Holiday reading

I started this blog slightly over six months ago. Here are some of my favorite entries from the year, even though, looking back, I cringe at reading a lot of them.

SNY betting big on Big East, Rutgers - My first major attempt at original content (I did backdate some older ones from my old, failed blog)

Is prostitution becoming a viable option? - Lamenting the sorry financial state of RU athletics.

A Walk on the Banks, pt. 1 - Early, simplified history of Rutgers athletics.

Why athletics matter - An attempt to articulate the pro-college athletics position and reframe the debate. Mostly just trying to gather my thoughts on that and think out loud a little.

Greg Schiano’s F.A.M.I.L.Y. - Angered by some hostile comments made about Greg Schiano by fans of other schools, I took a closer look at a relatively unexplored side of him.

2008 Big East Preview: Is George Selvie overrated? - Culmination of two things, really. The entire Rutgers fanbase had long considered Selvie a flash in the pan, and I had argued with SMQ/Dr. Saturday a few months prior about this, and filed it away in the back of my mind.

What do Mike Teel and Jeff George have in common? - An early apologia for Teel, and wishful thinking that the offense would get back on track.

A Walk on the Banks, pt. 2 - Exploring the formation of the Big East conference, and a close look at how Rutgers football ended up bottoming out in the mid to late nineties.

The baseline – My simultaneous rebuttal to homers AND anyone reaching for a razor blade after Rutgers got off to a bad start this year.

Lumberjacks – The “prequel” to F.A.M.I.L.Y., my take on the “chopping wood” phenomenon.

The Future of the Big East – I made a giant outline of points in response to an anticipated roundtable from Troy Nunes Is an Absolute Magician that never materialized. Weeks later, I patched it up into something vaguely readable.

Football graduation rate up 15% - Ranting about misleading statistics.

How good of a coach is Randy Edsall? – Knee-jerk response to out of control hyperbole the week of RU/UConn.

Player progression – A few nagging thoughts that had been lingering for a while.

The Longest November - Thirty days that shook the world. A chronicle of the Rutgers football coaching search that eventually led to the hiring of Greg Schiano.

Mike Teel’s legacy - Coming to terms, and acceptance.

Anthony Davis is not Leonard Davis - One piece that had been gestating for months. I waited until he had gotten 12 games at left tackle under his belt.

Give Me Liberty - The Big East must do the only thing it can – pick on Conference USA and take what little it has left.

Scouting RU: Kenny Britt - Three years of awe culminate as I make the case for Britt at the next level.

Death of the pro-style offense - “Hey, recruits, trust me on this. It’s a really good idea to come to Rutgers.”

Any omissions were either accidental or deliberate.

Closing the book on 2008

My final thoughts on the year that was:

2008 was a year of many highs and lows. I hope I feel differently in a month; right now, I’m just weary, and happy that Rutgers football survived a roller coaster of a 2008. I hope Greg Schiano and his staff can learn from all the mistakes they made this year, and try to avoid repeating a lot of them in the future.

Isn’t the spotlight of New York City supposed to give Rutgers an edge? It didn’t do much good for Kenny Britt this year. He was continually and comically snubbed for most post-season honors. The national media is obsessed with the SEC and Big XII (fair enough, although the gimmicky offenses in the latter greatly inflate offensive statistics), and the laughably overrated Big Ten. That factor, combined with being overshadowed by Ray Rice in 2007, and by RU’s poor start this season, led to a relative dearth of accolades for what was truly a performance for the ages. Is Ryan D’Imperio going to fare any better next year?

The Star-Ledger (as an organization, as what transpired did not involve their sports desk) deserves the majority of the scorn that it has received during the past several months. It would not be a good thing if they go out of business, and I deplore any overzealous attacks from Rutgers fans that have truly crossed a line. Nor does the media have an obligation to provide friendly coverage; the free reign that many of the “amateur” programs receive in the South is utterly deplorable. When a program truly steps out of line, as Washington did under Rick Neuheisel, they deserve any scrutiny they receive. The Ledger has a right to dig around wherever it wants; when two reporters decided to be the hatchet man for a despised political hack, and largely invent a story out of thin air to satisfy one man’s personal vendetta, they crossed a line. Rutgers and its athletic department are poorly governed and have no oversight. Any Rutgers fan could have told you that years ago. The sophistic narrative alleging any deliberate wrongdoing or unethical behavior is completely and wholly fictitious. The Ledger’s credibility as legitimate news organization is now in the gutter.

