[hiltond]

Sports stories don't get a lot of time here so I thought I would post one. Now I know what some of you, cough Carol, are thinking, a sports story in my thread , but this is a good positive story that you just might like.

From SI.com

There's this really weird thing happening at Rutgers. People are going to football games. Lots of people. They're wearing red, they're slapping Block R decals on their cars, and they're turning Rutgers Stadium's closed north end into the Northeast's version of the Swamp. Sure, the part of this story hooking columnists in Minneapolis and Los Angeles is that Rutgers is 5-0. The same school that was 1-11 four years ago and broke a three-year Big East losing streak only two years ago is now ranked 23rd in the nation. But that's not the real shocker. If you spent any time around Scarlet Knights coach Greg Schiano over the last six years, you kind of knew Rutgers couldn't be horrid forever. The man's sheer force of will is so strong that his wife admits to throwing card games just so he'll let her go to bed. He's incredibly obstinate and totally charming. He cajoled a short-of-money athletic director into trading a planned $3 million expansion for a $13 million as-good-as-any-in-the-SEC football facility, and you knew he'd get at least a few kids like stellar sophomore running back Ray Rice to play for him. But the wild part of this story, the best part of Rutgers' coming out, is that New Jerseyans are into it. New Jersey's a funky place. People place their towns as X minutes out of New York or Y miles from Philadelphia. There are three pro football teams, three baseball teams, three hockey teams and three basketball teams within an hour of most anywhere in the state. There are casinos in the south and a couple of racetracks. Worse, New Jerseyans aren't really into being New Jerseyans. When state senator Richard Codey was acting governor last year, he was sure that holding a contest to come up with a new state slogan was a killer idea. Until the entries started rolling in. New Jersey: All the corrupt politicians money can buy. New Jersey: You got a problem with that?

OK that one was submitted by Joe Pesci and was very popular.

New Jersey: Don't come. There's no more room. These days, Codey gets a little thrill every time he hears one of those SportsCenter anchors say, "Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey." He thinks the biggest "handicap" the state has is not having a Division I university with "New Jersey" in it. "People don't know Rutgers is a public school," he said. When assistant coach Darren Rizzi was recruiting placekicker Jeremy Ito, who is from California, Ito initially asked: "What's Rutgers?" Rutgers is 240 years old. Its $450 million endowment ranks 112th, smaller than any other major state university. Yet now, "everywhere I go in the state," First Fan Codey said, "people are talking about this team." Fans packed Rutgers' first two home games. Not once since the Scarlet Knights' inaugural 1869 season had Rutgers sold the place out twice in a single year. There's never been anything like this out at the state school. There's never been anything so many New Jerseyans can be personally connected to. The backup quarterback's the kid you taught ninth-grade geometry to. The starting quarterback's the kid who mowed your brother's lawn. "This is a pro area," my editor has said to me, oh, about a hundred times. "Everyone loves a winner," he says to me now. After cutting $66 million out of the school's $1.6 billion budget, the first time school president Dick McCormick felt safe smiling publicly was at a pep rally the night before the second home game this season. Not that Schiano's loving it, but even Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis keeps talking up being from New Jersey. Last Sunday, a month after a New York Times news reporter wrote about how the football program has improved morale at the budget-crunching school, a New York Times sports columnist ripped Schiano for hiring people to monitor his players' class attendance. Hey, they don't rip around here if you're irrelevant. So it's not like Tony Soprano had to worry about taking any flack when he first started shilling for Schiano's program six years ago. But James Gandolfini, long past his whacking days, was shuffling along the Rutgers Stadium concourse in a Brian Leonard jersey a few weeks ago. There have been murmurs that renowned chef Mario Batali, another alum, might man a charity concession stand at the Thursday-night Louisville game in November. The Rutgers athletic department tripled its previous fund-raising tally after last year's Insight Bowl appearance, and that $5.8 million record is suddenly looking vulnerable. Schiano said that would happen one day. He grew up in New Jersey; his first college job was at Rutgers. During coaching stops at Penn State and Miami and with the Chicago Bears, every so often he'd call his old college coach, Joe Susan, another Jersey guy and his current tight ends coach, and say New Jersey deserves better. After Rutgers opened the season with a win at North Carolina, one of the first things Schiano said was, "New Jersey deserves this." Rutgers is never going to be to New Jersey what the University of Texas is to Texas. Schiano's never going to get a Boone Pickens to donate $165 million to his program, like the Oklahoma State booster did. Five games does not make a juggernaut. Still, weird things are happening. People all over the state are wearing Rutgers gear. Codey, a bleeds-blue Seton Hall guy, wore a Rutgers hat golfing the other day. Applications are up. "It's only the start," Codey said. "Wait till people call me up, 'Hey, Dick, can you get me Rutgers tickets?'" Now that would really be weird.

This football team really has generation a sense of community in a state that has long suffered from regionalism and a bit of an inferiority complex from being wedged between New York City and Philadelphia. The state's nickname The Garden State comes from Abraham Browning who said

our Garden State is an immense barrel, filled with good things and open at both ends, with Pennsylvanians grabbing from one end and New Yorkers from the other.

Browning may or may not have borrowed this imagery from Benjamin Franklin, but this isn't a story about our self-depricating nickname.

People from North Jersey look down on people from South Jersey, South Jerseyans may at times be distrustful of those from the north and both refuse to admit that central Jersey even exists. Now everywhere you go you will here people talk about the football team and they don't mean the Eagles, Jets or Giants. Scarlet hoodies are everywhere. Everybody likes a winner.

We may never like each other, we may never be as revered as our neighbors but we will always have our giant underfunded University which somehow manages to make advances in science, art, education, public policy and, apparently, football. For a school that played in the *sport* opener it feels good to have that last one back.

PS after besting Navy and Pitt, Rutgers is now 7 and 0, go Knights.