Rutgers started this game red-hot on offense and jumped out to a 10-0 lead. They led 13-10 at halftime. But after seeing the second-half collapses against Iowa and Minnesota, we all had the gut feeling
that the lead was not safe. That feeling was proven right, as the Huskies woke up on offense in the second half, handing the Scarlet Knights their most lopsided loss of the season with a 38-19 win in Seattle.
Although there were some improvements on defense and special teams, many of the same problems that have been plaguing the Knights all season returned. Both bowl eligibility chances and morale within the fanbase are at a season and long-time low. Here are my takeaways from the back-breaking, frustrating, yet all-too-familiar loss.
Rutgers Comes Up Empty On Several Red Zone Trips
The Scarlet Knights came out of the gate swinging, scoring their quickest opening-drive touchdown of the season in just 1:18 of game time. Antwan Raymond picked up where he left off before the bye week with a 51-yard run that got the Scarlet Knights into Washington’s red zone before Athan Kaliakmanis found KJ Duff for the 20-yard touchdown, with Duff making yet another acrobatic grab on a jump ball down the sideline.
With the defense doing its job initially, the Rutgers offense took advantage, with Jai Patel getting back on track by hitting a 35-yard field goal. They had a chance for another score in the first quarter, but the offense stalled out and Jai Patel missed a 45-yard attempt wide right.
Late in the second quarter, Rutgers took advantage of a defensive fumble by driving down the field, but a third-down sack from the Huskies forced another Patel attempt, which he drilled from 37 yards out to put Rutgers ahead 13-7. Washington’s own quick-strike offense set up a 36-yarder from Grady Gross, who missed his first attempt earlier but drilled this one to cut the Rutgers lead to three entering the halftime break.
However, as Brian Fonseca of NJ.com said, it felt like Groundhog Day for the Scarlet Knights as the offense collapsed for the third straight game in the second half. Although Antwan Raymond had a 48-yard catch and run in the third quarter to cut the Washington lead to five (they had already scored two touchdowns by this point), that would be all the scoring the Scarlet Knights would do, ending the night with their season-low 19 points.
After Duff’s initial touchdown catch on the first possession, Rutgers returned to the red zone five more times and scored just six points combined, the two aforementioned Jai Patel field goals. The initial trip would have put Rutgers up by ten in the second quarter, while the latter two were desperation drives in an attempt to cut a double-digit Washington lead.
While field goals would have helped, the situations lent themselves to going for it, and Rutgers came up empty-handed. The first decision to be aggressive felt like the opposite of Rutgers’ approach against Ohio State in 2023, where the Scarlet Knights kicked three first-half field goals to build a 9-7 halftime lead but were unable to get a decisive touchdown that would have given them the separation to make the game truly interesting. The other two were really no decisions at all.
In detail, Rutgers failed to convert a fourth-and-three from the Huskies’ six-yard line while up 10-7 in the second quarter, being stopped just short of the chains on a 4th-and-10 from the Washington 11 early in the fourth quarter, and Athan Kaliakmanis was intercepted in the end zone by Ephesians Prysock from the UW 4-yard line, which effectively sealed the game.
All in all, Kaliakmanis threw multiple passes in harm’s way, with several questionable pass interference calls on the Huskies bailing out the Knights from further disaster. He posted his lowest completion percentage of the season, going 31/50 for 386 yards and two touchdowns to one interception, and had a QBR of just 57.9.
Antwan Raymond had an identical 89 yards as a rusher and as a receiver, which came off the back of two big plays that either scored or set up Rutgers for a touchdown score. Ian Strong continued his mercurial start to the year with seven receptions for 124 yards and a long of 34, with DT Sheffield hauling in a 41-yard pass to finish with 68 receiving yards, and KJ Duff having a three-catch, 59-yard game.
Defense Starts Strong, But Continues To Allow Big Plays
Flipping over to the defense, they too started the game strong, but fell apart as the game went on. After an early 42-yard run by Demond Williams Jr. left a pit in Rutgers fans’ stomachs, the pass rush forced Washington into a field goal attempt on its opening possession, and Grady Gross must have remembered his last outing against the Scarlet Knights, because he missed the 39-yard attempt.
The defense came up with a three-and-out with Washington near their own end zone, punctuated by Jordan Walker getting home on Williams for an emphatic sack. The Huskies initially punted from their own eight-yard line, and a penalty forced them to rekick from their own four-yard line, with Luke Dunne booting the football from his own end zone.
Rutgers was unable to take advantage of a 28-yard punt from Dunne and their starting field position at the plus-32 yard line as Jai Patel missed the 45-yarder. Perhaps that was another situation where Rutgers should have gone for it, as the winds were swirling and Patel was kicking from the right hashmarks.
DJ Djabome also came up with a huge forced fumble and recovery, snatching the football from Williams with the Huskies in the Rutgers red zone and threatening to take the lead. Rutgers extended their lead to 13-10, with Kaliakmanis finding Ian Strong and DT Sheffield on back-to-back explosive plays.
