Someone, Please, Banish Rutgers Football To The Shadow Realm Where It Belongs

Can you guess how many passing yards Rutgers had Saturday against Indiana? This is a trick question, because Rutgers did not have passing yards. They had passing yard. Just the one. However much TV money the Big Ten Network is making from the New York-New Jersey market, I would personally pay them myself if it meant never having to catch a glimpse of this cursed team again.

For your own sake, scram! Stop reading. Rutgers’s 35-0 loss to Indiana was the worst football imaginable, and learning more about it will do you no good. If you insist on soldiering through, keep this cool Oklahoma highlight with you in case you need it. This game began miserably—well, you say, it’s Rutgers, of coouuurse it began miserably, but no, hush, this was bad even by Rutgers standards—and the misery never ended. Scarlet Knights quarterback Johnny Langan fumbled on his first snap, and Indiana’s Reakwon Jones ran it in for six points, ten seconds into the game. Two plays later, the Hoosiers scored again. So, that’s 14-0 in less than three minutes.

The Scarlet Knights would go on to finish the game with just 74 total yards of offense. At halftime, Langan had managed just one net passing yard on five completions, and it stayed exactly that way through the second half. Langan’s longest completion was a 4-yard pass in the first quarter; his worst was for a loss of three yards. Doomed run after doomed run, Rutgers looked like they only wanted to wind down the clock on this game, so they could get back home and rock themselves to sleep.

You’d be hard-pressed to distinguish this badness from the perennial badness, but the Rutgers football program has been thrown into disarray lately. Head coach Chris Ash was fired after a blowout loss to Michigan a few weeks ago and starting quarterback Artur Sitowski and actually good running back Raheem Blackshear have decided to redshirt the season. With each passing week, the kind of salary Greg Schiano could demand from this desperate heap of cleats grows tenfold.

The loss drops Rutgers to 0-4 in the Big Ten this year. If all of this has not driven you to uncontrollable sobs (or laughter, if you are mean), allow me one more note. This has all been the easy part of Rutgers’s schedule. Still on the docket are Penn State, Michigan State, Minnesota and Ohio State.