Rutgers spent part of this season’s marketing budget outlicking itself at home, as a thirty-point favorite, against a UMass team carrying the worst active losing streak in college football.
That’s the surface story. The real one is smaller and worse: the team that beat Rutgers 37-21 last Thursday is coached by the guy Rutgers used to pay to run its own defense.
This was supposed to be the guarantee game Rutgers thought was free money: a home date against a program that went 0-12 last season, per CBS Sports, and hadn’t beaten an FBS opponent since a 21-14 win over Army in October 2023, per ESPN. Write the check, take the win, sell the concessions, move on to Big Ten play with the record intact. That’s the whole business model of a guarantee game; it only works if the visiting team is actually worse than you.
Joe Harasymiak used to run Rutgers’ defense. He held the job for three seasons, 2022 through 2024, before UMass hired him to rebuild a program with nothing left to lose. He grew up roughly 40 miles from SHI Stadium, and family and friends were in the stands Thursday to watch him walk his 16-game losers into Piscataway and end the streak on the road, against the defense he built.
He knew where the seams were because he installed them; he knew the tendencies because he wrote the playbook Rutgers is presumably still running. The check cleared. The beating still happened.
Greg Schiano’s postgame assessment did not require translation: “We got outlicked, outplayed and outcoached. There is no other way to say it. I didn’t have them ready.” I keep coming back to that quote, and it doesn’t get any kinder on a second or third read; it isn’t an excuse, it’s a diagnosis, and Schiano wrote it about his own team.
The reported price tag for hosting that lesson was $1.55 million, the standard rate for scheduling an FBS also-ran as a tune-up. Rutgers was favored by roughly 30 points, according to CBS Sports — the kind of spread that exists to make a home opener feel like a formality instead of a football game.
None of that dollar figure should bother New Jersey taxpayers half as much as this one: Rutgers paid $5 million in state tax money for this, technically. This year’s state budget routed $5 million to Rutgers Athletics for something called “Events Attraction and Marketing,” reportedly meant to help the program compete in the NIL arms race, according to Athletic Business. That’s real money chasing a real problem: the spending gap already splitting the sport into two tiers, and Rutgers wanted off the wrong side of it before the ink dried.
New Jersey’s State Assembly Republicans did the arithmetic before the athletic department’s own marketing office could get ahead of it:
https://twitter.com/NJAssemblyGOP/status/2095887271094260057
A state legislature live-tweeting your football program’s beatdown as a line item is not what “Events Attraction” was supposed to attract.
Rutgers’ best answer on the field was KJ Duff, an AP All-America receiver who caught nine passes for 196 yards and three touchdowns in the loss. Less than 24 hours later, Duff entered the transfer portal, per a report from Shane Tuttle that referenced “yesterday’s loss to UMass.” The best player on the roster watched the former DC win, then left before Monday’s practice.
Rutgers’ pregame planning survived the game itself better than the defense did. The postgame fireworks show, scheduled long before anyone knew what kind of afternoon it would be capping off, went up on time over a stadium that had mostly emptied by the third quarter, and Rutgers president William Tate reportedly didn’t stay for it.
https://twitter.com/NFLMemes/status/2095722906760184216
Somewhere in Piscataway a compliance officer is explaining to a state legislator why the marketing budget covers pyrotechnics for a home loss to a 16-game loser, and there’s no version of that conversation that ends well for whoever’s holding the microphone.
Rutgers isn’t an outlier here so much as an early example; the same parity problem showing up everywhere in September has already produced more than one of these buy-game disasters, and the season is one week old. The dollar figure is disputed. The former defensive coordinator isn’t.
