PISCATAWAY, N.J. — It wasn’t a flat and dispiriting performance from Rutgers football on Saturday night. After a week of hype and hope that the program’s rebuild of the past two seasons had finally moved beyond the foundational phase, the Scarlet Knights came up short in a 27-10 loss to a very good Iowa team.
A Hawkeyes team (3-1, 1-0 Big Ten) that, coincidentally, is still very much in the mix for a spot in the Big Ten Championship Game.
The truth is, and it is a sobering truth, that Rutgers football is not yet ready to compare with that top-tier of the Big Ten. Keep in mind that in the preseason, Iowa was receiving the most votes of any non-ranked team in both the USA TODAY Sports AFCA Coaches Poll and the AP Top 25.
Rutgers, by spotting 14 points off defensive touchdowns, dug themselves a hole that they simply are not built to dig climb out of. The offense remains behind the defense in this rebuild, and Saturday night was Exhibit A, Exhibit B and Exhibit C in that case.
But what was deflating about Saturday for most of the fifth-largest crowd in SHI Stadium history was that after a week of hype and hope, the splash of cold water from Iowa in the first half showed that Rutgers football remains a work in progress.
The fans turned out on Saturday night and were engaged, loud and bathed chunks of the stadium in scarlet. The team, however, wasn’t ready or mature enough yet to meet those expectations against a very good Iowa team.
“It was really good to see it, for sure, right? That’s what we aspire to build in this program, and we’ve had it that way where it’s week-after-week-after-week is that way,” head coach Greg Schiano said after the game.
“Are we quite ready to perform the way we needed to tonight? I guess not, because we didn’t do it. Now, there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some of it’s inexperience. Some of it’s not executing. Some of it is coaching. There’s a whole bunch of reasons.”
To say that Rutgers didn’t…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Rutgers football | Rutgers Wire…