Worse than Chris Ash? Rutgers football bottoms out under Greg Schiano

PISCATAWAY – The boos began raining down early in the second quarter of the first game of the season, against a UMass squad that went 0-12 last year.

The 20,000 fans who showed up couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

Even by Rutgers football’s standards, this was an unmitigated disaster.

Two weeks before USC comes to the banks, UMass made like Ohio State, rolling up a 37-21 victory that evoked all of the black eyes for this program over the years – the losses to New Hampshire and Villanova, 81-7 at West Virginia, 78-0 at home to Michigan, and most of relevant of all, the 42-13 shellacking by Buffalo on this field on Sept. 22, 2018.

That Buffalo program was in a much better place than UMass, but it’s relevant because it was the beginning of the end for Chris Ash, who lost the plot for good that day – and that was just his third season here.

This is Greg Schiano’s seventh season in his second tour at Rutgers, and now there’s a blue-flame Bunsen burner on full blast under his chair. To this point, his supporters have defended him with the rationale that he’s not Ash, he inherited a pile of wreckage and improved it from being a weekly punchline.

The jokes returned with a vengeance Thursday.

Last year’s biggest liability, the defense, looked even worse. It seemed like every play was a missed tackle, a blown assignment or a too-slow defender getting left in the dust by a UMass skill guy.

UMass rolled up 251 yards in the first half alone, averaging 5.1 yards per rushing attempt and completing 11-of-13 passes for three touchdowns in the air. Minutemen quarterback William Watson looked like Patrick Mahomes, beating the Scarlet Knights with his arm, his leg and his decision-making.

On the other side, the Scarlet Knights couldn’t block anyone, rushing for 15 total yards – a shameful 1.1 yards per attempt. New quarterback Dylan Lonergan was constantly under siege. A fourth-and-inches seemed like fourth and a mile.

“Never saw it coming, and I’ve been doing this a long time," Schiano said.

When UMass took a 24-7 lead into the locker room, the glam rock blasting on full volume over the public address system couldn’t drown out the jeers and catcalls.

Then, when the second half began, there was…silence.

Most of the fans had left the scene, and you can't blame them. The boos stopped as UMass kept tightening the vise on Schiano’s squad, but silence is the most damning thing in a Big Ten football game.

Silence is apathy. Silence is waving the white flag. Silence is the sound of a donor well drying up.

That’s what this place felt like the day Chris Ash’s Scarlet Knights got pantsed by Buffalo. There were boos. Then there was silence.

As bad as Ash was, he had a fraction of Schiano’s resources and bosses who hardly cared. Rutgers’ leadership at the time was grotesquely unserious about competing at a high level.

That has changed. Rutgers president William Tate and athletics director Keli Zinn are SEC people, LSU expats, folks who breathe college football and are used to winning or overhauling. They’ve spent the past year beating the bushes for corporate sponsors and building a war chest the likes of which Rutgers athletics has never seen.

No one was expecting that to translate to a Big Ten title this season. But in year seven, to open with a spanking by a junior varsity, with fans booing their lungs out and then sprinting for the exits, with people around the country cracking jokes at the state university’s expense, with a chant of "Let's Go UMass" ringing out in the fourth quarter, Schiano is handing Tate and Zinn a shovel.

“I’ve been down this road before," Schiano said. "We know our way out, and we’ll get this thing right.”

After the 2019 disgrace against Buffalo, Chris Ash survived a full calendar year because Pat Hobbs should have been teaching law instead of running an athletic department.

If there’s one thing for Rutgers’ faithful to hang their hat on after this, it’s that Schiano’s new bosses won’t wait nearly that long.

Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Worse than Chris Ash? Rutgers football bottoms out under Greg Schiano