Zoffinger, Margolin, Sherman, and Willse are not the only goats of 2008. Every fan of Rutgers football now has an obligation to work for the defeat of New Jersey Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan in the upcoming legislative primary and general elections for his unabashed, strong-armed meddling/blackmail in the ouster of outgoing Athletic Director Bob Mulcahy. I would add to the list any person (William C. Dowling and his likeminded compatriots, angry supports of the sports axed two years ago) who shamelessly tried to capitalize on the phony “controversy” to try and make a power play. They failed, utterly. If these individuals truly are as bitter and as foolish as they come off as being, and have no desire to work towards a better future for Rutgers University, then they deserve to continue being marginalized and ignored.

There are not many Richard McCormick fans at the moment, and for good reason. However, for one final time, I urge football fans to be the better people, and not stoop to the level of their adversaries. McCormick, along with like-minded administrators like Carl Kirschner and Barry Qualls, has a great vision for the future of Rutgers University. Athletics play a role; but even more important is what they have in store on the academic side and for the campus as a whole. The biggest impediment right now is resources. Now, more than ever, Rutgers University needs your support; both individually, and as a lobbying force. There’s nothing good that can come from wasting more time on what, frankly, is stupid bullshit. I’m sick of hearing about all of this, and want it go away. I’m sure you do too.

Boy, Mike Rosario and Greg Echenique sure look promising. I wish they had a point guard.

Non-Rutgers thoughts after the jump, sports and otherwise.

2009 is just around the corner

For the most part, any conjecture about the 2009 Scarlet Knights at this point chiefly depends on speculation, and the occasional crumb fed by beatwriters, or from the handful of people on the internet with connections to the program. Since these early reports largely concur with each other, it’s safe to assume that they’re not based off pure conjecture.

Putting the QB and RB competitions aside for now, the first obvious point of intrigue is at receiver. Timmy Brown is probably locked in at one starting spot. While his game is very different from Kenny Britt’s, Brown should be able to replace him as deep threat that can stretch the field. My bigger concern is where a possession receiver comes from. Dennis Campbell can play in the slot, but he doesn’t seem like a good fit as a dependable checkdown guy. You’d want to see someone in this group with size emerge. Whether that’s Cooper, Stroud, Hayes, Wright, or even DePaola, no one can say at this point.

There’s a similar question mark at tight end. Shamar Graves will return in a starting role. Due to some injury-related attrition here, Rutgers looks very, very thin behind him. True freshman Paul Carrezola seems to be a sure bet to play early, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Jack Corcoran get a few more looks as an H-Back. Could we see Corcoran and Morales on the field at the same time?

The starting five on the OL should be mostly set. Maybe Barbieri pushes for playing time at one of the guard spots. The intrigue there, and on the DL, is regarding who among the underclassmen steps up and emerges as a viable option. Rutgers has a lot of young linemen; you can never say for sure when the light will go on or not.

I’d echo that point for the defensive line too, with the added questions of where a returning Justin Francis and Gary Watts fit in. Rutgers took a lot of linemen on both sides of the ball in its 2007 recruiting class. Presumably, they all have some natural ability, but we’re not going to get a great idea of where they stand until spring practice starts. Sheer numbers will probably dictate a few transfers there at some point.

One thing I thought was interesting was that both Luicci and Sargeant see Lowery taking over at weakside linebacker, while envisioning a contest between Munoz and Abreu on the strong side. At this point, most Rutgers fans have to be rooting for Abreu, and redshirt freshman Marcus Witherspoon, to stick at linebacker instead of being moved to defensive end. There are a couple of other underclassmen who could be in the mix here.

David Rowe saw a lot of minutes in nickel packages as a true freshman, so it wouldn’t be a big surprise if he took over for Jason McCourty at corner. After the bit about Lowery being favored to start at WLB, the other thing that really stood out to me was that Luicci and Sargeant both see Brandon Jones in the mix for playing time at corner. At safety, the obvious move is to start Lefeged and Kitchen. However, it remains to be seen how Lefeged will play in more of a coverage role at FS. There could be an opening for underclassmen there, or even an incoming freshman or a player moving from another position.

What now

Blog stuff: 2008 still has a few loose ends to tie up. Things are going to get quiet around here for a while soon. This blog will still be on top of signing day in February, and any other big news.

Thanks to the readers, Bleed Scarlet had its highest month of traffic yet in December. In the near future, my plan is to do my own internal evaluation of the past few months, and we’ll see where things are after that.

Rutgers stuff: we should get news on the Hazelton and Britt fronts shortly. On Saturday, at noon on NBC, Rutgers fans will get a chance to watch prep quarterback Tom Savage compete in the Army All-American Bowl. He’s been stuck on a struggling Cardinal O’Hara team, so it’ll be very interesting to see what he can do playing with and against some of the top competition in the country. It wouldn’t surprise me if he showed a lot of promise, but still looked somewhat raw. On Sunday, at 8 pm on ESPN, Antwan Lowery will suit up for ESPN’s all-star contest. That could be worth watching too.