But the same defensive issues that have plagued the Scarlet Knights all season reared their ugly heads against the best offense Rutgers has all seen all season. The early Williams run was far from an exception, with Demond gashing the Knights for a 25-yard run in the second quarter and a 30-yard run in the fourth quarter.
The pass defense was that much more porous, with just about every pass-catcher on Washington’s active roster having at least one catch for 10-plus yards. The longest of the day was a 59-yard pass to Dezmen Roebuck, while Denzel Boston hauled in a 23-yard touchdown pass over a Rutgers defender and had a long of 38 yards.
Wide receivers Raiden Vines-Bright and Omari Evans had 30-plus yard passes, while even tight end Decker DeGraaf and running back Jonah Coleman had passes caught for 28 and 20 yards, respectively. When the night was over, Demond Williams Jr. finished with 402 passing yards and two touchdowns to go along with 136 rushing yards and two touchdowns on the ground. Although it should by no means come as a surprise, those were career-high numbers for Williams in both passing and rushing yards.
If any of this sounds familiar, that is because this was the same movie we have been seeing all season, particularly in Big Ten play. The secondary continues to leave wide-open spots all over the middle of the field while being completely inept in covering any receivers on deep passes, and a lot of that has to do with poor coaching and missed assignments. Schiano discussed the defensive issues in his postgame press conference, saying that poor coaching is the leading cause of the team’s inability to hold strong on that side of the football.
“I have to put it all on coaching. Players play, we are the ones that have to get them to play the way we want them to play. So I put it all on us. I think play-calling is overrated. Not that it’s not important, but it’s overrated. If it is on the call sheet, it should be good, otherwise you shouldn’t have it on the call sheet. When to call it, when not to call it, that can be argued. When you don’t do your assignments, that’s coaching and we had that too much tonight. I have to look first in the mirror and figure out why — we got better. “
Special Teams Avoids Major Blunders In The Loss
The one phase of the ball that did show some improvement was special teams. Jai Patel went two-for-three on field goals and got enough lift on the ball to avoid any more kicks being blocked. Although he missed the 45-yarder (his first career miss from 40-49 yards), he bounced back after multiple kicks were blocked from the Norfolk State game all the way through the Minnesota game. The mental pressure as a kicker is always immense, likely even more so than many other positions, and for Patel to bounce back serves well for the rest of the season.
The Scarlet Knights also avoided any long punt or kick returns after allowing a 100-yard kickoff return to open the Iowa game and nearly allowed one more before the half. Against Minnesota, the team allowed a long return from Koi Perich just before halftime, but Rutgers was bailed out in both scenarios and escaped without allowing additional points.
In this game, the lane integrity was sound, something that special teams-minded Schiano must have drilled into the units. Although Rutgers could not swing the game with a punt block of their own, the team’s avoidance of any major miscues on special teams (or on the other two phases) was a sigh of relief for disheartened Rutgers fans. We have been harping on the team not making new mistakes and fixing the old ones, so credit is deserved when that is done well, even with nothing spectacular to write home about either.
Morale At A Low Heading Into The Oregon Game
Rutgers has now lost its first three games of Big Ten play, and against opponents that were seen as roughly on the same level as the Scarlet Knights, with Iowa and Washington possibly “one tier ahead,” as little as that personally means to me. But although one loss to Iowa in itself may not have been as deterring as many made it out to be, three consecutive losses to Iowa, Minnesota, and Washington are absolutely unacceptable.
It is that much more unacceptable when you factor in that Rutgers went into the locker room tied with Iowa and ahead of both the Gophers and Huskies before falling apart in the second half in all three games. The homecoming game against #3 Oregon may already be a sellout, but morale is at a long-time low around the fanbase (and possibly the team), although there are no indications of that from within the program.
Although UCLA stunned Penn State last week at the Rose Bowl, the Oregon Ducks are much more fundamentally sound on both sides of the ball, while the Scarlet Knights are not playing nearly well enough to come close to pulling that kind of an upset. Rutgers fans will need to pack SHI Stadium next week for the team to have any semblance of a chance to hang around against the current #3 team in the country.
Bowl eligibility has slipped further and further away with each of those losses, with the Minnesota game feeling like the one that team needed to have a realistic shot at an extra game. Washington felt like the last gasp; a win would have catapulted the team back towards respectability and set the Scarlet Knights up for two more winnable games against Maryland and Purdue.
Although Rutgers can still defeat both teams later this season, it truly feels like the bowl dreams are dead, which would be a huge and painful step back for a team that went bowling in back-to-back seasons and appeared to be set for a third consecutive appearance in the postseason. With an offense this explosive, that is an extremely painful gut punch to everybody in Rutgers Nation. As much as Greg Schiano has moved this program in the right direction, having this kind of down season at this point in the rebuild will only make his seat hotter.
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