He’s got the fancy nickname (Rocket), he’s got a cheering relative who could draw cameras like Janet Rice once did and now he’s got membership in Rutgers’ 100-yard club. But will DeAntwan Williams keep having carries?

The true freshman out of Woodbridge, Va. had a game-high 19 carries for 132 yards in Rutgers’ Saturday win over Texas Southern. In his other appearance, against an also-FCS Howard, Williams had 14 carries for 89 yards. Both sets of yards came late in the game, after things were well in hand, and Sunday Greg Schiano said that makes assessing them an “apples and oranges” situation.

“You can’t compare fourth-quarter-35-0-lead carries versus first-quarter-game-on-the-line carries,” he said. Still, Schiano said he is seeing good things in what he can compare, like practice drills against Rutgers’ no. 1 defense. And that could make things interesting.

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*This game is not being televised, but Texas Southern will have a live feed of the action – in HD – on its website. You can sign up here; a one-game purchase is $9.95.

52:02 before Kickoff: The Tigers are doing lunges across their half of the field, DC Jefferson’s catching balls on the Rutgers’ half of the field and Jay-Z’s on the speakers. Rutgers was offering 2-for-1 tickets to this game and from the look of the tailgater-packed lots, this should be a pretty good Homecoming Day crowd. I wonder what former players will make it. Texas Southern’s most famous former player of course is Michael Strahan. He’s no longer a Montclair resident, though, and the Texas Southern folks tell me it’s been a long time since they’ve seen him on one of their sidelines.

41:27 before Kickoff: Every game, the Scarlet Knights spread across the field and stand on the yard lines, from the five to the 35, for their pre-game stretching. Every game, Greg Schiano goes along these lines, shakes hands with every single player and says something to each one. It never really looks cursory. I wonder what he’s saying and if it’s different for different players. I should ask some of the kids…

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I love Eric Foster. He was an enormously fun kid to cover, he is a tremendously polite – and truly genuine - human being and he says things like he this: “I can take it 50 (yards). I might die when I get to 60, but I can take it 50.”

That, of course, is Eric talking about carrying the football. Defensive tackle Eric who the Colts are deploying at fullback and splitting wide, and who the Colts’ starting tailback wants to relinquish some runs to.

The Scarlet Knights are kept so busy, they don’t always get to stay fully up to date on how their former teammates are doing. Heck, Devin McCourty couldn’t even watch his twin brother Jason’s first-ever NFL start this past Sunday. But this week, EVERYONE knew about Eric Foster’s line-up jumping. Blair Bines said he loved it and Devin said he was looking for video highlights on his computer. So, when I sat down to talk with Rutgers’ latest defensive tackle named Eric, one who also has braids, also smiles a lot and also was once a linebacker, the original Eric inevitably came up.

Here’s the story:

By Aditi Kinkhabwala / SNY.tv

PISCATAWAY – His fiery exuberance, his camera-grabbing chop, his YouTubed raps – Eric Foster is legend in these parts.

So even though Eric LeGrand never played with Foster, of course he still knows all about the former Rutgers captain who preceded him on the Scarlet Knights’ defensive line. And of course he knows what Foster is doing now, toggling from Colts defensive tackle to Colts fullback.

“No, I don’t think I can ask Coach to let me do that too,” LeGrand said, shaking braids just like Foster’s, flashing a grin an awful lot like Foster’s – and showing a deference Foster maybe wouldn’t.

“No, no, it’s not that,” LeGrand said, protesting a teasing suggestion that he’s lost some of his athletic chops after moving – like Foster before him – from linebacker to tackle. “That’s the NFL. And besides, I’m very happy where I am now.”

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It’s homecoming and Rutgers wants its fans to remember not everyone has a home with a stocked kitchen. Or a home. 

The football stadium will host the first of three food drives this Saturday and Rutgers is asking its ticket holders to bring non-perishable food (canned or boxed) and paper items (like toilet paper) to the game. There’ll be drop-offs at the North, South and West gates and one at the RAC. The food will go to the Rutgers Against Hunger initiative, which feeds New Jersey’s hungry.

A few years ago, when the NCAA decided to have officials include the jersey numbers of the offending parties in their penalty announcements, I remember asking a few Rutgers players if they minded. I know I asked Greg Schiano and if I remember correctly (it was a long time ago), he sort of waffled. He didn’t have a problem with the accountability, especially since announcing a name didn’t change whether a penalty occurred or not. But it’s also his nature to protect college kids and so he wasn’t wickedly excited about it either.

I bring this up because yesterday, I think Greg found himself in a similar competing-interests spot. If he’s in the business of molding men, does he hold an underachieving player publicly accountable? Or is it more important to shield a player from what can be tough public scorn and make apologies for why the player’s not met standards?

