Long snapper Jeremy Branch may have suffered a serious injury on Saturday. Who else but Andrew DePaola, the former walk on QB who has turned into a jack of all trades this season, stepped in to replace Branch.
USF safety Carlton Williams accused RU of running up the score. Not exactly. I think they were getting close to that point, and Mike Teel should have given way to Dom Natale. However, they ultimately did not end up running up the score.
I knew that Mike Teel wasn't the most popular guy on Facebook, but he actually decided to delete his account a while back. Apparently, Coach Schiano does not have a MySpace account, but his staff (re: probably one overmatched student manager) does monitor the team's activities on the internet.
"We have to be conservative, we have to be smart," he said, even as he openly admitted to not ever being on Facebook or MySpace, or fully understanding their breadth. He does, however, have staffers "occasionally" check his players’ sites. He doesn’t have a formal social networking site policy, as half of the 12 SEC schools do, or a compliance office that monitors sites, as Oklahoma does, and instead says, "I don’t like to (police) too much because I want to trust them."
I was looking at Saturday's game participation report, and it said that Gary Watts saw action. If true, that would doom his chances of a medical redshirt. Did he play?
Kordell Young and Zaire Kitchen are linked by their simultaneous rehabs from knee injuries. SI.com has a great article about the science behind ACL injuries. Quick summary: they're bad news, but there are ways to prevent them.
In keeping with project sabotage, I'm pleased to report that it is absolutely not true that any Rutgers receiver passed Tres Moses's for tops in receiving yardage in school history on Saturday.
Good news on Brian Leonard's recovery:
Rams RB Brian Leonard recently told team insiders that his season-ending shoulder injury wasn’t as serious as originally feared and that he should be 100 percent healthy for the team’s next offseason training program.
Welcome to the Big Leagues: Ray Rice had nowhere to run against the Super Bowl Champion New York Football Giants.
No one outworks Chris Carlin.
Gary Brackett on program building:
"My first year [at Rutgers] was tough. We were 1-10 and it was pretty bad. It was tough going to practice. The next two years, we won a couple games each year under [then head coach] Terry Shea and then they decided to get rid of him and bring somebody else in," Brackett recalled this week.
"In comes [former University of Miami assistant coach] Greg Schiano and he just brought a different mentality into the program. First of all, he tried to set a foundation. Fundamental things, such as education, to make sure that the players were going to be eligible the next couple of years so they could help us win. So that’s when he took a step back and looked at their grades, looked at their classes, and things like that. Getting study halls and tutors and everything involved just so we could have a team that was going to be there for four or five years. He wanted to graduate players. And that got accomplished. Then the on-field success followed a little bit after that."
A bit of a backhanded compliment from ESPN's Mark Schlabach:
One of the best coaching jobs in the country has gone largely unnoticed. Rutgers lost five of its first six games, but has somehow rebounded to win four games in a row, including a 49-16 rout at South Florida on Saturday. If the Scarlet Knights beat Army and Louisville to finish 7-5, Rutgers coach Greg Schiano will have to get serious consideration for jobs at larger schools.
A Syracuse blogger thinks that I'm totally off base with my desire to see the Big East split and put more of an emphasis on football. That's one way for this site to creep above 300 hits a day.