Rutgers Football Has Their Eyes Set on the Spartan/New Jersey Native Shilique Calhoun in Hopes for an EPIC Upset Over #4 MSU!

If you are Rutgers there is no doubt that you somehow have to find a way to keep New Jersey native and Spartan All American Shilique Calhoun away from your QB.

If you are Rutgers there is no doubt that you somehow have to find a way to keep New Jersey native and Spartan All American Shilique Calhoun away from your QB. The pride of Middletown, NJ, Calhoun has the attention of the Scarlett Knights.

Scarlett Knights QB Chris Laviano completes 73% of his passes and the Spartans are on a mission to neutralize him and make the Knights try to run the ball. They are going to bring blitzes from every direction and we all know that Calhoun hopes to make a living back home and in the Knights backfield.

Assistant head coach Norries Wilson said of Calhoun this week, “That guy that can rush the passer pretty good. Yes. Well, we know he's a good player, he's a real good player, and we've got to make sure -- we've got a good idea we know where he's going to be. We've got to make sure that whoever's going against him is going to have to fight and strain and compete against a real good player. I think when you're a college football player, that's what you want to do, you want to play against good people. You want to scheme up some things you're doing against them and mix it up and try to get him off balance a little bit. But we know that he's a good player and he's someone we're going to have to account for.”

Wilson went on to add, “He's sudden, and when I say sudden, he's got a good get-off. He's long. He can keep the offensive linemen off of him. He uses his hands well, he can get his hips away. He's got speed and he can turn the corner fast. You put all those things together and he can get up the field and get after people really quickly.”

The Spartans wiped the Scarlett Knights out last year in East Lansing 45-3 and the Knights are looking for some way to change that. They’ve looked hard. Coach Wilson said, “Defensive coordinator's since gone on to be the head coach at the University of Pittsburgh but they're still doing a lot of the same things, and we'll take and learn from whatever mistakes we think we may have made last year. Each week it's about -- we feel like it's about how we prepare and how we execute. We know we've got a quality opponent, but regardless of who we may be playing, we try to make it about what we're doing and how we're doing and how we're executing so our kids can stay focused on what we think's important.”

Coming off of a bye week, Rutgers spent all of that extra time trying to figure out what to do with Calhoun and his merry gang of henchman. Wilson said of their bye week MSU prep, “We did something every day. Every day we went out there with did something on advance prep for Michigan State. We had a good three periods of good teamwork against the things they do on defense.”

But Spartan fans know that MSU isn’t just about Calhoun on defense. The Spartans traditional no fly zone, is very young this year and Coach Wilson doesn’t buy that this part of the Spartan D is struggling.

He said of the Spartans defensive backfield, “I see great tacklers. I see guys that come up and try to strip the ball, guys not scared to stick their nose in the box and tackle. They're not scared to press and play one-on-one, and you have to be confident as a coordinator to allow your defensive backs to press and play one-on-one. They've got athletic kids and our kids on the edges are going to be challenged and we expect our kids to step up and meet the challenge.”

The struggling Rutgers team had the advantage of a bye week, but the coach acknowledges you can’t reinvent yourself in that short time frame. Spartan fans may not like how the Spartans are winning, but Rutgers would love those problems as the mighty Spartans come to town.

Wilson said of bye week anticipation and fixing their struggling issues, “We don't try to reinvent the wheel each week and try to come up with a new offense. We try to find the best ways to attack them, be it with personnel or with formations or a combination of the two. There may be a new wrinkle in there or here if we see that it fits into what we're doing, it's not very expensive for us to get taught in the time that we have available. So we'll go out and see what's in our package that helps us best prepare to win the football game and we'll take it from there.”

At 8PM on Saturday night Rutgers will give the Spartans their best shot. This one game can make their season. A head coach in trouble, a program struggling just to be relevant and a MSU team that has a high national ranking and prestige is coming to town. MSU will get their best shot, is that shot good enough to stop the Spartans? Doubtful, but anything can happen at night, on the road and on national TV. I bet Shilique Calhoun coming home, might have something to say about that.