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.

The 2009 Preseason BlogPoll has been compiled and published.

The BlogPoll, of which my vote constitutes .99009% (1 of 101) of the total result, has been published this afternoon. As with the Coaches and AP Polls, there is no Big East football team in the top 25, but the top 5 teams are closely clustered in the thirties: Pittsburgh 32, Rutgers 33, Cincinnati 35, West Virginia 36, and South Florida at 37. As in the other polls, UConn, Louisville, and Syracuse were not among those receiving votes. Click Here for Brian Cook's detailed analysis of the opening poll.
The bunching of the top five Big East teams shows the perceived parity among these teams, but it is just a perception at this point and it could change radically and quickly once the pigskins start flying. I'd also like to point out that I have seen this parity referred to on two websites (non-Rutgers websites) as the "parody within the Big East," which is a perfect example of someone who is getting their language skills verbally through radio and television and hoping that his or her (OK, his) spellchecker will bail him out (in these cases it just made him look silly, or a parody of a sports journalist).

This just makes the Labor Day opener even MORE important

The preseason AP football poll just came out and, as with the Coaches poll, not a single Big East team is in the top 25.
If you count down through the "Others Receiving Votes," you will see that the voters placed Pittsburgh Panthers at #28, Rutgers Scarlet Knights at #30, West Virginia Mountaineers at #32, Cincinnati Bearcats at #33, and South Florida at #45. Among the Big East football teams, only UConn, Louisville, and Syracuse are starting the season with no votes.
Not to put any pressure on the Scarlet Knights, but the Labor Day game is going to put Cincinnati or Rutgers into the top 25, and move the other down into the forties or worse.
Go Knights!

Beat Visitor's Final Preseason BlogPoll Contribution

Here's my updated preseason input to the BlogPoll. The changes that were made since my early first draft on August 8th all revolve around the ACL injury of Virginia Tech's Darren Evans.

Rank	Team
1	Florida
2	Southern Cal
3	Texas
4	Oklahoma
5	Penn State
6	Alabama
7	Ohio State
8	Mississippi
9	LSU
10	Oklahoma State
11	California
12	Georgia
13	Virginia Tech
14	Oregon
15	Georgia Tech
16	Iowa
17	Boise State
18	Florida State
19	Nebraska
20	TCU
21	North Carolina
22	Texas Tech
23	Cincinnati
24	Utah
25	West Virginia

If you have comments (or abuse), feel free to leave them (or heap it) in the comments section. My comments section is unmoderated and allows anonymity, so feel free to tell me where I'm off the track (or full of shit). Otherwise, I'll be waiting for the first weekend of actual games to help me with the reshuffling of the top 25. A nationally-televised game on Labor Day will determine whether or not my favorite team begins its climb up the rankings.

Look for the first combined football BlogPoll of the 2009 season here at CBSSports.com next Monday afternoon and be amazed by the incredible prescience and wisdom of crowds (of bloggers).

Don't wait until the last minute to reserve your flight!

The first 2009-2010 bowl predictions are coming in and the Rutgers Scarlet Knights are getting some respectable early-season picks from the mainstream football press (if anything, the Rutgers fans and bloggers themselves are being a lot more conservative, at least publicly).

ESPN has Rutgers playing in Charlotte on December 26th in the Muffler Bowl (the Beat Visitor style guide calls for no brand names whenever possible, and you know which bowl we mean) against either Clemson or North Carolina.

Sports Illustrated has the Scarlet Knights meeting Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl on January 1. Like ESPN, SI also has Rutgers ranked at #27 in their first Power Rankings, the highest of the Big East teams (just ahead of West Virginia at #28).

Brian Bennett, the Big East blogger for ESPN, also has the Knights playing football in New Orleans on New Years Day.

Is it too early to check Orbitz for flights to Louisiana and hotel rooms in the French Quarter?

Scarlet Knights at 27 (with a bullet) on the ESPN Power Rankings

The Rutgers Scarlet Knights are getting more preseason respect than I expected from the ESPN Power Rankings. As with many other preseason college football polls, there are no Big East teams in the top 25, but the Scarlet Knights are on the cusp, at 27 (with Pitt at 30, Cincy at 35, USF at 39, and WVU not receiving any votes).