There’s a fair bit on the plate on the basketball front coming up. The men are, incredibly, playing the #1, #2, and #3 teams this week. They fell to UNC on Monday, and have Pitt and UConn coming up. The women have a tough slate of their own, with a showdown against Tennessee at the RAC on Saturday (which will be on CBS), before starting a tough Big East road slate.

To reiterate: this is primarily a football blog, and there is not going to very much coverage of  basketball or other RU sports here.

They’re Red Hot

Rutgers showed a lot of guts and perseverance today in coming back from a first half deficit to topple the NC State Wolfpack.

It’s only fitting that the definitive story of the game was that Rutgers knocked another starting QB out of the game, even though Russell Wilson was injured on a routine tackle following a scramble. Wilson was playing out of his mind in the first half. He has Pat White’s scrambling ability, and an absolute cannon for an arm. Rutgers very well may have lost the game if he had stayed in. That fact cannot be ignored, but harping on it too much is unfair in that it downplays everything that Rutgers did well in this game.

The first half of this game, in a lot of ways, resembled the first half of the season for Rutgers. Mike Teel was making a lot of errant throws, the running game was ineffective, the secondary gave up a lot of big plays, the offense was terrible in the red zone, and there were numerous special teams mishaps. Rutgers looked rusty (proving Keith Sargeant’s prediction today very prescient) to start following their long layoff.

Wilson leaving was the definitive turning point (Daniel Evans was passable, but Harrison Beck might be the worst QB I’ve seen all year). Rutgers dropped the Shotgun empty sets in the second half for a heavy dose of play action and fullback checkdowns. Nothing was more fitting that Kenny Britt, in likely his final game as a Scarlet Knight, secured the victory with a phenomenal go-ahead touchdown pass in the fourth quarter.

One big standout today was Joe Martinek. He did not receive a carry in the first half (btw, where was Timmy Brown?), but was a big upgrade over Kordell Young and Jourdan Brooks in the second half. On defense, Alex Silvestro got a little penetration, although the pass rush was of limited effectiveness against Wilson. The true heroes on defense today were Ryan D’Imperio and the resurgent Courtney Greene. Against Louisville and NC State, Greene has played two of the better games of his career. He and Tiquan Underwood are no doubt in the process of rehabbing their damaged pro stocks with their recent play.

There’s no apologizing for winning. What Rutgers did today was twofold: they preserved momentum of a winning football program, and they they ended things on a happy note to what has been a very trying year. NC State is one of the hottest teams in the country, but they found their match in Rutgers. It may have taken a couple gadget plays, but Greg Schiano was able to crack Tom O’Brien’s long streak of bowl victories.

It’s a shame that the season has to end just as Rutgers is in its stride. After this victory, Rutgers deserves a vote at the bottom of the top 25 poll. They’re moving up with a bullet. You can’t look around the college football landscape right now and say that many teams are playing better football.

I’m going to go let this one sink in now.

The Last One

I’ll be here at 3.

3:16 – And Rutgers scores on the fake FG option! Schiano seems to have balls of steel whenever RU is on national TV. XP was just blocked though.

The game got off to an inauspicious start, with a bad kickoff, followed by a big NC State run. At the end of it though, Courtney Greene forced a fumble that Rutgers recovered. There were a few nice deep strikes on that drive, but Teel almost coughed up an int when facing heavy pressure, and had a few overthrows. The offense was in Shotgun for nearly the entire drive.

3:27 – Russell Wilson is goooood. NC State just marched down the field. Wilson can scramble, and he has a cannon. The NC State receiver had a few steps on the DB in the end zone. Rutgers needs to respond here, and it’d be nice if they could mix the run in to keep the Pack honest.

3:45 - At least NC State was held to a FG. We’re seeing a few of the problems from early in the year returning. Jason McCourty is in full human target mode, and some of the deep passes aren’t connecting.

3:53 – Uh oh. Teel is completely out of rhythm and missing wide open receivers. The layoff may have hurt him.

4:21 – ST gaffe by NC State on their punt, but Rutgers can’t convert it to points. Teel threw it away on 3rd and five with heavy pressure on the right coming in his face, and then the FG was blocked.

4:39 – Now Rutgers is down by double digits. Russell Wilson is at a Pat White level of infuriating right now.

5:19 – Rutgers moved the ball a little on that drive, with a heavy dose of play action. Once again, they can’t put the ball in the end zone however. I think the holding penalty on Caleb Ruch, where he drove a NC State defensive lineman to the ground, was a killer.

