This Year’s Rutgers Beats Rutgers

Filed under: Big East, Rutgers Football, Cincinnati Football

Rutgers wasn’t sneaking up on anyone this year. Aside from their non-con, the Scarlet Knights weren’t exactly hiding, either. Campaigning for Ray Rice as a Heisman candidate. Rising in the rankings. They had 5 home games to start the season. Last week, they failed in their first game against a BCS team.

Tonight they blew it in their conference opener to Cinci, falling 28-23. The Scarlet Knights jumped out to a 17-7 lead at halftime because they got turnovers and converted them into points. The Rutgers defense looked sharp and acted cocky. Ripping at the ball on every tackle and jumping into the face of every Bearcats player after the whistle.

Much like last week, the opposing team was hardly intimidated and things changed in the second half. The big shift was that the Rutgers offense fell apart. Mike Teel threw an interception in the opening drive of the second half and Cinci cashed in. Teel added a second interception at the end of the third quarter that Cinci again turned into 7 points.

The Rutgers defense got worn down trying to respond to Cinci’s no-huddle spread. They surrendered over 400 yards with a rather balanced Cinci offense — 257 yards passing and 151 rushing.

The Cinci defense concentrated on, and mostly succeeded in containing Ray Rice. They limited him to only 94 yards despite 34 carries. They wanted to make QB Mike Teel beat them. The plan worked. While Teel put up lots of yards, he also threw 3 second half picks. The last a killer inside the Cinci 20 with a little over a minute left, allowing Cinci to hang on for win.

The Bearcats are now 6-0 with the second longest 1-A winning streak with nine straight wins.That makes just about as much sense as anything else in a college football season that has been completely insane in only the first 6 weeks.

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