Rutgers keeps finding excruciating new ways to lose against elite Big Ten programs | Politi

It’s always something.

The late, great Gilda Radner coined that phrase during her valiant battle with cancer in the ‘80s, and while it seems unlikely that the comedian ever crossed the Hudson River during her days on Saturday Night Live to attend a college football game, you would be hard pressed to come up with three better words to sum up this Rutgers program.

Give the Scarlet Knights an opportunity to win a big-time game, and chances are, they’ll find an excruciating new way to break their fans’ hearts.

Here they were on Friday night, zip-zip-zipping up and down the field against one of the Big Ten’s best defenses. They had scored just 17 points in their previous four meetings with Iowa, but in front of a record crowd of 55,942 at SHI Stadium, they put up 21 on their first three possessions. It felt like they might score 50 … on Iowa!

“It seemed almost easy at the beginning,” head coach Greg Schiano would say a few hours later, because — and this is hardly a spoiler alert — it would turn out to be anything but.

The offense had 400 yards, sure, but Rutgers still managed to lose to Iowa, 38-28, because of a litany of special teams mistakes, defensive breakdowns and crushing penalties.

Instead of sending those fans home with a forever memory, they were streaming to the exits midway through the fourth quarter in their black outfits with a new twist on an old script.

Are these gut-punch losses less painful when the home team actually can score points? Or, somehow, does that make it even worse?

It’s always something.

“We made too many mistakes against a very good football team tonight,” Schiano said. “We need to coach better. We need to play better. Iowa is not going to beat themselves. You have to go beat them, and we didn’t.”

Schiano wasn’t on the sidelines the last time Rutgers had a home crowd as passionate at the start of a game as this one. That was in the Scarlet Knights’ very first Big Ten game against hated Penn State in 2014, when a stout defense held the Nittany Lions to just 13 points but — with five interceptions — the offense threw away an opportunity to step into a new conference with a program-shaping victory.

Rutgers has been looking for that signature Big Ten win ever since. Oh, sure, there have been some nice ones along the way, including a 21-18 decision last September over a Washington team that had reached the national championship the previous winter. That game was also on national TV in the program’s annual Black Out game.

This one, against Iowa, just felt bigger. The Hawkeyes are one of the programs that Rutgers needs to beat to move into the next tier of the Big Ten, one that is always competitive but a rung below the Ohio State/Penn State level. And this was a perfect opportunity.

Rutgers quarterback Athan Kaliakmanis was red hot, completing 24 of 40 passing for 330 yards. His No. 1 target, Ian Strong, was playing like he might single-handedly carry this team to victory, ripping the ball away from Iowa defensive backs in one of the best performances by a player at his position in recent memory. He had eight catches for 151 yards.

“(We) put up 400 yards against an Iowa defense,” Schiano said. “That’s plenty good enough to win. To be honest, 28 points is plenty good enough to win.”

But it wasn’t. Rutgers spotted Iowa seven points, allowing Kaden Wetjen to return the opening kickoff 104 yards — untouched — for the touchdown. Usually reliable kicker Jai Patel had doinked one kick off the upright and had another blocked, so that’s 13 points that the Scarlet Knights gave away in the kicking game.

Even still, Rutgers had a 28-24 lead in this game. The defense needed just one more stop in the fourth quarter, and when Iowa quarterback Mark Gronowski threw incomplete on a third-and-eight play from the Iowa 33, it looked like the D had come through. Instead, cornerback Al-Shadee Salaam was flagged for holding, and just four plays later, Gronowski scored easily on a keeper to put Iowa ahead for good.

It’s always something.

Kaliakmanis had a chance to answer, but he was hit as he threw the ball on a third-down play on the next possession, and his end-over-end pass landed in the arms of a diving Iowa defensive back named Teegan Davis for the interception. And that was that.

“Iowa is a great defense, you can’t forget that,” Strong said. “But I feel like as an offense, we left a lot out there. We made too many mistakes ourselves.”

Rutgers now almost certainly has to win one of its next two road games — at Minnesota and at Washington — to position itself to make a bowl game given a brutal November schedule.

The Scarlet Knights still have plenty of opportunities to do something memorable this season. But after years of having the defense to win in the Big Ten but not the offense, now it looks like the exact opposite is true.

Yes, Gilda Radner would have loved this team.