The ESPN announcers reported that Russell Wilson sprained his knee and won’t return. The QB injury streak continues, even though Rutgers didn’t really do anything to hurt him. He did come back out from the locker room, but wasn’t wearing a helmet. Harrison Beck was struggling early in the year, so let’s hope he hasn’t learned a thing or two sitting on the bench.

5:27 – Malast blocks the punt! Ugly direct snap as McNulty is emptying the playbook today. And boom, Teel to Underwood! It’s a whole new ballgame.

5:40 – That last series of plays was a microcosm of the entire season. NC State breaks a huge return. Teel throwing low-percentage passes deep down the sideline. Teel throws into triple coverage and the ball is deflected for an int. Oh, what’s that? RYAN D’IMPALER returns the favor with an int of Beck.

5:54 – Well, at least they retook the lead. Joe Martinek was ripping off some nice runs there. Baffling sequence of plays at the end of the drive, and once again Rutgers settles for 3.

6:03 – Ah, damnit. NC State pulled the horrible QB for one that is looking pretty good. NC State took advantage of an all out blitz to score an easy TD to retake the lead.

6:11 – Eat that, Todd McShay. Please stop them, please stop them, please stop them…

6:18 – That’ll do, Devin. Now, Rutgers needs more points here.

6:33 – Ok, up six. Schiano chose to kill the clock over the knockout punch. 47 seconds left. NC State needs a TD to win. The first step is stopping a big return here, and then they can’t give up the big play.

6:39 – Greene caps off a great game with the clutch interception. He and Underwood have really turned it on lately. Upstream, redteam, victory!

Consensus

The announcement today that Carl Kirschner will serve as interim Athletic Director after Bob Mulcahy steps down in two days is being met with near universal praise from the Rutgers community and the media.

It’s for very good reason. Dean Kirschner is among the most able and skilled administrators at Rutgers University. He “gets it”, per se. Kirschner is one of several in a cadre of skilled administrators that envisions Rutgers excelling in all aspects of a well-rounded university experience.

The search for a new, permanent AD should begin soon. The process must be comprehensive without unnecessarily dragging on.

Athletes get a leg up

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution just published an article containung a lot of interesting academic data. For instance, did you know that

Many schools routinely used a special admissions process to admit athletes who did not meet the normal entrance requirements. More than half of scholarship athletes at the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin, Clemson University, UCLA, Rutgers University, Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University were special admits.

Of course, this information specifically pertained to the Rutgers football recruiting classes of 2001-2003. These practices are far from limited to a who’s who of bowl subdivision schools.

It’s true not just in big-time college sports but even in the Ivy League. Football players in the Ivies’ 1995 freshman class scored 144 points lower on average than other Ivy League men, according to Bowen’s book “Reclaiming the Game.”

The study was not totally comprehensive though.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gathered the information for this project via public records requests to every public university that competes in a Bowl Championship Series conference or finished in the 2007-08 season’s football or men’s basketball Top 25s. Once every 10 years, each NCAA member school is required to undergo an athletics certification process. The SAT and core GPA data presented here came from reports the universities filed as part of that process.

A few universities are so open about their athletics departments’ performance that they publish the report containing their SAT and GPA data on their Web sites. Others, such as Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh, refused to provide it. The University of Kansas and West Virginia University said their most recent NCAA certification self-study did not include the information.

The SAT scores in this study are on the 1600-point scale that predates the addition of an SAT writing component. For schools that reported ACT scores, we derived comparable SAT scores using the NCAA’s conversion chart. Some schools refused to provide men’s basketball SAT scores on the grounds it would violate the privacy rights of individual athletes. Kansas State University did not provide the AJC any sport-by-sport data.

Private schools were not included in this project because they are not subject to public records laws. The NCAA does not release the school-by-school information; it considers it confidential.

If you’re curious as to how Rutgers stacks up against its conference peers, only UConn’s incoming freshmen had higher SAT scores according to the data that the AJC looked at. What’s really eye-opening is to take a look at the other conferences, specifically the SEC and the Florida Gators.

I think a fair interpretation of this data is mixed. Rutgers fares relatively well against other Division I-A schools when it comes to admissions standards, and is among the best at making sure football players go to class and receive top-notch academic support. Of the 54 schools surveyed, Rutgers ranks 26th in average SAT score of football admissions, which is right above the dead middle of the pack. Obviously, the fact that so many teams have lax admissions standards isn’t really a great excuse in itself, and you’d love to see Rutgers become more selective over time. I think that’s already happening to an extent; those early Schiano classes had to take a lot of risks.

