First a little bit about me. The very first “real” football game I attended was a game in the ’90s when my dad got some free RU tix. Curiously, as Chinese immigrants, from the outside looking in, the two dudes partook a long-time, heartland America tradition: NCAA Division I Football. Army at Rutgers. This was before the High Point stadium was built, so we were playing even closer to where we lived. I think I was maybe a Freshman in high school. Of course, this is before the Schiano era as well, and the now-athletics director Pernetti probably was just a small-time mid-level manager. Rutgers was just having its butt handed to them in the Big East, which it joined not all that long ago at the time. It was a chilly November day and as usual, RU got its butt handed to them. I remember more fondly when Army’s canon went off, and seeing the red knight rode on the field.

To all those OSU dudes planning a trip to central NJ: You know that Avengers movie? You want shawarma that’s actually good? New Brunswick has it (now). But that’s another 10 minutes from the stadium w/o traffic, and the traffic going into NB sucks. Probably triply so right after a game. And forget about parking!

Star Ledger sports writer Steve Politi has it. Not only an answer to Nate Super-Oracle Silver’s Google-search fueled inquiry (actually the numbers speak for themselves, RU is a perfectly fine pickup and fits the B1G profile), but points out the obvious: times are a-changing. I even bothered reading some of what those mid-western columnists had to say about the dilution of the Big Ten.

Well, maybe it is political. Because this is a change you all should believe in. Not only in terms of the obvious–RU is a real academic powerhouse (when’s the last time Maryland turned down an offer to join the Ivy League?). There are a lot of good arguments to keeping the Big Ten the way it has been but since it ceased to be the Big Ten with Penn State, why bother? If the possibly enigmatic Big Ten commissioner wants to expand to the east, how is that a bad thing? The worst piece I read came from some newspaper which argued that this isn’t good for the games. Hello? RU is 3-0 against B1G opponents, right? And it’s not like they play them every year. The part that makes it the “worst” is how it then complains how college football is not a religion to some of us like how it is to the stereotypical mid-west demographic. How is this “part of the game” now? More like part of the meta-game, yeah?

There are plenty of Buckeye fans that I want to go with to see that inevitable game, and most of them lives on the East Coast. It would be p. chill.

Seeing Tebow and his Broncos beat the Pittsburgh Steelers is seeing miracle upset #1. Will there be a #2? How do hard-lined football media pros talk about upsets like this? I mean, yeah, you could look at it like a statistical thing and say any given Sunday any team can win against any other team. But that seems like paltry complement that fails to describe Tebow’s Broncos, who now have one more playoff win than Matt Ryan’s Falcons, and the dirty birds are definitely a “better” team, at least on paper. I mean it’s the sort of thing you could say but it doesn’t really mean anything.

And even with a gimpy Big Ben, the Steelers are better than both of those teams. Of course the Steelers is far from invincible compared to even their 2010 season, so you have to ask what is going on here.

I think I like this whole Tebow winning games thing precisely because it makes people uncomfortable trying to describe what Tebow’s Broncos have done. How exactly do you talk about predicting an upset? Look at their far inferior team statistics? How do teams get it done when they have little statistical advantages? What is in the game plan? How will Tebow eventually crash and burn? Or not?

Coming into this next playoff game against New England, who is more or less still the same Brady offense monster as they were in recent years, will we see a repeat? New England is definitely also a team that has lost some of its sheen compared to 2010, although obviously Brady is much better off than Ben physically, and the Pats are less beat up than the Steelers as a group. This is such grand stage for such beautiful drama. And in that sense I’m going to root for Tebow all the way, because these upsets make for awesome entertainment. Certainly way better than if the game went the other way. I’m sure CBS execs are doing exactly the same thing.