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Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sport
Kristen Wong

What Rutgers Did After Stunning Upset Loss to UMass Made Its Night Even Sadder

Rutgers UMass Football Greg Schiano Minutemen The Scarlet Knights FBS

College football is so back. And so are the unbelievable upsets that make the sport well worth watching.

On Thursday night, Rutgers suffered an all-time embarrassing loss to UMass in its season opener, one that will regrettably be etched into the school’s infamous history. The Scarlet Knights lost, 37–21, to a team that previously held the longest active FBS losing streak. To a team that hadn’t won a game in 677 days dating back to October 2024. To a team that was 26–134 overall since moving up to FBS in ’12 and that, against all odds, started this year’s campaign with the unlikeliest of underdog wins.

And to top it all off, Rutgers, perhaps anticipating an easy win against an opponent that was on a 16-game losing skid, appeared to have forgotten to notify their fireworks guy.

Shortly after the Scarlet Knights’ stunning upset loss, fireworks lit up the night sky above their home stadium in New Jersey. Shakira’s upbeat anthem, “Zoo,” started playing on the speakers as a nearly emptied-out stadium commiserated over the blowout defeat.

Here’s a look at those sad scenes, as shown in a fan’s video:

Oof. That can’t feel good for Greg Schiano’s program.

“I wanna congratulate UMass and Coach Harasymiak, his staff and players. They out coached us, they out-coached me, they out-played our players. We got licked tonight. There's no other thing to say about it,” Schiano said postgame, via Sports Illustrated’s Bryan Fischer.

To give credit where it’s due, the Minutemen, underestimated much like they were centuries ago fighting British troops in the Revolutionary War, surprised their foes with their feistiness, grit and resilience.

After falling behind early in the first quarter, UMass punched back with 30 unanswered points and forced five turnovers. Minutemen quarterback William “Pop” Watson III, a Virginia Tech transfer, put together a dominant showing (19 of 22 for 197 yards and three touchdowns) and kept UMass’s offense on the field drive after drive after drive.

Here’s a look at one of Watson’s early touchdown passes that helped turn the tides of the game:

Minutemen running back Curtis Kimmons IV also spearheaded a fierce attack on the ground that out-rushed Rutgers 200 to 30 yards, with Kimmons accounting for 78 of those yards and a touchdown. UMass didn’t look like a team that failed to notch a winning season since 2010, or a team that, just last year, ranked last nationally in points scored (11.1 per game) and points allowed (38.6 per game).

Led by coach Joe Harasymiak, who served as the Rutgers’s defensive coordinator from 2022 to ’24, the Minutemen finally, at long last, won a college football game—even if there was some collateral damage in the process.

Moving forward, Thursday’s uninspired result raises looming questions about Schiano and the Scarlet Knights, who failed to secure a bowl berth last season and are no doubt still reeling from what just happened. Simply put, it was the worst possible way for Rutgers to kick off its 2025-26 campaign, and the stadium’s probably pre-planned and hilariously farcical fireworks display only makes the football program look even worse.

Up next for Rutgers is a road game against Boston College next Friday, at which point the team will hopefully have put this utter disaster of a season-opener behind them and learned from their woeful mistakes. And that includes whoever at the stadium was in charge of the fireworks.

MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL ON SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

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