Rutgers Won Every Game It Should Have, and Lost the Rest, But in the Most Bizarre Fashion Yet

Being a Rutgers fan is almost uniquely frustrating. On one hand, it feels like this team never makes progress, never beats a team in that “next tier,” but gives fans just enough hope and reason to believe that a night like the Penn State game happens, with a full-fledged crowd living and dying every play, hoping for an elusive win over the Nittany Lions that came so close to happening.

In the most inexplicable way yet, defeat was once again snatched from the jaws of victory in the eleventh hour. And yes, I pushed back hard on the tiers narrative after the loss to Iowa, but seeing it two more times has helped me understand the reasoning behind why these types of “signature wins” matter so much, even with the other team just a smidge better than Rutgers this season.

But even when the Scarlet Knights were the favorites, the pressure for the underdogs seems to have gotten to them just when they get close to pulling the upset, just like Rutgers against the marginally better teams they have played this season. It happened to Ohio and Purdue this season, while Maryland was simply overmatched.

Without a power team on the nonconference schedule, Rutgers was nearly upset by the likes of a solid MAC team in the Ohio Bobcats, escaping 34-31 on a gutsy fourth-down call that was an almost identical situation to how Penn State ended Rutgers’ season three months later.

I do not think it is purely a coincidence or bad playcalls that stalled the Bobcats the second that they had a chance to take control of the game after battling back from being down 31-14, and failed to get a stop thereafter. I think it had a lot more to do with the pressure of the moment and of closing the game out as a decided underdog on the road in the Big Ten, even when Ohio won the MAC Championship and had been playing full of confidence.

With the season on the line at Purdue, the Rutgers defense continued its horrible play and allowed wide-open touchdowns to the Boilers. Purdue used its timeouts and forced Rutgers to kick a field goal to tie the game, but Ryan Browne’s pass was tipped at the line of scrimmage on their next drive, causing Farrell Gnago to punch the ball out and Jett Elad to recover the fumble. Jai Patel was set up nicely for the first game-winner of his career.

Purdue may have played just as well, if not better, but once again, an untimely mistake saw the better team on paper come up with the big play to win the game. The fact that this happened away from Piscataway and that the Scarlet Knights were demolished 56-10 by Oregon the previous week did not seem to matter because Rutgers was better than Purdue, even if just by the tiniest of margins.

On the flip side, the Iowa game saw Rutgers being the team looking to punch above its weight class and narrowly falling short. A highly anticipated blackout game on a September Friday night saw the Rutgers offense roar to life, but the defense allowed the Hawkeyes to score 38 points in Piscataway and escape with a win.

A defensive holding (untimely mistake) by Al-Shadee Salaam extended an Iowa drive when they were down 28-24, allowing the Hawkeyes to go up 31-28. Sure enough, Kaliakmanis threw an interception, and Iowa proceeded to take advantage of a short field to defeat Rutgers 38-28. Is it because Iowa has been the better team in the past, and the pressure to close the Hawks out got to the Knights? I would hate to think so, but it sure seems like it.

Against Minnesota, we got to see what could have happened if Rutgers got the ball back up 28-24, but the Scarlet Knights punted anyway and allowed the Gophers to score a touchdown to take a 31-28 lead. With Rutgers driving down the field, Gus Zilinskas inexplicably snapped the ball through Kalikamanis’ legs, causing the Scarlet Knights to lose 15 yards.

Rutgers could not get back into Jai Patel’s field goal range, causing Dane Pizarro to miss a 56-yard field goal as time expired, ending the game right then and there. This game might not be the best example, because Minnesota has not really been a tier above Rutgers, but once again, the Knights played themselves out of a win or at least a tie with an unfathomable offensive mistake. Sure enough, the Gophers got embarrassed by Iowa but finished 7-5.

And last night, with Rutgers striking first by moving down the field with ease and matching Penn State score for score, it felt like things would be different. The defense came up with a timely stop, and the Knights were bullying Penn State’s vaunted front on the line of scrimmage with Antwan Raymond. But Kaliakmanis dropped the football before throwing it, the first time in his career that had happened to him, but it came at the worst time.

Perhaps it was the cold or the curse of being a Rutgers player, but it seems that the psychological pressure of everything needing to go right to beat a better team has played a role in multiple of these games for the Scarlet Knights this season. Rutgers has been a victor and a loser in these situations by the narrowest of margins.

Even after Duff made an incredible catch, Raymond was suddenly stuffed on second down, the Tush Push got one yard, and the fourth-down end-around play did not work. Then Penn State had what it took to get the first down on its own fourth down attempt deep in Rutgers territory, and they prevented RU from seeing the ball again.

Was that all just a coincidence or plays gone wrong? Maybe, but it could have also been the fact that fans and players alike had started to taste victory, and despite the season that Penn State had, they were still Penn State, and Rutgers was still Rutgers. Once that fumble happened, nothing seemed to work correctly for the Scarlet Knights, despite Rutgers moving the ball with ease and getting a stop against the Nittany Lions just before that.

On one hand, Rutgers had the chance to pull multiple upsets (and also get upset several times), but on the other hand, were any of those games going to actually swing in the favor of the underdogs? It sure did not look like it, with intervention getting in the way, reminding the lesser team that they were “not supposed” to win the game, despite the fact that they had done everything they could to win it. So not only did they lose, but they fumbled their opportunity to even give themselves the needed stop or the go-ahead score to have a real chance at victory.

This is not just a Rutgers thing, by the way. Indiana stole a game in Happy Valley with their backs against the wall, Oregon escaped Kinnick Stadium 18-16, and if Ohio State beats the Hoosiers next week, even by just a field goal, the pundits will surely declare that there is only one true king in college football and that no other team in the country, including the #2 Hoosiers, is good enough to unseat them this year.

But the way that Rutgers has won and lost games this season is, on one hand, so predictable, and on the other hand, the most unpredictable. It always seems to come down to which team is supposed to win before the game starts, but it has happened in the most bizarre ways imaginable on the field. If you need another example, the Illinois game last season is another one where the Knights somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, keeping their long streak of failing to beat a ranked opponent intact.

Rutgers is the best of the bottom Big Ten teams this season, and therefore, they beat their nonconference opponents, Maryland and Purdue, but could not win even one more game, simply because those teams were just marginally better and had the luck of the draw that usually comes with that. Although the play of the defense is certainly to blame for the 5-7 record, you have to wonder just how much psychology plays into this as well.

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