UMass beat Rutgers 37-21 at SHI Stadium on Thursday, September 3. The Minutemen had not won a football game since October 26, 2024. They were carrying a 16-game losing streak, the longest active skid in the FBS, and they were roughly four touchdown underdogs on the road.
They rushed for 197 yards. Rutgers rushed for 30. That single number explains the whole night.
Pop Watson III threw for 197 yards and three touchdowns, hitting Elijah Faulkner twice and Joseph Griffin Jr. once as UMass built a 24-7 halftime lead. The Minutemen scored 30 unanswered before Rutgers found the end zone again. UMass outgained Rutgers 394-349 and simply looked like the more prepared team from the opening drive.
Schiano Said It Himself
Greg Schiano did not hide after the game. “I didn’t have them ready to play,” he said, and he added that he never saw it coming after doing this a long time. Credit him for the honesty. That admission is also the exact sentence that gets circulated when an athletic director starts building a case.
Schiano is still the head coach at Rutgers, and he will be through this season barring something extraordinary. His buyout is real money and Rutgers does not make impulsive decisions. But the seat got hot in a hurry, and the reason is not just the loss. It is what the loss revealed.
The Bigger Problem
Schiano’s second stint at Rutgers has been sold on a specific premise: he would restore program culture, toughness and preparation even if the talent gap in the Big Ten stayed permanent. Losing to Ohio State by four touchdowns is survivable inside that framework. Getting physically dominated by a team that had not won in nearly two years is not.
A 197-30 rushing disparity against UMass attacks the foundation of the argument. If the pitch is toughness, and the tape shows a team getting pushed off the ball by the worst program in the sport, the pitch is broken.
The schedule offers no cushion either. Rutgers plays in a Big Ten where the bottom half of the conference has gotten meaningfully better, and the Scarlet Knights now need to win six of their remaining games just to reach a bowl. That path was already narrow. It got much narrower on a Thursday night in September.
The Harasymiak Twist
The detail that makes this especially painful for Rutgers: UMass coach Joe Harasymiak was Rutgers’ defensive coordinator from 2022 through 2024. He worked for Schiano. He knew the building, the personnel philosophy and the tendencies. He had family and friends in the stands at SHI Stadium watching him deliver the biggest win UMass has recorded since joining the FBS in 2012.
Harasymiak just made a very loud case for himself as a coach who can build something out of nothing. That is a résumé line that travels.
Where This Goes
My stance: Schiano finishes the season and Rutgers moves on in December unless the team wins seven games. The fan base has been patient across six years because Schiano is a program legend and because expectations at Rutgers have always been calibrated to reality. Patience is not infinite, and this is the kind of loss that reframes every subsequent bad result as part of a pattern rather than an accident.
UMass, meanwhile, got its streak, its moment and a coach whose stock just tripled. One Thursday night rearranged two programs.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
