded with cheers and good-hearted laughter. And that was exactly the mood in R House when the television timeout ended and Mike Teel threw his first touchdown of the day, a forty-three yarder to Kenny Britt with 7 seconds off the second-quarter clock. You know the rest. I hope you were there.

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.

Scarlet Knight Streaks

School Spirit versus Buffalo, 30 August 2007

Current Streaks Entering the Norfolk State game on 9/15/07

15 -- Rutgers (#13 AP/ #13 Coaches) has now been nationally ranked in 15 consecutive polls, a school record.
9 -- The home winning streak, at nine games, is now the 6th longest in the country (after only USC, Louisville, Florida, LSU, and BC). After Saturday’s game, the current Knights could be halfway toward matching the record home-win streak of twenty games set when yours truly was a student On the Banks in the mid-Seventies.
5 -- Five straight games scoring 30 points or more.
5 -- Five straight games in which the offensive line has not allowed a sack.
5 – Ray Rice’s current streak of 100+ yard games (he shares the RU record of 7 straight games with J.J. Jennings).

3 -- Three straight Homecoming Day victories. The last Homecoming loss was to Pittsburgh in 2003.
2 – Ray Rice’s current streak of 1,000+ yard seasons. Could he be halfway to his third thousand-yard campaign after the third game of the 2007 season?

No Single-Game Tickets for Public Sale in 2007?

According to this article in the Sporting News, there will be an attempt to offer at least one single-game ticket to each of the 6,000 people on the season-ticket waiting list, and I know from mailings I've received that there will be an offer to Alumni Association members for homecoming against Norfolk State on September 15, and of course undergraduate students will get theirs, but other than that I haven't heard of any other tickets going on sale (other than on StubHub and other resellers).

But remember how easy it used to be to decide to see a game at Rutgers Stadium at the last minute, just because it was a nice day?

Rutgers vs. Temple, 31 October 1998