It’s no secret Rutgers’ offensive line has been a little slower out the gate than expected. Okay, a lot slower. The returning starting five (and maybe six) didn’t all hold their spots, a former defensive lineman (Desmond Wynn) is suddenly starting and feverishly working to get caught up and ostensible first round pick Anthony Davis came in to camp overweight.

We know this because Greg made a big deal out of it at the start of camp. We know this because he stuck AD with the second team for the start of camp (perhaps sacrificing the forging of chemistry for discipline) and we know this because AD took a lot of heat from fans when Rutgers opened the season with that clunker against Cincinnati. (I don’t care how good Cincinnati is or who Rutgers has looked decent against these last three weeks… that game should NOT have been that out of hand.)

Then, in yesterday’s press conference, and seemingly out of nowhere, Greg sounded a little regretful about all of it. The glaring – unfriendly – spotlight on AD, he said, is “not totally his fault. I think he was villainized a little bit, maybe by me.”

Huh?

“He had an issue this summer, a freak deal. He was playing basketball and someone poked him in the eye and there wasn’t a lot of time where he could go full out in training, because it is dangerous with the pressure in your eye,” Greg said. ”So that was part of why he came in heavy and not in quite the shape he was supposed to be in.”

Really?

So the kid has to be accountable and is therefore publicly called out for not being in shape. And people naturally start thinking he knows he’s out the door to the NFL, he has an ego problem and he isn’t committed to working hard. Only, now we find out that’s maybe not it at all.

Rutgers fans, remember how that one bad day suddenly turned Kenny Britt into an attitude problem? And how that alleged knock wouldn’t die?

I think this is a really hard spot for a coach to be in.

Ed. I’m afraid my point in highlighting all this was lost a little and so I want to elaborate some…  I’ve always admired the ways in which Greg Schiano expects his players to be men. From my first year on the beat, when the then-media relations director was wary of letting me into the open locker room every other beat writer went into, I remember Greg shrugging and saying that if these kids were in the NFL they’d have to be mature enough to have women around. Even as his mentor, Joe Paterno, regularly shields his players from the media, Greg hasn’t ever let a kid – say one who threw four picks to end a win streak or one who slapped a teammate - hide from reporters.

If AD came in out of shape, why should he get special allowances no other player did? But if he was hurt and that played a role in his being out of shape, do people outside the program need to know that too? Like I said, tough call. To call out or not to call out.

Mrs. Savage played true to form. Tom was home for the first time all fall and barely two weeks off a sidelining concussion, so she warned her son – and Rutgers’ starting quarterback – her wary eye was open wide.

“Make sure you listen to the doctor,” she said. (Several times, according to Tom.)

Mr. Savage was supposed to be looser. He’s the one his son calls “hard-nosed,” the one likely to say, “Stop crying and get out there.”

Except this past weekend… Read the rest right here.

Toward the end of last week, as it seemed more likely that Tom Savage’s head injury would sideline him at Maryland, I sat down with Dom Natale to talk about the possible opening – and staying ready. He of course said all the right things about preparing the same way and not getting down, but the QB he stood behind for three years (Mike Teel) always did the same. In fact, most every Greg Schiano player habitually spits out coach-approved quotes and so when Greg Schiano was again praising Natale’s attitude, I asked him why he keeps doing that. Isn’t that team-first selflessness, I asked, what you demand – and get – from all your players?

To his credit, Schiano paused a moment. And then said Dom’s a little different. Dom came in, he said, with an uncommon maturity.

Now we know part of why. Five days ago, the Press of Atlantic City’s Susan Lulgjurag wrote about Dom’s experience with cholesteatoma, a type of skin cyst in the inner ear which left Dom deaf in his right ear at age 12. In this morning’s editions of the Star-Ledger, Brendan Prunty wrote about it too.

Dom went out to Michigan State a highly-touted recruit and then dealt with a coaching change. He transferred, sat out a year, blew out his arm, finally got the starting job and then lost the starting job. People talk about his resilience and yet when he and I were chatting yesterday, I realized that resilience was learned before football.

What neither Susan nor Brendan wrote was that by the time Dom had the surgery to remove that mass of cells in his ear, he’d been operated on nearly a dozen times. His intestines were all twisted when he was little, he needed multiple eye surgeries – the surgery he had at Rutgers three years ago was the 14th of his life. He’s only 23 right now.

“My mom always says she was so scared every time we went to the doctor,” Dom said, smiling a little but mostly being matter-of-fact, like he always is. Dom volunteered that he wasn’t premature (“People always ask that when they find out about all the problems I had early,” he said) and that his teammates’ unmerciless teasing is kind of nice.

“They try to sneak up behind me and whisper in my right ear,” he said.

Tim Brown (who instructed me yesterday to stop calling him Timmy, because “Timmy sounds like a little kid’s name”) admitted yes, the Scarlet Knights will sometimes try to mess with Dom, “but only in fun,” he insisted.