Looking at the individual voters, Rutgers was placed in the top 25 by 5 of the 15 ESPN voters, specifically by Rece Davis (at 15), Pat Forde (at 19), Ivan Maisel (at 23), Joe Schad (at 24), and Mark Schlabach (at 24). Surprisingly, Brian Bennett, the ESPN Big East blogger who picked Rutgers at the top of his Big East Power Rankings earlier today, did not put Rutgers (or any other Big East teams) in his top 25.
At the risk of being accused of "embarrassing, poll-credibility-damaging homerdom," I'm tempted to put my Scarlet Knights in my preseason BlogPoll top 25 too, but I probably won't. Though my gut places them in that company, I'll wait to move them up after the Labor Day game (you can safely assume that I have them no lower than 26 right now, lurking, waiting for anyone in the top 25 to lose in week one).

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.

Time for Beat Visitor to get serious -- and for you to tell me where I'm totally wrong with my first preseason BlogPoll

The BlogPoll is the invention of MGoBlog’s Brian Cook and is published on CBSSports.com. Though Brian Cook's obvious emotional connection is to the Michigan Wolverines, he solicits the opinion of college football bloggers from a wide representative selection of teams from all the conferences and independents.

This year I have been invited to participate in the BlogPoll. During the season I will create my contribution to the weekly poll on Sunday or Monday and post it here for feedback from the Beat Visitor readers before posting the final version on Wednesday morning. The preseason poll has a slightly different schedule and this year it can be adjusted up until the morning of August 24th when the combined preseason BlogPoll is going to be finalized.

In any case, here’s my very first preliminary preseason poll; I wanted to give myself extra time to make sure that I was comfortable with the process before the football season begins.

Let me know if you feel I've left anybody (other than the Scarlet Knights) out of this preliminary preseason top 25. Unlike a number of other preseason polls, I could not bring myself to totally ignore the Big East, so I have included Cincinnati (because they are our reigning champions and because they are the only Big East team not represented by a blogger in BlogPoll) and West Virginia (because they are West Freakin Virginia). Again, I'll try not to place the Rutgers Scarlet Knights where my emotions put them (above all), but where their record earns them a place (one 2008 blog, the Enlightened Spartan, was drummed out of the BlogPoll this year "for years of embarrassing, poll-credibility-damaging homerdom," so I'm not going to let that happen to Beat Visitor).

So, without further ado, here's a list that will be changing drastically after the first week of games anyway, but let me know where you feel I'm totally off base.

Rank	Team
1	Florida
2	Southern Cal
3	Texas
4	Oklahoma
5	Penn State
6	Alabama
7	Virginia Tech
8	Ohio State
9	Mississippi
10	LSU
11	Oklahoma State
12	California
13	Georgia
14	Oregon
15	Georgia Tech
16	Iowa
17	Boise State
18	Florida State
19	Nebraska
20	TCU
21	North Carolina
22	Texas Tech
23	Cincinnati
24	Utah
25	West Virginia

Motivation Anyone?

In case the Scarlet Knight football players needed any more motivation to play as if their season depended upon it on September 7th against the Cincinnati Bearcats, or in case the Rutgers fans needed any reason to fill all the seats of the expanded Rutgers Stadium on Labor Day (and to make as much noise as possible -- your throat will have a few weeks to rest before the next important game), here it is, courtesy of today's preseason Big East media poll:

1) Pittsburgh Panthers
2) West Virginia Mountaineers
3) Cincinnati Bearcats
4) University of South Florida Bulls
5) Rutgers Scarlet Knights
6) Connecticut Huskies
7) Louisville Cardinals
8)Syracuse Orange

I don't make predictions here at BeatVisitor.com, but I love for my Knights to be underestimated at the beginning of the season (and for Wannstedt and the Panthers to be overestimated. How many years in a row do the Knights need to pummel them before we get respected by the pundits?).