That was just a little food for thought. I don’t think any of the data here is particularly novel or surprising. It’s always good though to know exactly where you stand, and have accurate information stored away for future use.

The Yellowhammer State

The Scarlet Knights are in Alabama.

Rutgers showed up Thursday evening at the Wynfrey Hotel in Hoover after taking Christmas Eve off.

“Traveling on Christmas is not unusual for college football programs,” Rutgers coach Greg Schiano said. “We’re used to it. The excitement of being able to play in a postseason game more than makes up for traveling on Christmas.”

Isn’t the internet great? There are all sorts of communities out there. Yesterday, a thread on Rivals linked to one that happens to be dedicated to tracking flights. Airliners.net users seemed to be interested in why a commercial airliner was flying from Newark to Birmingham on Christmas, and one of them even went to the airport and snapped a picture of the football team departing their plane? Strange, perhaps. Mostly harmless though.

Nothing yet on Vidal Hazelton.

Former USC wide receiver Vidal Hazelton continues to look at Missouri and Rutgers as his frontrunners for a transfer. A decision was delayed because USC’s compliance department did not fax the release to schools interested in Hazelton, so he could speak to them under NCAA rules.

The latest on bowl ticket sales:

Papajohns.com Bowl officials expect about 10,000 North Carolina State fans and between 6,000 and 7,000 Rutgers fans in attendance for the game’s third edition.

From their allotments of 10,000 tickets, Rutgers has returned 3,000 to the bowl and N.C. State plans to send back 1,500 for the Dec. 29 game at Legion Field.

“I think the response we got from N.C. State is equal to anything we’ve seen in the three-year history of the game,” said Bo Kerr, the bowl’s manager of sales and marketing. “We’ve been very pleased with N.C. State, and given the distance for Rutgers, we think 7,000 would be a good crowd.”

You know it’s a rough economy when a team like Wisconsin, known as another Big Ten team that travels very well, only uses 3,000 tickets from its allotment. Even with the Badgers having a relative down year, that’s a horrible number. You can’t really criticize UConn or Pitt for poor ticket sales if a team like Wisconsin is struggling.

Blogger Q&A: NC State

Thanks to Steven from Section Six for agreeing to answer a few NC State-related questions to preview next week’s Papajohn’s.com Bowl. My corresponding Rutgers-related answers are now up.

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Can you talk a bit about what it means to support NC State athletics, and the football program in particular? One thought kept coming up when trying to think of questions to ask: I am extremely unfamiliar with the school in general. Between Jim Valvano, Philip Rivers, and Mario Williams, what are some of the important aspects of the school’s athletic tradition that everyone may not be familiar with?

My blog’s tagline–”cheering for anyone else is for quitters”–is probably the most succinct way I can express what the NC State experience has been like for me.  I’m too young to remember when the school had a consistently good basketball program; our rich tradition there is a distant memory I can only wish I had.  Which is not all bad, since, frankly, I think the Valvano era was an embarrassment.  As I grew up in the ’90s and became increasingly invested the Wolfpack, I found the experience to be one defined by disappointment and unmet expectations, with the occasional peak/fluke success mixed in, just to ensure I kept coming back.  And that’s pretty much the way it remains today, as sustained athletic success remains elusive.  I have hope, of course, but I think I’m more realistic in a general sense now.

Watching the football program evolve in this decade has been interesting; we poured a ton of cash into facilities improvements in order to put ourselves on par with the best of the power conference football schools, and when Philip Rivers was here, it looked like we were really going somewhere.  It fell apart after that though, and now we’re in a sort of weird position where we feel like we should be able to compete with the best, what with the facilities and strong fan support, but admittedly have no track record of sustained excellence that we can look back on and say, “we were like this once, so we can do that again.”  Which is the big difference between the basketball and football programs.

Basketball still defines the school athletically, and rightfully so–NC State was the power program that helped establish Tobacco Road and the ACC, was responsible for popularizing cutting down the nets after championships, and might have been the first school to use the alley oop.  Since you weren’t allowed to dunk in the ’70s, David Thompson–one of the five best college basketball players ever, who led the school to the 1974 NCAA title and ended UCLA’s run–often caught lobs near the rim and just laid the ball in.  There is a lot to be proud of, so you can probably get a sense for the extra bit of pain that comes from seeing so many wins go the way of our Tobacco Road neighbors while we remain mired in irrelevancy.  It still boggles my mind to think that, 20 years ago, NC State had more national titles, conference titles, and all-time wins than Duke.  But we are long-since dead, to the point where no one remembers what we were; that’s something that smarts more with each passing season.