“We always say he can’t hear the crowd noise, that’s why he doesn’t feel any pressure,” Tim said. He said no one’s very good at totally catching Dom off guard (Dom can feel vibrations if not sound) and he said Dom encourages the Scarlet Knights to be at ease with what clearly isn’t an impairment.

I wrote last night of Schiano’s feeling that Dom’s leading a win at Maryland and Savage’s continued sidelining won’t re-open Rutgers’ QB competition, that Savage will return as starter when he’s healthy. Either way, I’m sure we’ll keep seeing some of Natale. And I’m fairly sure Rutgers fans will keep rooting for Natale too.

How’s this for a random bit of history: in 1904, after brain injuries either killed or paralyzed 19 college football players, President Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban the sport entirely.

Rutgers freshman QB Tom Savage suffered some sort of head injury the Saturday before this last one, against Florida International. He was taken out of the game in the third quarter, he never left the sideline and even though he told us Monday that he was “knocked out cold,” he also insisted he could’ve gone back in the game.

He practiced all week, all week Rutgers coach Greg Schiano said Tom was a tough kid, but he was unsure if he’d go against Maryland and Thursday he said it was 50-50. Then, Saturday and Maryland came and Tom didn’t play.

Now, Tom never used the word concussion. Schiano pointedly never used the word concussion either. Just as a quick primer, there are three grades of concussions. Grade 1 usually features transient confusion, poor concentration and generally clears up in 15 minutes. Football players who suffer a Grade 1 concussion can go back in a game – which Tom said he could have.

Grade 2 concussions feature the same symptoms, but take a lot longer to clear up. Doctors generally recommend that players should not return to the field until they’ve had two symptom-free weeks.

Then there are Grade 3 concussions. This is any loss of consciousness. A football player who suffers this should be taken straight to the ER (which Tom wasn’t). If the loss of consciousness was seconds, a player can come back after one symptom-free week. If the loss of conscious was minutes, the generally recommended layoff is two symptom-free weeks.

Regardless, I don’t know if Tom had a concussion. I also don’t know if anything more serious showed up in Tom since I last saw him last Thursday. On this morning’s coaches’ teleconference, Schiano only said he was “hopeful” Tom could practice this bye week.

“When you’re dealing with head injuries you’re not really sure how things are going to respond and certainly it’s not something you mess around with,” Schiano said. “I’m hoping that he feels better and that he can practice this week. And if he can’t, he can’t.”

Like I said, I don’t know if something took a turn and Tom’s doing much worse. But if not, and Schiano’s just being hyper-cautious, you have to commend him for that. And commend him for taking lessons from the past. Remember, it was Kordell Young who came off of total reconstructive knee surgery and then was handed the ball 26 times in last year’s opener. Kordell hasn’t been the same since. Maybe that workload had something to do with it, maybe not. Either way, Schiano’s talked a lot this season about erring on the side of caution with hurt guys and for a football coach who clearly values toughness, that says something.

I got the text message last night, as I was driving home: “Michael Moore’s on Larry King and he’s wearing a Rutgers hat!” Then a second: “Why?!”

Whatever your politics, it’s irrefutable that Michael Moore is a public figure. Three of the top-five grossing documentaries EVER are his and he does draw high-voltage attention, like Larry King’s. (Moore was indeed on Larry King last night, talking about his new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story.) I’ve seen him in Rutgers’ hats in front of those cameras a lot and I have to admit I’ve wondered why too. He’s from Flint, Michigan and he went to school at the U of M-Flint.

So I looked. And it’s a story that has to make all Rutgers alum who believe in free speech – and who don’t believe in censorship – proud.

Check it out.

Edit: Thanks to Spanky for pointing out that that story of Ann Sparanese doesn’t mention the key point: Sparanese got her library studies degree in 1990 from… Rutgers.

The original idea was to write on Antonio Lowery and his (big) little brother, Antwan. Greg Schiano’s said he’s pretty set with his rotation of four tackles and so the true freshman Antwan may not play this year, but Antonio’s having a heck of a year, he’s continuing to just eke above Manny Abreu in what’s probably the closest 1-2 competition on the Scarlet Knights and, well, Antwan talking about how he follows around Antonio was pretty cute.

Then I randomly decided to ask Timmy Brown, another Miami native, if he knew Antonio particularly well. Timmy’s a wideout, Antonio’s a linebacker, they went to different high schools and… they’re best friends. From the time they were six or seven. And the way the two of them go at it… woo-eee. They’re both talkers, they’re both incredibly friendly, but there’s still a subtle personality difference. Timmy has a little more edge and he’ll talk a little more (teasing) trash. Antonio’s just the sweetest, nicest, most earnest kid. He’s always, always smiling and when Timmy says, “He’s my best friend in the whole world,” you can see why.

In any case, I had a riotous conversation with one, then the other and then both, when Antonio demanded Timmy come and sit with us so he could “face up to his lies.” Take a look, here. I promise you’ll chuckle at least once.

Brown, Lowery thriving together