Beat Visitor Is a "No Prediction" Zone

It's not just a fear of jinxing the only team that we care about -- especially in a year like the coming year when almost* every team in the Big East has a chance to win it all -- but this article on Scarlet Scuttlebutt today shows the sheer futility of trying to sort out this year's race in advance of the first game.
A lot of professional prognosticators are going to be left looking very silly on December 5 when the undefeated Scarlet Knights finally emerge from the pack by beating a previously-undefeated group of Mountaineers (Oh, right. Sorry. No predictions.).

_______
*UConn, Syracuse, and Louisville fans should not let their hopes get too high.

Go Red Teams: Reminded of a pre-season prediction from Stewart Mandel

Watching the Sugar Bowl between the Utah Utes and the Alabama Crimson Tide last night, I was reminded of Stewart Mandel's preseason prediction from July 30th. (Click here to see his origjnal SI.com Mailbag prediction.)

The three teams he gave the best chance of going from unranked to the top fifteen in the final 2008 rankings were the Utah Utes (who at 13-0 have a strong argument for being the National Champions and certainly can't finish lower than #2 if there's any justice), Alabama (ranked at #1 for five weeks until they lost to Florida in the SEC championship game; they'll definitely finish in the top ten), and our beloved Scarlet Knights. When the Knights were 1-5, Stewart looked like he was totally off on one of his three picks, but who would have known at that point of the season that the Knights would then pull off seven victories in a row? With an extra four points in the game against Cincinnati, we would have been going to the Orange Bowl instead of the Pizza Bowl, and we would have been ranked despite the slow start. If early season games were discounted in football the way they are in basketball, the dominant RU team of November and December would definitely be in the top 15 now, so I'm giving Stewart props for his predictive acumen.

He was also two for three on his picks for the three teams he thought had a chance to drop out of the top 25 in the final standings after starting in the top 10. West Virginia and Wisconsin didn't waste much time dropping from their preseason heights. Ending the regular season at #8, Texas Tech will probably hang onto a place in the top 25 even after their bowl loss to Ole Miss in the Cotton Bowl yesterday, but they'll probably drop out of the top 10.

Congratulations Stewart! I know you're probably reminded about your bad picks more often than about those with which you're (almost) right on.

Knights, Utes and Tide as the sleepers of 2008? Go Red Teams!

Click here to see what Stewart Mandel has to say in his most recent Mailbag on SI.com about the 3 teams with the best chance of going from unranked in the preseason to ranked in the top 15 at the end of the 2008 season (remind any Scarlet Knights fans of 2006?) and the 3 teams with the best chance of starting in the top 15 and ending the season unranked (a feeling that should be familiar to 2007 fans of the Louisville Cardinals).
For those who don't like to click, the potential sleepers are 1) Rutgers, 2) Utah, and 3) Alabama.
The sinkers are 1) West Virginia, 2) Texas Tech, and 3) Wisconsin.
I hope that Stewart's Mailbag is made of material that's strong enough to handle the weight of mail that it's going to be receiving from Mountaineer country this week (and for the rest of the season).

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).

Knights atop the Big East in 2008?

At least one writer, Brock Murphy at Lindy's, has made that prediction. His placement of the West Virginia Mountaineers in fifth is stirring up a not insignificant amount of dissent in the comments section.

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?

Have you seen Stewart Mandel's Spring Picks over at SI.com?

There are three Big East teams listed in the lower half of his first top 25 for the Spring and one team in position 26, and none of them are the Scarlet Knights. Maybe he feels burned about putting the Knights at #12 in his 2007 Spring power rankings, or picking us to go to the Rose Bowl last year.

He has the Mountaineers down at 14, the Cincinnati Bearcats at 22, the Pitt Panthers at 25, and the Connecticut Huskies as the first of five teams "On the cusp". He doesn't mention in this first ranking how the four Big East teams in the bottom of the conference -- Rutgers, USF, Louisville, and Syracuse -- are ranked in his mind at this point in the preseason, but the Scarlet Knights look like they're going to need some big wins, with style points, to make an impression on the pollsters this fall.