Rutgers football, since joining the Big Ten in 2014, has had some of the toughest schedules in the college football landscape. For reference in 2023, 247Sports rated Rutgers’ schedule as the fourth toughest schedule in the country. This season, however, the Scarlet Knights weren’t even in their top 15 toughest football schedules.
Playing three of the top dogs in college football year in and year out is not easy. Constantly being pitted against Penn State, Michigan, and Ohio State has not boded well for the Knights as they only have one win against all three of these programs combined since joining the conference in 2014. Throwing in Michigan State who can field great teams at times and Maryland who is no pushover and you have a schedule that can feel like an absolute gauntlet to run through. The Big Ten East division was a killing field for teams like Rutgers.
However, this is where the conference re-alignment and the Big Ten’s abandonment of a division-based conference model play in Rutgers’ favor. The Knights already showed substantial improvement last year finally clawing their way to a bowl game for the first time since 2014. Now they get to throw their new and improved hat in the ring against weaker opponents because, for the first time since joining the conference, Rutgers is not playing Ohio State, Michigan, or Penn State.
Moving Schedules: A Changing of the Guard
Who are they replacing them with? Who will be taking the places of the toughest opponents? The only team to finish the season ranked last year on Rutgers 2024 schedule is Washington. The same Washington that has lost their head coach, starting quarterback, and star wide receivers this off-season. The two other schools from the now seemingly broken PAC-12 conference that Rutgers will be playing are USC and UCLA who are not nearly as daunting a task as the big three from the old Big Ten East.
The other power five teams on Rutgers’ schedule to finish with winning records were Virginia Tech, Wisconsin, and Maryland. The best record among the winning teams not named Washington was 8-5 finishing only one game above Rutgers at 7-6.
Rutgers played and beat Virginia Tech last year. They had played Wisconsin to the end, where a costly pick-six was the deciding factor in the game. This means that Rutgers would’ve had a good chance to win if their quarterback play was better. With a stronger quarterback room and a new, proven Big Ten starter, that script could very well be flipped.
USC and Maryland have both lost a major part of their offense in their starting quarterbacks so it remains uncertain if they will be able to pick up right where they left off. This becomes especially true for USC because they also lost their number-one receiver and had a notoriously weak defense last season. This provides perfect opportunities for Rutgers to pounce on the now weakened teams.
The biggest thing to note about all of this is that Rutgers’ schedule is now fully open for the first time since joining the conference. Of course, there is the mentality that anybody can be beat and every given Saturday however being able to knock down all three of the big dogs in the eastern division was just not in the cards for a team that was in the same situation that Rutgers was at the time.
When looking at the schedule in years past many Rutgers fans would say that they had three almost guaranteed losses on their schedule. Now they have no games where they don’t have a realistic fighting chance to win. That’s the key difference between last year’s schedule and this year’s schedule.
